No Higher Honor (20 page)

The first night—6 March 1988—set the tone for two tense weeks. At three in the morning, a radar operator called up from CIC: “Iraqi Badger inbound, speed 330 knots, altitude 200 feet, CPA four miles.” The last bit stood for “closest point of approach.” The plane, a Soviet-built medium bomber, would pass within four miles of the
Roberts
—much too close for comfort. Rinn sent the ship to general quarters. The alarm bonged throughout the ship. Sailors rolled from their bunks and rushed to their stations. A Standard missile slid onto the launcher rail, and gunners switched the CIWS from manual to automatic.

The air traffic controller in CIC radioed the Badger pilot, warning him to divert his course or face deadly consequences. The Iraqi pilot was just nineteen miles away—a handful of seconds of missile flight—when he acknowledged
Roberts
's command and veered south to miss the frigate by less than a dozen miles.

At 5:30
AM
the alarms sounded again, and a weary crew scrambled to GQ stations. This time it was a trio of Mirage F1s, screaming toward the ship at 385 knots, right down on the deck. They closed to twenty-three miles before turning away.
¹⁵

And there was one more development. Sometime in the night, the
Roberts
had welcomed aboard a mysterious pair of small black helicopters. The call to flight quarters confounded sailors who knew that the ship's own aircraft was tucked snugly in its hangar. The mystery only deepened as two choppers approached the ship, their landing skids barely clearing the waves. Rotors whirring softly, the aircraft climbed up to land on the flight deck, both squeezing onto a platform that barely accommodated a ten-ton Seahawk. The pilots disembarked, and the deck crew tucked the tiny helicopters into the frigate's starboard hangar.

The new shipmates remained a mystery to most
Roberts
sailors, who knew them only as some sort of special-ops army aviators. They wore their hair long. They slept by day and flew at night, low and fast over the black water, night vision goggles clamped to their helmets. The
Roberts
was accustomed to running without lights, but went super-dark whenever the army guys had a mission. Sometimes the black helos took off with a load of rockets and landed with empty canisters. “A buddy of mine, Ron, asked them what they did one day,” recalled Mike Tilley, a junior engineman, “and he said, ‘Mind your own fucking business.' Just like that, point-blank. Ron said ‘Sorry.' The guy said, ‘No problem; just don't worry about it.'”
¹⁶

The soldiers were, in fact, five pilots and four mechanics from the army's 160th Aviation Group (Airborne), the elite unit formed after the disastrous attempt to rescue U.S. hostages from Tehran in 1979. They flew AH-6 Little Bird helicopters, small and agile craft armed with 7.82-mm mini-guns and 2.75-inch rockets. They operated at night, lights out, with their landing skids just six feet above the waves. “You'll know you're too low when you get wet,” their pilots told one another. They were nicknamed the Night Stalkers, and they were part of the secret Operation Prime Chance. Even aboard a warship, their identity was strictly need-to-know.
¹⁷

For the next ten days,
Roberts
patrolled the waters around the barges. The crew dubbed the area Badger Alley. In just the first week, watchstanders warded off a dozen Iraqi Badgers, two Blinder bombers,
and fourteen Mirage fighters. Iran's air force generally kept its distance, but the frigate's radar operators spotted Iranian C-130s, F-4s, F-14s, P-3s—even Bell AB-212 helicopters. And the frigate was doing some hunting of its own. During the day, the
Roberts
's Seahawk swept the area by sight and radar. At night, the army helos emerged from the hangar, lifted from the flight deck, and flew off to do their thing.

Rinn described the feeling a few weeks later. “The type of operation that we do over here is one of the most demanding physically and mentally that you can do . . . I think the saving grace and tribute to these guys is that we survive in that environment and do our jobs—fully aware all the time that we can go from a semi-relaxed environment to an absolutely hostile one ready to fight. It never goes away; it can't go away. That's our job.”
¹⁸

The job was always toughest on the midwatch. By longstanding naval custom, midnight duty lasted until four in the morning. The pilothouse was darkened, its fluorescent lamps extinguished, the better to keep eyes sharp for the unknown dangers beyond the ship's skin. Black came in shades and texture: obsidian sea, dusty sky, plastic instrument panels. Bulkheads and windscreens faded into the surrounding night.

Here and there, light pricked the void: the red letters of gauges, the running lights of ships, gas flares atop unseen derricks. From time to time there were streaks of tracer fire and the quick blooms of antiaircraft shells. Far off, lightning flickered, the tocsin of a coming thunderstorm.

A dozen watchstanders went about their business in near-silence, just the way Rinn wanted it. Lookouts screwed binoculars to their eyes. The watch quartermaster studied his charts for shoals; the officers bent to the rubber visor of the surface-search radar, or eyed the spectral green images of night vision goggles. Any blip on the radar screen could be an armed ship, boat, or aircraft looking for things to shoot. The idea was unnerving enough during the day, when human sight could help sort things out; at night it could rattle the coolest crew.

A radar operator called out a contact: an Iraqi Badger, inbound. The radio operator warned the pilot off, but the jet was less than thirty miles away when it finally turned to port. Under a brilliant quarter moon, the bridge crew watched a missile flare beneath the jet's wing. The rocket motor ignited, transected the dark sky, and hit its target. Flames rose
above the silhouetted shape of a tanker, well short of the horizon. The helmsman drove the ship onward, leaving a trail in the Gulf's pale green bioluminescence, tracing endless fourteen-by-seven-mile boxes in the dark water.

Fatigue dogged the bridge watch. They might have grabbed an hour's sleep before coming on duty, but each had worked a full day before dusk and would work another after dawn. And yet the watch demanded closer attention at night; darkness concealed the dangers of the enemy, and the sea. Even more than in daytime, the sailors on the bridge cradled their shipmates sleeping below. So the watchstanders drained mug after mug of coffee, watched the passing Gulf traffic, and, bored, half-wished for something to happen. They indulged in wry, clipped conversation, or nibbled on welcome gifts from the galley: a late-night plate of chocolate-chip cookies or an early batch of breakfast rolls. From time to time the radio squawked, breaking the quiet with a burst of static. Most of the messages were fully routine, the expected traffic in a crowded sea. But every so often a high manic voice would break from the speaker: “Hee hee hee! Filipino monkey!” No one knew who the caller was, or what he meant by his strange message. It became part of the background, just another reminder that the ship was in foreign waters.

Ennui mixed with apprehension; the resulting brew could make standing watch just a bit giddy. Mike Roberts recalled taking the signalman's watch one night. “It was black as hell out,” the petty officer said,

The quartermasters, who tracked the ship's position in neat pencil lines, wore through one chart, and then a replacement. The bridge watchstanders drummed their fingers and waited for their relief.

Day or night, the rest of the crew had their own problems. Most could be chalked up to the Gulf climate: hot, humid, and dusty. Sand and dust shrouded radio masts and radar antennae, clouding the frigates' electronic eyes. Airborne grit dust clogged the seals on the big SPS-49 radar, which leaked big globs of muddy oil down onto the sailors manning 50-cals on the deck below. The engineers wrapped cheesecloth around air intakes and changed it almost daily. Frustrated aviation mechanics struggled to clean the dirt from the crevices of their aircraft. Even the warm water played havoc with a ship built to fight in the cool Atlantic Ocean. It took more time and fuel to distill hundred-degree seawater into drinkable fluid, and algae built up in the intakes. Water-cooled systems fared poorly, including the frequency converters that turned 60Hz electricity into the 400Hz variety required by the ship's weapons.
²⁰

“The hot sticky days turned into hot sticky weeks,” Preston wrote. “Every day I was glad we had discovered Freon. Without air conditioning, I would have died in the Persian Gulf.”

The pace and the conditions wore on everyone. People lost weight; Ford, despite his hours in the kitchen, was twenty pounds slimmer by mid-March. The officers had it particularly bad. Their assigned duties, plus drills, plus watchstanding, plus taking care of their sailors yielded far too little rest.
²¹
“You don't get eight hours' sleep. You get four or five here and there, but you find you do without a lot of sleep,” Glenn Palmer said. “There's a lot of tension, there's a lot of pressure, and you just sort of live on a high.”
²²

Commanding officers sometimes got even less sleep than their subordinates. A running joke among skippers held that command tours generally lasted eighteen months because you just couldn't stay awake much longer than that. And Rinn was one of those captains who loved to prowl his ship at all hours, surprising engineers at 3:00
AM
or just sitting in the dark on the bridge, fostering the perception that The Skipper Never Sleeps. But in the Gulf, this propensity, combined with the hectic pace, frequently left Rinn exhausted. One morning, just after dawn, he started a letter to his brother. “This place is crazy,” he wrote, and fell asleep atop the bed's undisturbed covers, still wearing his uniform khakis.
²³

Rinn tried to get by with catnaps but occasionally fell asleep standing up.
²⁴
Eckelberry finally stepped in after the captain chewed out the bridge
watch for failing to alert him to a radar contact. “Sir, we did call you—three times,” the XO said. “You've got to cut that out.” Abashed, Rinn apologized to the watchstanders. He admonished them not to let him slumber through anything again. “If that happens, send somebody down. Drag me out if you have to. God, don't be intimidated.”
²⁵

His officers preferred their captain to simply get more rest, and so they plotted to keep his unconscious hours undisturbed. Someone rigged his cabin door with a “traffic light,” a brass box the size of a soap bar that glowed green for awake, red for asleep. Only Ens. Rob Sobnosky dared disobey; the CIC officer had orders to wake the captain whenever a strange ship approached. The rest of the wardroom dubbed him “Red Light.”
²⁶

The conspiracy eventually gathered the entire crew, who began passing the word whenever Rinn put his head down. The announcement “set condition Circle Zebra,” a play on damage control conditions, went around the ship via sound-powered headsets. The idea was to keep things quiet—dog the hatches gently, easy on the course changes, no loud maintenance. CIC watchstanders used the door near the sonar console instead of the one that opened next to the skipper's cabin. It was some weeks before Rinn discovered his crew's well-intentioned conspiracy of silence.
²⁷

AMID IT ALL
, the ship kept up Sorensen's training routine: every four hours, a new watch, a new team on duty, a new damage control drill. The mock situations were as realistic as possible; from time to time the engineers would bleed smoke from a generator into a space so the firefighting teams could practice in obscured conditions.
²⁸

“There's nothing worse than having the duty late at night, and your section leader has a bug up his butt to do these drills,” said Jim Muehlberg, an electronics technician second class. “And you wind up doing a fire drill at midnight. And you've got the four to eight [
AM
] watch.”
²⁹

But even all the drills, all the work, all the time at battle stations couldn't fill all the hours at sea.

Official working hours ended at 5:00
PM
, after which came dinner. At 6:00
PM
, the ship broadcast its very own nightly news program, live and quite unrehearsed from the broom-closet workspace of the ship's interior
communications technician. Kevin Ford, who handled the sports roundup, traded wisecracks with fellow newsreader Senior Chief Storekeeper Earl Crosby Jr. Even with all the joking around, the closed-circuit program was the crew's main source of information about the world beyond their hull.

Sailors with no pressing tasks might hang out for a few hours on the mess deck, where a television showed selections from the videotape library: hundreds of movies, sitcom episodes (
ALF
), and TV dramas (
L.A. Law
). There was usually a game of hearts or Monopoly going, or just knots of sailors sitting on plastic swivel-seats and shooting the bull. Some of the crew wrote letters home, or answered mail from the two grade-school classes the ship had adopted as pen pals.

Mail was the sweetest escape aboard ship, a breath of the faraway familiar. “When mail call goes down, the work day just about ends,” said Dick Fridley, a boatswain's mate first class. “You let them get their mail. You don't bother them. You let them go where they want to go and then relax and listen to their tapes and watch their videos. . . . That's when they're spending their time with their families.”
³⁰
But tinfoil packages of cookies or cling-wrapped fudge were shared, lest unfortunate things befall the addressee.