No Higher Honor (12 page)

At two minutes after 9:00
PM
, the Mirage locked its Cyrano-IV fire-control radar onto the
Stark
. The frigate's instruments lit up in warning. A sailor asked permission to send a standard “back off” message to the Iraqi pilot. “No, wait,” came the reply.

At 9:05, the Mirage banked left, toward the warship. At just over twenty-two miles' distance, the pilot launched his first Exocet. The missile leveled out a dozen feet above the waves, accelerated to nearly the speed of sound, and turned on its radar-homing seeker. Twenty seconds later, another Exocet dropped from a wing and lit off toward the
Stark
.

The ship's tactical action officer later recalled no warning of the launches, though the ship's radar and electronic countermeasures system were both built to sound such an alarm. The ship popped neither chaff nor flares. The Phalanx weapon—conceived, developed, and purchased for a moment such as this—remained in standby mode.

The first Exocet punched through the
Stark
's hull near the port bridge wing, eight feet above the waterline. It bored a flaming hole through berthing spaces, the post office, and the ship's store, spewing rocket propellant along its path. Burning at thirty-five hundred degrees, the weapon ground to a halt in a corner of the chiefs' quarters and failed to explode. The second missile, which hit five feet farther forward, detonated as designed.

The fires burned for almost a day, incinerating the crew's quarters, the radar room, and finally, the combat information center. Nearly one-fifth of the crew was incapacitated in the attack. Twenty-nine men were killed immediately; eight more died later.
⁷

By the time the
Stark
was towed into Bahrain, a shaken U.S. Navy was already trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Why had the ship failed to defend itself? The service's formal investigation blamed Brindel for failing to “provide combat-oriented leadership.” But the investigators also noted that the navy leadership had failed to sound the warning about accidental attacks from Iraqi jets. Instead, Gulf skippers had been told to keep a sharp eye for Iranian mines and admonished not to embarrass the United States by acting precipitously.
⁸
One contributor to
Proceedings
wondered whether America's naval service was breeding leaders who could handle a split-second switch from diplomacy to combat, saying: “The Navy's natural selection during peacetime mirrors American society. We have always imagined a gulf between war and peace. We have attempted to separate cleanly our values and our behavior accordingly, and this has limited our effectiveness in a world of shadow conflict, or ‘violent peace.' Even when we bridge that gulf and formally go to war, the mental transformation from gentility to the warrior's ethic that demands unconditional surrender takes time. How long does it take the warrior to emerge?”
⁹

The news of the
Stark
reached the
Roberts
at sea as it headed south for some exercises off the Virginia capes.
¹⁰
The report shocked the crew. Many had a buddy aboard the
Stark;
some had acquaintances among the dead. Everyone knew the two frigates shared the same weapons, the same systems, the same vulnerabilities. Lester Chaffin, an electrician's mate first class, studied the missiles' paths and the damage done, and counted the shipmates who would have perished if the missiles had struck his own ship.

Rinn had known Brindel since their Naval War College days, and the classmates had renewed their ties at Gitmo the previous summer. “When I got that message, I sat on the bridge of the ship,” he recalled.

Rinn saw the
Stark
as the mistake of a guy who hadn't been mentally ready. He vowed never to let an enemy take the first shot. Training aboard the
Roberts
, always intense, ratcheted up a notch.

IN JUNE 1987
the
Roberts
headed once again for Guantanamo Bay. A year earlier the crew had merely been confident. This time, they set sail with a gleam in their eye and a knife in their teeth. The frigate had aced its recent readiness exam, and its helicopter detachment had notched a flawless flight certification. The commander of the Atlantic Surface Fleet sent kudos: “Your DC material condition was the best ever seen by the inspectors, and your crew's average score of 94 on the General DC Test has set the standard for others to follow.”
¹²
At Gitmo, the
Roberts
crew intended to break every record in the book.

But the instructors were waiting for them. The curriculum that the
Roberts
had faced a year ago was among the casualties of the hellish chemical fires aboard the
Stark
. In the month since the attack, the damage control testers had devised more complex scenarios intended to put a warship's crew in the
Stark
's shoes.
Roberts
would be the first ship to face the new test.
¹³

For three weeks, the crew moved through one exam after another with aplomb. The bridge watch notched the best seamanship and navigation grades in two years. Van Hook's engineers ran through the comprehensive set of equipment-failure scenarios—then did it twice more just for practice. The frigate's sonar operators locked onto the nuclear attack submarine USS
Scamp
(SSN 558) with helicopter and towed array, pounding away on the hapless sub for three extra days. Gitmo trainers deemed it the “the most impressive operation of its type held to date.”
¹⁴

The big test, a “mass conflagration” drill, arrived on 14 July. The instructors arrayed themselves around the ship, ready to dock points for
any missteps. At a whisper from an instructor in CIC, one of the operations specialists called out a warning: “Missile inbound, starboard side!” The Gitmo instructors clicked their stopwatches, and the game was on.

Rinn sent the crew to general quarters, but the “missiles” struck while hatches were still being dogged. The ship's repair teams sprang into action as instructors around the ship narrated the scenario to grim-faced
Roberts
sailors. The first missile plunged into the ship's exhaust stack, knocking out electrical power. The ship's interior grew dim as fluorescent lamps went out and battery-powered battle lanterns came on. The roof of the starboard helicopter hangar collapsed. Class Alpha and Bravo fires erupted in the hangar bay and the midships passageway.

A second missile slammed into the ship moments later, exploding in the central office complex under the flight deck. The blast punctured decks and bulkheads, and thick black smoke spread inside the ship. A fire main ruptured. Main propulsion and communications followed electrical power into oblivion. The explosions “killed” or “wounded” just about everyone in the superstructure aft of the signal bridge; fantail, flight deck, hangars, central office, supply office—all gone.

Repair Lockers 3 and 5 leaped to work, with Rinn, Van Hook, and Sorensen in charge. The sailors diagnosed the damaged fire main and closed valves to stop the leak. They opened crossover connections to draw water from the undamaged pipes. They connected fire hoses and began to attack the blazes. They shored up failing bulkheads with wood and steel.

The instructors ratcheted up the pressure. Twenty minutes into the fight, the CIWS magazine atop the hangar deck blew up from the heat, further weakening the ship's beleaguered superstructure. Moments later, the welding gases in an aft storage room exploded, blowing another six-foot hole in the side of the ship. That “killed” Rinn, and the instructor snarled at him with a look that said, “You're an idiot for standing next to a flammable locker without moving its contents to a safe location.” It was a lesson he would not forget.

The instructors were merciless. They walked among the hose teams, sending scene leaders and nozzle operators to the sidelines with a tap on the shoulder and a terse “you're dead.” Others they squirted with blood-red liquid, leaving them “wounded” for the corpsmen to save if they could.
The imaginary toll was worse than the
Stark's;
nearly one-third of the
Roberts
's 165-member crew were pronounced dead. But the crew, cross-trained to a fare-thee-well, was unflappable. As chiefs and first-class petty officers fell, junior petty officers and seamen slid smoothly into their places.
¹⁵
Through it all, Rinn kept the bridge and CIC teams in their seats, monitoring their surroundings for more attacks.

When it was over, the crew was winded but victorious. The instructors were a bit stunned. Their unanimous verdict: the
Roberts
sailors had saved their ship—and could have fought off more enemies as well. The senior tester praised the crew's “originality and initiative,” “excellent crew participation,” and “superb leadership.” It was, he declared, the best mass conflagration drill he had ever witnessed.
¹⁶

The Gitmo training commander tacked up a framed photo of FFG 58 outside his office and gushed about the ship to the three-star head of the Atlantic Surface Fleet. “The entire crew presented an eager, aggressive attitude and refused to let any problem set them back. Superior leadership and a keen sense of pride in their ship enabled them to function as a complete team,” he wrote. “USS
Samuel B. Roberts
departed GTMO as one of the best REFTRA [refresher training] combatants trained in years.”
¹⁷

The
Roberts
would need all that expertise soon. Half a world away, the first Operation Earnest Will convoy was assembling on the far side of the Arabian Peninsula.

THE MV
BRIDGETON
, anchored off the eastern coast of Oman, defied the eye's attempt to take its measure. The supertanker's weather deck stretched a quarter mile from stem to stern and 230 feet across the beam. From time to time a Filipino sailor appeared on the rim of that vast steel plain, pedaling a bicycle on some errand. The ship's double-bottomed hull could hold nearly 120 million gallons of crude oil, enough to keep Japan, the vessel's birth nation, running for eight hours. For a decade the 413,000-ton tanker had gone by the name
al-Rekkah
and had reigned as the largest ship in Kuwait's fleet—indeed, the biggest under any Middle Eastern flag.

The giant ship had recently surrendered that title, not because any larger contender had appeared, but because it no longer sailed under the
Kuwaiti flag. Under the deal negotiated between Washington and Kuwait City,
al-Rekkah
and ten other Kuwaiti ships had shifted their country of registration to garner U.S. naval protection.

The crew of what was now the
Bridgeton
had marked the change in a ceremony in the Gulf of Oman, hauling the kingdom's banner down the stern mast and running up the Stars and Stripes. The funnel, which had advertised the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, already bore the red “C” of the Chesapeake Shipping Company. The new name had been painted over the old one on the stern, and the new home port lettered in white: Philadelphia. The ship would never visit its purported home; the river city's piers were too shallow to accommodate its seven-story draft.
¹⁸

The
Bridgeton
weighed anchor along with a reflagged liquid propane carrier, and four U.S. Navy warships fanned out around them. The nine-thousand-ton cruiser USS
Fox
(CG 33), the largest of the escorts, was a gnat beside the behemoth.

On 22 July 1987 the first Earnest Will convoy moved into the Strait of Hormuz and headed toward Kuwait, beginning a journey of nearly five hundred miles through a war zone. The seven-year toll on commercial shipping stood at 333 watercraft damaged or sunk, according to famed insurer Lloyd's of London. The total for the year to date was 65.
¹⁹

The
Bridgeton
was within a day of its destination when it became a naval statistic. Around 6:30
AM
, the ship's American skipper and his bridge team heard a distant metal-on-metal clank. Then the deck began to undulate. The sailors grabbed for the railings and hung on. “It felt like a five-hundred-ton hammer hit us up forward,” the ship's skipper recalled.
²⁰
There was only one likely explanation: the tanker had hit a naval mine. But the leviathan was unable to stop—even emergency reverse thrust could not halt a supertanker in less than three miles—and the
Bridgeton
barreled on, making sixteen knots through a minefield. When the ship finally came to rest, the crew discovered a jagged hole the size of a squash court in the port bow. But the double hull kept the ship afloat. Soon the convoy was steaming onward to Kuwait, with one change in formation: the warships trailed
Bridgeton
in a meek line.
²¹
None of the thin-skinned escorts dared break trail.

This was not the first live mine U.S. forces had found in Gulf waters. Mines had damaged at least one other commercial ship in the Gulf in
1987, and possibly two or three. About a dozen of the stealthy floating bombs had been detected and destroyed, but how many more were out there was anyone's guess.

Stealth and simplicity made mines cheaper and often more cost-effective than just about any other naval weapon. During World War II, for example, U.S. submarines sank roughly five million tons of Japanese shipping, at an approximate cost of one hundred dollars per ton. By contrast, mines dropped by B-29 bombers in 1945 sent about 1.25 million tons of shipping to the bottom—and at one-sixth the cost per ton.
²²
Another statistic: in the half century after World War II, eighteen U.S. warships were damaged by hostile action. Fourteen of them hit mines.