It was April 10, 1967, and Jim Beaty was a jug-eared, skinny kid from Memphis, Tenn. - a bit of a screw-up, according to his dad. Yet there he was, 20 years old and improbably charged with saving lives as an operating-room technician aboard the USS Sanctuary, a revamped Navy hospital ship that had just sailed into Danang, Vietnam.
Within hours of the ship's arrival, the first casualties were brought in. A Marine tank had struck a land mine, badly burning the men inside. Beaty still remembers the smell of charred flesh, the looks on the Marines' young faces. He also remembers that his fast-acting crew had most of the wounded on the mend and in the mess hall within 72 hours.
Such extraordinary days were routine for the hundreds of men and women who proudly served on the Sanctuary through two wars. Their history is well documented and sharply remembered. The future of the highly decorated ship, however, is less clear.
For the past two decades, the Sanctu ary has been largely neglected, left to rot in Maryland waters. It was forcibly sold at public auction in 2007, and a federal judge ordered the new owner, Potomac Navigation Inc., to tow it away by Dec. 3 of that year.
But more than 14 months later, the 64-year-old, 522-foot ship still rests in Pier 5 at the Locust Point Marine Terminal in Baltimore, taking up valuable commercial space, according to the Maryland Port Administration.
It's caught in a legal tug of war between Potomac Navigation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The company says it envisions a new life for the Sanctuary as a floating hotel or storage facility in Greece. But the EPA worries it will actually become a broken down, illegal, toxic scrap supply.
The EPA has received a court order keeping the ship from leaving the state without costly chemical remediation. The company, in turn, has filed lawsuits against multiple parties, claiming the EPA's concerns are unfounded.
And so the Sanctuary sits, waiting for its fate to wend through the courts. The lingering uncertainty is troubling for veterans like Beaty, who has kept tabs on the Sanctuary's reincarnations through the years.
"The Navy, other than my mother and father, probably made the greatest contribution to the development of my character," Beaty said on a quick November trip to Baltimore from his home in Memphis. "That's part of the reason I continue to be interested in the old girl."
