No Higher Honor (11 page)

THE SHIP PAID
a short visit to Annapolis, Maryland, serving as window dressing for the U.S. Naval Academy's graduation week. Then there were two weeks of sweet liberty in Newport, the ship's new home. The colonial-era city, long a center of naval training, had recently been returned to duty as a home port for a quartet of frigates and destroyers. Many of the married sailors had already installed their families in navy housing along Narragansett Bay. But the reunion was soon over.

In mid-June the ship weighed anchor for U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “Gitmo,” as sailors and marines called it, was one of the U.S. military's odder installations. For starters, it sat on communist land, an accident of history whose roots lay in the Spanish-American War. After U.S. troops seized the island's eastern tip in 1898, a permanent lease was drawn up with the Cuban government, and marines had occupied the area ever since. Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution prompted better defenses—barbed wire, gun emplacements, the western hemisphere's largest minefield—but could not stop Cuban troops from taking the occasional potshot with a rifle.

The navy eventually established a training facility at Gitmo, and a predeployment visit became a rite of passage for Atlantic Fleet crews. From before sunrise to long after midnight, the instructors worked a ship and its crew to exhaustion, pushing them through lesson after lesson, drill after drill, honing their skills in damage control, engineering procedures, and naval combat. For many crews, Gitmo was the toughest action they ever saw.

The
Roberts
arrived on 27 June 1986 and spent the next five weeks almost constantly on the go. A typical day went like this:

  
3:00
AM
:
  
Reveille

  
3:15:
         
Sweepers: clean the ship

  
3:30:
         
Breakfast

  
4:15:
         
Morning muster

  
4:30:
         
Convene the sea-and-anchor team

  
5:30:
         
Anchor in Guantanamo Bay

  
6:15:
         
Weigh anchor and get under way

  
8:30:
         
General quarters exercise

11:30:
         
Lunch

Noon:
         
Next exercise

12:30
PM
:
  
Convene the sea-and-anchor team

  
1:30:
         
Moor at training center pier

  
2:15:
         
Damage control drills

  
4:45:
         
Dinner

  
5:45:
         
Convene sea-and-anchor team

  
6:15:
         
Get under way

  
7:00:
         
Electronic warfare exercises

  
7:30:
         
Eight o'clock reports

  
8:00:
         
Movies on the mess deck

10:00:
         
Taps

10:30:
         
More antiship exercises

11:59:
         
Sailing off Cuban coast

  
3:45
AM
:
  
Reveille

Even the occasional afternoon off wasn't much to write home about. Temperatures hovered in the nineties, and there wasn't anywhere to go anyway.
²⁷
Besides the barracks, training centers, and gun emplacements, Gitmo consisted largely of a Navy Exchange store, an outdoor movie theater, an un-air-conditioned self-serve laundry, and a McDonalds. You couldn't really stroll the landscape on the forty-five-square-mile base because of the lizards and land crabs. Even sliding into second base on the softball diamond might draw a nasty infection from the bacteria that lived in the local dirt—though the
Roberts
team ignored the peril and won the Independence Day tournament.
²⁸
Social life was all but nonexistent; the place was dubbed “Gitno” by those who most acutely felt the absence of women.

So crews threw themselves into damage control drills. Sorensen had taught the sailors well, but the Gitmo team made them better. The instructors' exercises were tougher and more complicated than those that the ship's DC training team could set up. “It was always kind of the worst-nightmare kind of thing,” Signalman Roberts said. “Sometimes there literally was a reveille after a night with no taps.”
²⁹

Van Hook's engineers faced an operational propulsion plant examination (OPPE), an exacting review that could turn engineering heads prematurely gray. Many ships survived Gitmo and the OPPE by packing
the watch bill with experienced chief petty officers instead of green ensigns and junior lieutenants, but Van Hook had pushed to do it right. Most of the senior watch stations were filled by officers, as they would be in combat, and their preparation paid off in “superb” grades, the highest compliment an official navy report can bestow.
³⁰

When the ship departed in late July, it left very impressed trainers in its wake. The instructors graded the
Roberts
“outstanding” in navigation, anchoring, transferring items at sea, and gathering intelligence. The ship's overall report grade, through more than thirty-five exercises, was 87.1 percent, or “good”—unusual for a crew with so few weeks at sea.

As the
Roberts
prepared to leave Cuba behind, another
Perry
-class frigate flashed a message over the water. “PAUL THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND GOOD WISHES HAVE A SAFE TRIP TO CHARLESTON HOPE TO SEE YOU IN MAYPORT SOON REGARDS GLENN.” It was Cmdr. Glenn Brindel, skipper of the
Stark
(FFG 31), who was readying his own guided missile frigate for deployment.
³¹
The next time Rinn heard from the
Stark
, the news would not be good.

THE
ROBERTS
SPENT
much of rest of the summer in Caribbean waters. In the exercise ranges off Puerto Rico, the ship sent half a dozen Standard missiles skyward after orange jet-powered drones. Time and again, the bulky launcher on the forecastle whirled into loading position, tilting its arm to accept the missile that popped up from the magazine below. With frightening speed, the arm came down and the launcher swiveled to starboard. Under the launch rail, guidance fins unfolded and snapped into place, and the weapon departed in a puff of white smoke. In an eyeblink it was miles away, leaving radar operators to track its kill or its ignominious descent to the waves.

In September a coast guard drug-enforcement team came aboard and helped the crew track down and seize a smuggler's sailboat. The bust netted nearly six tons of marijuana and earned the ship the coast guard's Meritorious Unit Commendation.

The
Roberts
closed out its first calendar year of commissioned service amid a flurry of praise. After a four-day search for construction flaws, a navy evaluator declared the
Roberts
the best
Perry
-class ship to date.
³²
The Atlantic Fleet commander took note of “a highly professional crew
getting their ship off to the right start . . . Well done and keep charging.”
³³
And when the Battle E results were announced, the crew had earned Mission Es in seven of the nine categories, including air defense, engineering, and damage control.

But they were also left with goals to strive for. Commodore Aquilino denied the
Roberts
the squadron's overall Battle E, ruling that FFG 58 had been in service too short a time. And Gunner Reinert had met half of his objectives: his crew had received the antisubmarine warfare prize, but the gunnery prize had eluded them.

As wintry storms drew a curtain on a busy and successful season, the
Roberts
returned to the state of its birth for a few months of light repairs and equipment installation at Bath Iron Works' dry dock in Portland, Maine.
³⁴
Since its April commissioning, frigate and crew had spent seven weeks in BIW yards and more than four months at sea or elsewhere—and less than two months in its new Rhode Island home.
³⁵

The holidays provided the sailors of FFG 58 a few weeks' respite from the demands of the naval life, a chance to think about friends and family and life outside a steel hull. But in a faraway land untouched by snow, war and politics were shaping their destiny.

A
s the
Roberts
began its yard repairs in late 1986, the crew could be forgiven if they generally skipped the
Portland Press-Herald
's wire stories about the Iran-Iraq war. There seemed little reason to suspect the frigate might somehow become caught in the bloody conflict, which had already ground on longer than World War II with little U.S. involvement.

Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had lit the flame in 1980, pouring troops across his eastern frontier to seize land and oil in the chaotic aftermath of Tehran's Islamic revolution.
¹
But the incursion galvanized a divided country, and Iranian troops soon bludgeoned the invaders back to the border. Unfortunately for the region, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proceeded to duplicate his enemy's blunder by mounting his own push into Iraq. The Baghdad strongman rallied his war-weary citizenry, and the conflict soon devolved into a brutal stalemate, pocked with fruitless offensives and punctuated with missile explosions in crowded neighborhoods. In the first three years of war, some three hundred thousand Iranian troops and civilians died, along with nearly sixty-five thousand Iraqis.
²

By 1984 Saddam wanted peace, but he could neither eject the Iranian forces nor swallow Khomeini's heavy reparation demands. So he sought instead the aid of more powerful nations who might enforce a cease-fire. The Iraqi leader knew that long years of slaughter had not moved the West to intervene, but he thought he knew what would. The maritime traffic of the Persian Gulf included a steady procession of deep-draft oil tankers, whose capacious holds slaked one-tenth of the world's daily demand. Saddam's plan was simple: sink tankers, hurt oil-thirsty countries, and let
them
stop the war.

The strategy turned a sprinkling of maritime attacks into a new battle-front. In March 1984 a pair of shiny new Dassault Super-Etendards lifted
off an Iraqi runway and headed southeast down the Gulf. Their wings bore Exocet missiles, the ship killers that had sunk a British destroyer in the 1982 Falklands War. South of Kharg Island, the pilots locked their radars onto a sea-level blip, let fly two missiles, and set a Greek tanker ablaze.
³
Four attacks followed in as many weeks, all on ships bound for or bearing away from Iran. Tehran soon struck back in kind.
⁴

The “tanker war” littered the shipping channels with burning vessels. Seventy-one ships were hit in 1984, 47 the following year, and 111 the year after that. Few of the big tankers actually sank, thanks to their spill-proofed double hulls, but dozens were declared total losses.
⁵
Both sides preferred to sink enemy cargo, but one merchant ship looked much like another. Adding to the confusion, Iraq shipped its oil from ports in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The pillars of black smoke that rose above the hazy horizon frequently pointed back to neutral or even friendly craft.

Western action in the Gulf was long in coming, and it did not take the form Saddam had envisioned. In late 1986 the oil kingdom of Kuwait, tired of the attacks on its merchant fleet, asked Washington to provide naval escorts for its tankers through the war zone. American foreign policy toward the Persian Gulf might charitably have been described as muddled. Publicly, U.S. officials professed neutrality in the conflict. But Khomeini's coup had transformed Iran, a staunch and well-armed U.S. ally under the shah, into a bitter enemy. The Reagan administration had tried to rally an international arms embargo—while secretly shipping U.S. weapons and gear to Tehran in attempts to free hostages elsewhere in the Middle East and to fund the Nicaraguan contras. Meanwhile, Washington had restored diplomatic relations with Baghdad in 1983 and had begun the covert supply of battlefield intelligence to Iraq.
⁶

But the Kuwaitis proved better geopoliticians than Saddam. Even as Washington began to declare the request for a naval escort, the monarchy's diplomats were inviting Moscow to do the job. The idea of Soviet warships protecting the world's energy jugular was too much for the White House to bear. In March 1987, U.S. officials announced an upcoming series of convoys, to be dubbed Operation Earnest Will. The U.S. Navy had patrolled the Gulf since World War II. But this new effort would require a far heavier presence—as many as three dozen ships in and around the region.

The buildup had barely begun when disaster struck. One of the first new ships to arrive was the
Stark
, Cdr. Glenn Brindel commanding. Ten months earlier, Brindel had flashed a friendly message to Rinn across the tropical waters of Guantanamo Harbor. Now his frigate was on patrol in the middle of a war zone—and fairly relaxed about it. Neither the chaff launchers nor the Phalanx CI WS (close-in weapons system), an antimissile weapon, was turned on. The .50-caliber machine guns were unloaded, their gunners lying down near the mounts. In the combat information center, just one of the weapons control consoles was manned.

Just before sundown on 17 May, an Iraqi pilot in an F-1 Mirage jet headed down the Gulf, scanning his instruments, looking for tankers. In the
Stark
's darkened CIC, an operations specialist picked up the Mirage on his screen: track number 2202, range two hundred miles, headed inbound. The jet was pointed past the ship, four miles off the port beam. The sailor passed the word to his skipper.