Valley veteran recounts explosion on USS Enterprise

The aircraft carrier was 80 miles off the coast of Hawaii, far from the fighting in Vietnam.

But at 8:19 in the morning, the silence was shattered when an overheated rocket on the flight deck triggered a chain reaction of explosions that killed 28 sailors and injured hundreds of others.

Danny Noe was asleep in the room directly below the first explosion. “I survived. Two of my mates did not, and I luckily got out just in time,” Noe explained.

He says the blast threw him into the wall, and when he came to, his first instinct was to run. His two friends, who were in the same room, ran to the right; he ran to the left.

“If I had gone to the right, I would probably have been dead. It’s heartening, but I’m here,” Noe explained. “That’s the good thing, I guess, and unfortunately they didn’t make it… They were doing what they did to protect everyone, and I just happened to get out alive.”

After escaping the fire, Noe ran to grab a hose and help fight the flames.

After surviving the explosion and doing what he could to help, he was shocked to learn he had been listed as missing in action.

“I went up and gave them my name a couple of days later, and they said you are MIA, and I said ‘As you can see, I’m here’ and they gave me them somehow during the explosion, they got knocked off and were found, and I’ve had them ever since,” Noe said.

Noe doesn’t know why he survived when others didn’t, but he says he carries their memory with him every day, just like his dog tags.