UNITED STATES NAVY

Rubber-tired tractors tugged the newly returned planes well away from the angled runway, and in two minutes the flight deck crew raised a nylon barricade across it.

Fire fighters in asbestos suits, foam nozzles in hand, ran to their posts. Men wearing red crosses stood by with wire litters. It was time for the injured Crusader to come home.

With Adm. David L. McDonald, then Commander of the Sixth Fleet, I watched from the bridge of this largest and most powerful ship in the world. Now, on the intercom, the captain said, "Bring him in."

We could see the aircraft clearly, approaching Enterprise with one wheel dangling. It had been damaged in the catapulted take-off.

I stole a glance at the net stretched across the runway six decks below. How could it possibly stop a 14-ton fighter-bomber?

Suddenly the Crusader roared life-size above the stern, then skimmed low over the flight deck, yawing slightly. The pilot brought her in at normal landing speed-around 150 miles an hour-and flew her straight into the barricade.

Before our eyes that 21-foot-high maze completely enmeshed the plane, yielded 300 feet, and stopped it dead. An incredibly strong web-thickness after thickness of heavy nylon strips fastened to hydraulically controlled cables-had halted the aircraft in the length of a football field.

And the pilot, uninjured, walked away. His million-dollar, 1,200-mile-an-hour Chance-Vought Crusader would fly again, too. It sustained only minor wing damage.

This was the nuclear-powered, 100-plane carrier's first barricade engagement, as the Navy calls it, in thousands of plane recoveries. Launch, recovery, launch, recovery-day and night, this is the life cycle of the aircraft carrier. Each launch and each recovery represent the cooperative effort of the entire ship.

Capt. Vincent Paul de Poix, then commanding Enterprise, had trained his 4,600 officers and men for this emergency, or any other.

A man's life had, indeed, hung in the balance for a few fearful seconds. But that night, logging the day's events in my journal, I realized that what we had witnessed was more than a dramatic slice of life at sea. This was the four-ocean United States Navy at its best, calmly meeting one more challenge.

It could have been a different challenge, and it could have happened half a world away - in Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, or Arctic Ocean. One such test occurred last August, for example, when North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two U. S. destroyers in the Gulf of.

But whatever the magnitude of the crisis, the Navy's reaction is the same: swift response, efficiently executed.

Two years ago Adm. George W. Anderson, Jr., then Chief of Naval Operations, marked January 17, 1955, as the birth date of our nuclear Navy. On that day Comdr. Eugene P. Wilkinson, commanding the attack submarine U.S.S. Nautilus, flashed his historic message to President Eisenhower:

"Underway on nuclear power."

Today our Navy has 53 nuclear-powered ships in commission besides the giant carrier Enterprise. Though mostly submarines they…"