No Higher Honor (21 page)
Authors: Bradley Peniston
For more urgent matters, there were telegrams. On 1 April a message arrived from Newport, addressed to Glenn Palmer, reporting the birth of his fourth child. The combat systems officer was overjoyed to hear that mother and infant were doing fineâand yet the separation made it the worst moment Palmer had endured since leaving home. Mercifully, perhaps, duty soon distracted him. “Right after it got there, we had a helicopter that came close to the ship,” he recalled, “and I was right back on the console in the combat information center.”
31
In late March a pair of
Roberts
engineers had taken pen in hand to write to the editors of the
Wisner News Chronicle
, a Nebraska newspaper. The small-town paper had become regular reading in the engineering spaces, thanks to a shipmate whose mother had taken out a subscription for her son. The
News Chronicle
featured headlines like “Persons Interested In Housing For Elderly Should Contact Clarence Schmitt,” and had become a crew favorite, passed around until the graying pages were torn, grease-stained, and soft as rags.
“Dear Editor,” the two engineers wrote,
   Â
We are currently serving aboard USS
Samuel B. Roberts
in the Persian Gulf. One of our shipmates, David Claus, is from Pilger, and receives your paper almost every “mail call.” All of us enjoy reading it, because it helps us “escape” the gulf for a short time. We are engineers and concern ourselves with keeping the ship moving and the lights turned on. So for us, things can quickly become boring and routine rather quickly, but after reading several of your newspapers, we feel that we are becoming part of your community. We are also waiting for the next editions. (Go Lady Gators!) I'm sure you can understand our meaning by us being eight thousand miles from home.
       Â
Our deployment is only half over, and it seems like an eternity, but the Navy has given us port visits in Palma, Spain, a quick stop in Djibouti, East Africa, then on to the Persian Gulf, where we have had liberty in Bahrain. While in the gulf, we have seen things like Iraqi aircraft, and Russian ships and aircraft, along with that of our allies. A sister ship to us found an Iranian gunboat drifting. We had it in tow for a few hours, until we passed it to another American warship.
       Â
Things here for the most part are quiet, and we believe we aren't in any real danger as long as we do our jobs and remain alert. If anyone would like to write us (or send cookies) we would be more than happy to write back. Thank you for your time.
              Â
Sincerely,
              Â
GSM2(SW) Randy Tatum and HT2 Ted Johnson
32
Many found escape in exercise, pumping iron on the ship's weight machines or riding the stationary bike. Out on the flight deck, Chief Engineer Gordan Van Hook and Gas Turbine Chief Dave Walker led daily calisthenicsâ“snipercise,” they called it. You could even jog on the miniature airfield if you could endure a left turn every ten paces.
And an enterprising crew could carve out time for fun, even in a war zone. Every month or so, Ford's cooks set up barbeque stands on the
flight deckâ“steel beach picnics,” the crew called them. “Just being able to eat back there, relax, listen to music, talk to people you haven't seen in a couple daysâit just relaxes you,” said Fridley, the boatswain's mate.
33
Mike Tilley, in particular, knew how to take relaxation to the limit. When one steel beach picnic was declared a no-uniform zone, the young seaman showed up without a stitch of clothing. The engineman striker from Missouri had a knack for trouble. During precomm duty in Norfolk, he'd been cited for having an altered identification; when the ship visited the Bahamas, he'd helped set adrift someone's dory. Rinn had no time for troublemakers, but there was something about the junior sailor that showed promise, and the captain had let him off with some stern words. And when Tilley joined the burger line au naturel, Rinn just laughedâand had a chief send him below to get dressed. “We're in an environment where twenty-four hours a day we have to be ready,” Rinn told a visiting reporter. “We can get by with a barbecue even though we're in a tough situation, but everybody has to know that within two or three minutes they've got to get that barbecue over the side and into their battle station.”
In early March, cryptic missives began appearing in Rinn's cabin.
   Â
I walked in my cabin one day and there's a note stuck to my mirror that said, “Beware the Ides of March.” And every time I went to the bridge, there was a note on my chair that said, “Beware the Ides of March.”
       Â
So I said, “What the hell is going on around here?” It's not a lot, but it's there, and I'm getting the sense: who's screwing around with me? It's the XO or someone, and I have no clue. I'm not going to go and ask, “What the hell's going on?”
       Â
But I think I did bring it up in the wardroom at lunch one day. Lunchtime at the wardroom was a great social event for me, and the rule was, I would never discuss work, talk business. And if I did, I would apologize and say, “I'm sorry.” So I asked one day, “Does anybody know what's going on?” and they said, “No, no.”
       Â
So, lo and behold, we're on the bridge one day and five Iraqi Mirages go by. We've got a live missile on the rail and we're doing twenty-five knots, and the Iraqis go by and we track, and they do
what we tell them to do, and they go away. Eleven-thirty, lunch-time, and everybody goes down to the wardroom. I'm on the bridge, and the XO says, “Captain, are you coming down?”
       Â
“Start without me, I'll be there.”
       Â
Ten minutes go by, and the intercom rings, and they say, “Captain, are you coming?” I said, “Yes, start without me.”
       Â
Five minutes later, it rings again. “We've got something special.”
       Â
And so I said, “Okay, I'm coming.” Nobody ever bothered me like this soâstupidâI get up and I go down to the wardroom.
       Â
We're twenty-five miles off the Iraqi coast, we're running around with live missiles on the rail, we're in modified Condition Zebra, we are a full-up round ready to fightâand here's my entire wardroom in togas. Hail Caesar! They've got wreaths around their ears. I took one look and I started laughing so hard I fell over one of the chairs and onto the floor.
       Â
Later on, they said, “We were sure glad you laughed when you came in that room.”
       Â
It was tremendous. That was the kind of attitude about them. It was a really good bunch of guys.
34
On 18 March the
Roberts
relinquished its northern patrol duties and its coterie of army aviators and headed southeast for a well-deserved port visit in Bahrain. It would be the crew's first liberty since entering the Gulf, and it would be a blessed relief from hidden mines, hostile speedboats, and missile-flinging warplanes. Rinn celebrated with his first full night's sleep in weeks.
The frigate tied up next to a garbage scow at Sitrah pier in Manama, and sailors streamed over the brow. For many, the first stop was the phone booths pierside, where three-minute calls to the United States cost a wallet-scorching eleven dollars. Then they hit the whitewashed desert town, savoring beer and pizza at the navy canteen, haggling for souvenirs in the souks. They bought hammered gold jewelry by the ounce, rugs from afar, and the traditional Arab headgear that sailors called the “tablecloth and fan belt.”
35
Fire Controlman Preston purchased a gold Seiko watch for his girlfriend, Shelley, and tried to relax. The long weeks on his CIC console had
tied him in knots. He'd heard shipmates express frustration with the rules of engagement and talk about how they wished their ship could be free to fight back. Once in a while he'd even voiced such sentiments himself. That scared him.
“What was I turning into?” Preston wrote later. “I know I just wanted to go home, just like everyone else on the ship did, and if that meant being involved in all-out combat, then let's take our chances and possibly set a new order in the Gulf.” Preston had to consciously remind himself on watch that he was “still a rational, logical, human being and that by my actions I could mess up everything some high-paid civilian and military decision makers were trying to do over here.”
It didn't seem to do much good to try to talk about the pressure. He'd tried, once or twice, to describe what it felt like to sit at the missile console as an armed aircraft bore in. He wanted his shipmates to feel the fear, the exhilaration, the anger of knowing just how close the
Roberts
had come to “kill or be killed.” But no one wanted to hear it, or if they did, they blew it off like it was nothing. “Maybe it was their way of coping with something they had very little control over. I stopped telling people after a while,” Preston wrote.
But with ten weeks to go in the Gulf, he wondered whether he was going to keep it together. He worried that “I was going to flip out and maybe shoot when I wasn't supposed to, or worse, not shoot when I should have.”
36
He could not have known that the
Roberts
's patrols would end much sooner than that.
ON 22 MARCH
the
Roberts
weighed anchor, test-fired its guns, and headed back to the war zone. The frigate was slated for several weeks of convoy duty, starting with the mission designated EW88018.
Over the three-day weekend, violence had flared again. Iraqi war-planes had bombed two Norwegian supertankers, killing 90 percent of their sailors, and Iranian forces had hit another seven merchants.
37
Even the weather had turned nasty. The
Roberts
headed into a desert
shamal
, battering eastward through fifteen-foot waves as sailors fell from their bunks and DC gear skittered from its racks.
38
The convoy was already assembling in the Gulf of Oman. By the time
Roberts
arrived in the K-Mart parking lot, the USS
Reuben James
(FFG 57)
had corralled the merchants:
Gas Princess;
the 290,000-ton supertanker
Middletown;
andârarity of raritiesâan honest-to-God unreflagged American ship, the 36,000-ton tanker
Courier
.
39
The five-ship group got under way on 25 March, accompanied as usual by various ships and aircraft. Two minesweeping tugs,
Hunter
and
Striker
, led the way. Next came the
Middletown
, a double-hulled giant that stood the best chance of absorbing a mine without fatal consequences.
Courier
trailed it about a mile back. Last in line, as far away as its captain could be persuaded to stay, was the
Gas Princess
. Its spherical tanks held liquid natural gas at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit, giving
Princess
the look of a seagoing banana split. But no one laughed; the potential energy bottled up inside was equivalent to that of a small nuclear bomb.
40
The
Reuben James
brought up the rear, ready to shoo off any Iranians who tried to sneak up from behind.
The tugs led the convoy through the strait and then broke off; a pair of fighter planes far above returned to the carrier
Enterprise
in the Gulf of Oman. But the convoy retained several uninvited participants: four merchants, none under U.S. flag. They tagged along, huddling close, hoping to sail through the danger zone under the convoy's protective wing. Some of the ships sported real American flags; others merely ran up the crew's best attempts at vexillogical forgery. Rinn had become accustomed to maritime hitchhikers flying red-white-and-blue banners with four stars or ten stripes.
       Â
They would jump in the line, and you were supposed to tell them to get out, but it was difficult to do. What were you going to do? They would ignore you.
       Â
I think everyone over there driving a destroyer or a frigate was very much averse to what the Iraniansâand later the Iraqis when you got further up the lineâwere doing, so we tended to tell them to get out, and if they didn't, not do anything about it, and escort them. They really didn't cause problems. A lot of times, they'd tag on to the tail end of the formation. Other times, they'd sneak into a gap in the line, which made it even more difficult, and when they got to the point when they could peel off and go to their port, they'd simply turn and go.
41
When Rinn was the convoy commander, he liked to put the
Roberts
in the middle of the line, where he could be reasonably safe from mines but able to react to any moving threat. The crew kept a live missile ready to go, pushed 76-mm rounds up below the breech, and scrutinized the radar screen. Any ship big enough to show up as a blip would get a stern message if it came within five miles: “You're standing into harm's way. We want you to stand clear.” When nothing threatened, the
Roberts
would take a spin around the miles-long string of ships, just to reassure the merchant crews that their U.S. Navy sheepdog stood ready to drive away the wolves.
“The hardest part of the mission is that you have to stay ready 24 hours a day. There's no time, really, to let your guard down,” Rinn told a trio of reporters who came aboard for a few days as part of the Pentagon-run media pool. “I'm never going to allow my ship to be shot at and hit.” The
Stark
's fate, he added, “is not lost on us.”
42