When Operation Iraqi Freedom opened in March 2003, the oldest active warship in the United States Navy was already on station in the northern Persian Gulf, launching strikes. USS Kitty Hawk had sortied from Yokosuka, Japan, weeks earlier, crossed two oceans, and taken her place on the line. For the next month her flight deck ran day and night, and her crew went 104 straight days without setting foot on land.
America's Oldest Active Warship
Kitty Hawk (CV-63) was commissioned in 1961. By 2003 she had outlasted every carrier of her generation and taken over the toughest job in the fleet: since 1998 she had been the Navy's forward-deployed carrier, homeported at Yokosuka with Carrier Air Wing Five (CVW-5), the successor to USS Independence in that role. Forward-deployed meant she was the carrier that could get there first — and in the winter of 2003, "there" was the Persian Gulf.
The Transit and the Buildup
Kitty Hawk departed Yokosuka on February 23, 2003, steaming west through the Strait of Malacca and the Strait of Hormuz to join the fleet massing for the invasion of Iraq. She entered the Arabian Gulf as one of five carriers ultimately committed to the operation, positioned in the confined northern waters of the Gulf where her aircraft would have the shortest run to targets in Iraq.
The air wing was a full-strength deck. CVW-5 embarked the F-14 Tomcats of Fighter Squadron 154 (VF-154); the F/A-18 Hornets of Strike Fighter Squadrons 192, 195, 27, and 102; the EA-6B Prowlers of Electronic Attack Squadron 136 (VAQ-136); the E-2C Hawkeyes of Airborne Early Warning Squadron 115 (VAW-115); the S-3B Vikings of Sea Control Squadron 21 (VS-21); the SH-60 helicopters of Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 14 (HS-14); and the C-2 Greyhounds of VRC-30's detachment, the ship's lifeline for mail, parts, and people.
Shock and Awe
When the war began on the night of March 19–20, 2003, Kitty Hawk's aircraft were among the first into Iraqi airspace. Flying from the northern Gulf, CVW-5 struck targets across Iraq in support of the ground advance toward Baghdad, hitting command-and-control sites, air defenses, Republican Guard formations, and targets of opportunity as the coalition pushed north. The pace was relentless. Over the course of the deployment, the ship and her air wing flew more than 5,000 sorties and logged over 11,000 flight hours.
There was no pause for liberty. From the day she left Japan to the day she returned, Kitty Hawk stayed at sea — a continuous underway period that tested her aging engineering plant and her crew in equal measure. The mess decks kept feeding thousands of sailors around the clock. The catapults and arresting gear cycled tens of thousands of times. Steel that had been launching aircraft since the Kennedy administration held up under the strain.
Life Aboard During the War
For the crew, OIF was defined by the grind of continuous operations. Watch, work, sleep, repeat — with the general-quarters alarm and the thunder of the catapults marking the hours. Sailors who served aboard remember the strange rhythm of it: the intensity of launching combat sorties, and then the odd domesticity of a ship at war, where the laundry still had to run and the coffee still had to be made. They remember the flight-deck crews working in the Gulf heat, the ordnancemen building bombs in the magazines, and the sense that the ship — old as she was — was carrying her weight in a real fight.
Kitty Hawk turned for home and returned to Yokosuka on April 18, 2003. The families waiting on the pier in Japan met a crew that had been to war and back in less than two months, without ever touching a foreign shore in between.
Legacy
Kitty Hawk soldiered on as the forward-deployed carrier until 2008, when USS George Washington relieved her and she sailed home to decommission after forty-seven years of service — the last conventionally powered carrier in the fleet. Her 2003 OIF cruise stands as one of the defining deployments of that long career: the old ship, first on station, flying from the top of the Gulf when the war began.
If you served aboard USS Kitty Hawk or want to honor a Kitty Hawk sailor, browse the full USS Kitty Hawk (CVA/CV-63) collection — cruise shirts, crest apparel, and more for the crew of America's oldest active warship.
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