about back home.’” In 1972 the problems that Heinl and others were describing in the Army were about to explode in the Navy. As an article in The New York Times put it, “The Navy, with its tradition of Filipino waiters and Southern WASP leadership, never really was an alternative for America's young city blacks during the early years of the Vietnam war.” But, Navy commanders under pressure to increase recruitment to meet the needs of the expanding air war, “decided to change the Navy's image and its appeal to blacks.” By late 1972 approximately 12 percent “of new Navy recruits were black”, and they “were typically assigned to the ship's most miserable jobs”, and often "thrust into the dreariest, most menial, and most unpopular jobs on board" Several unprecedented developments on board U.S. Navy ships dramatically exposed the intersection of antiwar sentiment, civil rights issues, discontent over working and safety conditions and racism. One of the first of these incidents highlighted many of the common threads between them. Troublemakers in the Philippines When martial law was declared in the Philippines in September 1972, the U.S. Navy “used the occasion to crack down on so-called troublemakers and…loaded more than two hundred enlisted men from eleven different ships onto planes for immediate transfer back to San Diego.”<ref>, Up From the Bottom" Underground Newspaper, Vol. 2 No. 6 p.8, Dec 15, 1972</ref> Once in San Diego many of the men wanted to let the public know what had happened and on October 24 “a racially mixed group of thirty-one enlisted men held a press conference to denounce the deplorable conditions, harassment, and racial prejudice they encountered while at sea.” Their statement, partially excerpted here, captured many of the issues swirling within the Navy at that time: The Kitty Hawk Riot In October 1972 the Kitty Hawk pulled into Subic Bay after 8 months at sea, expecting a rest before heading home. Instead, the crew was notified they were returning to combat operations in Indochina. Tensions, already high from accelerated combat operations, flared even more. Blacks made up 7 percent of the enlisted crew on board the Hawk, and the majority of them “were assigned to the toughest and dirtiest Navy jobs, in the deck force and on flight decks, while whites populated the more coveted and higher tech jobs in the crew.” The black crew members felt they had been “treated like