num_pages: 256
description: Ship out with the crew of the USS Enterprise as they sail off into an adventure which endures today as her single most terrible trial in all her history.Go to flight quarters for night operations and watch the spectacle of the mighty F-4J Phantom straining under full power with afterburners thundering before hurtling down the catapult and flaring the black sea with the light of her passing.Join a fight to the death between an all consuming holocaust of raging flames and stupendous explosions and a crew of ragged, bleeding men who refused to give up their ship.Take an emotional roller coaster ride and join the fight. Make a stand with a flight deck hose team and be seared and suffocated from the heat. Be blasted senseless --- as if stricken by the hammer of Thor --- as exploding five hundred pound bombs go off in multiples only yards away. Ask yourself if you have the courage to stand up to it as storms of metals and sheets of flame blast through defenseless hose teams gouging great, bloody gaps through the ranks.Read about nameless, faceless heroes who step over those who have fallen to take up the fight knowing full-well that they are feeding themselves into the meat grinder. In the twenty minutes of exploding weapons nearly four hundred were cut down, the vast majority from the flight deck hose teams. Yet, at no time were there even a quarter of that number engaged during the fury -- so great was the carnage, so intense was the battle to halt the tide of burning fuel.Watch in spellbound humility as the finest virtue in human character exhibits itself in those who step forward to take up the fight even in the face of what fate surely awaits them. The red agony and horror of it evidenced at every hand.This is a story of high drama on the high seas with a crew that fought an unimaginable fight. Sail with us.
title: Trial: Ordeal of the USS Enterprise, 14 January 1969
titlecomplete: Trial: Ordeal of the USS Enterprise, 14 January 1969
ratings_count: 6
publisher: Tuscarora Press