For almost five decades, the USS Kitty Hawk carried not just the brunt of American naval power but also the unseen personal stories of the men and women who sailed on her deck. Commissioned in 1961 at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, she quickly became an essential part of the U.S. fleet. Next, the Navy called her a “long-legged, far-ranging force, giving confidence to the free world, and pause to any potential enemy.”
Even her name was historic—borrowed from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Wright brothers took their first flight, giving this giant carrier an aura of legitimacy from the early days of aviation. Life aboard was in a class by itself.
Over the decades, tens of thousands of mariners lived, labored, and grew up inside her steel hulls. Life may be brutal, but it was life-changing to many. Corey Urband, a machinist’s mate from 1992 to 1996, remembered the feeling of responsibility: “Thirty feet under the waterline, halfway around the globe from home,” he said, while friends back in their hometown were still in high school or college.
For Rich Bratlee, a young man from rural Montana, being a member of a crew of 6,000 was like stepping into another world. The Kitty Hawk also had some quirks, such as her balky escalators that broke down so often they jammed paths to the flight deck. Her operating years covered decades and wars.
She spent the Vietnam War launching sortie after sortie from Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, providing key airpower support during the Tet Offensive—a mission that earned her a presidential unit citation. She subsequently operated out of Somalia, conducted Iraqi and Afghan missions, and spent a full decade forward-deployed in Yokosuka, Japan, as the Navy’s sole permanently stationed carrier.
But her history had not been untroubled—there had been the 1972 riot at San Diego’s Naval Amphibious Base that had led to cultural reform within the Navy, and a jarring crash into a Soviet submarine in 1984. When at last she was retired in 2009, the Kitty Hawk went to the “mothball fleet” in Bremerton, Washington, to rest with the other retired carriers.
Several erstwhile sailors and preservationists had hoped to repurpose her as a museum, a living memorial to her decades of service. But it was too expensive and too logistically complicated to save a non-nuclear carrier of her size.
Too large for the Panama Canal, she was towed over 16,000 miles around the southern end of South America to Brownsville, Texas. She arrived there in May 2022 to a public welcome of her decades of service and thousands of sailors who’d ever called her home.
Demolition was left in the hands of International Shipbreaking Limited, with president Chris Green describing how his staff felt a sense of pride in handling the process with care and respect.
Ship breaking has emerged as a major industry in Brownsville. Companies like ISL now recycle more than 85 percent of retired U.S. Navy and MARAD vessels. It’s not merely a matter of cutting through metal—it is the remediation of the environment, the safe disposal of garbage, and the salvaging of materials for reuse. Alone, the Kitty Hawk was estimated to see 97 percent of her materials recycled, providing local jobs and reducing the demand for newly mined metal.
She is preserved in the memories of those who sailed, in the artifacts recovered and preserved in museums, and even in the recycled metal that will be born again. From Cold War surveillance to her stately decommissioning, her story is a testament to how history, technology, and service are all intertwined—and why some ships are never really lost.