No Higher Honor (28 page)

AFTER RINN GOT
off the phone with Admiral Less, the captain decided it was time for a look at AMR 2. He waded through the fire hoses that crisscrossed the mess deck and headed down into the machinery space. On the lower level, the captain stepped off the ladder into shin-deep water.
Oh, fuck, this is worse than I thought
. He could see that Ford and his team had done plenty already. Two big blue mattresses were pinned against the leaky bulkhead by steel shoring beams. Other holes were plugged by various bits of uniforms, boards, and even an entire toolbox. Two eductors were pumping away. But there was still plenty of water coming through.

Two sailors came by in their skivvies, having sacrificed their coveralls to the damage-control effort. Both were overweight; the captain recognized them as members of the ship's weight-loss program. “You guys look pretty shitty with your clothes on, but this is almost unbearable,” he told them.

Rinn found Ford. The situation didn't look so good, the captain said. “That's nothing,” said the cook, and led Rinn into the generator enclosure. Raymond's patch was keeping the seawater from spurting onto the diesel engine, but the wall was soaked.

“They've clearly got their work cut out for them,” Rinn recalled,

Ford told the captain to give his team twenty minutes; they'd have things under control. “Okay, you got it,” Rinn told him. As the captain turned to leave, the strains of rock music caught his ear. In the din of the diesel and the yelling and the watery rush, there was also a boom box, perched on a refrigeration unit, blasting out tunes by the rock band Journey.

Halfway up the ladder, Rinn turned around. Raymond thought he looked worried. But for just an instant, the captain felt lighthearted. The music reminded him of a joke that had started after his teenage daughters visited the ship.
The captain fears no man
, the sailors said,
but what he really fears is that he'll come back to the house one night and see one of us in a Trans Am in his driveway with a Journey tape playing and his daughter in the front seat
.

Rinn smiled. “Even in this situation, your choice of music sucks,” he told the room. The sailors laughed and the captain left. He wondered whether he'd see them again.

T
he DC effort atop the deckhouse had begun while the mammoth fireball was still dissipating into a charcoal smudge on the late-afternoon sky. Flaming debris fluttered down to the deck, and sailors soon stamped the pocket-sized blazes into extinction. But there was clearly a more serious fire to fight. Dark fumes boiled from the stack and wafted up from cracks in the deck. Somewhere in the steel maze beneath their feet, flames were spreading.

The response by the sailors atop the deckhouse, mostly signalmen and quartermasters, was all but automatic. Treading paths worn in countless drills, they flaked out hoses into long canvas lengths on the deck, screwed them into knee-high fireplugs, and attached the heavy brass nozzles. Signalman 1st Class Chuck Dumas and other petty officers directed traffic as junior sailors set up fire parties. Within a few minutes of the blast, a pair of hose teams was ready to go: nozzleman, two hosemen, plus three or four helpers behind. A team leader gave the signal to charge the hose. Someone turned the valve on the fireplug. Nothing came out.

What was the problem? No one knew. But they had seen this before, in drills. When a fire hose lost pressure, it often signified a gash or leak in one of the ship's fire mains, the eight-inch copper-nickel pipes that carried water from fire pump to fireplug. Someone in the repair party would go find the leak and turn the nearest cutoff valve, closing the pipe as a surgeon might clamp a bleeding artery. The hose would be connected to the nearest plug that still had pressurized water, and the battle against the flames would go on.

The
Roberts
sailors soon determined that there wasn't a working fireplug aft of the mast, but they found pressure farther forward. Willing hands unscrewed fittings from dry plugs, broke out more hoses, and began
daisy-chaining them forward in fifty-foot lengths. In moments, someone opened the tap on another fireplug, and the nozzleman drew on his control ring. A stream of cooling liquid arced over the ten-foot lip of the stack and disappeared into the smoke.

The pressure wasn't great, because of the missing fire pumps and the long draw through 1 1/2-inch hoses. But it was a start. A minute later another hose team opened up on the blaze.

Then the water flow slowed to a trickle and stopped once more. Someone yelled back from the pilothouse: the electricity was out, and the fire pumps with it. The stream of smoke emanating from the stack became a flood of boiling black vapor. The deck plates grew warm beneath their boots.

The power returned as suddenly as it had vanished—thanks to whom the firefighters did not know—and the fireplugs began once again to operate. But the pressure was even worse than before. Somewhere, something was definitely wrong with the fire main system.

But there was more than one way to skin this cat. Two decks down, on the quarterdeck, groups of sailors under the direction of Chief Sonarman John Carr connected hoses to a pair of P-250 gas-powered pumps. One pump drew seawater from the port side; the other from starboard, and both sent it up to the hose teams two decks above. At about four gallons a second, the pressure was weaker than a fireplug's, but it was all they firefighters had. They resumed their work, playing the relatively light flow of water over a stack fire that was clearly getting worse.
¹

GUNNER REINERT HAD
hustled aft from the bridge when the mine went off, stomping a few pieces of flaming insulation into charred fluff along the way. Then he stopped, caught by the sight of controlled bedlam before him. His junior shipmates were throwing themselves into the damage control effort with impressive abandon.
Looks just like a drill
, he thought.
²

Twenty minutes after the blast, the topside firefighting effort was going full bore, dumping dozens of gallons of seawater down the stack each minute. But the smoke was only getting thicker. Reinert tried to picture the fire's progress through the superstructure. By this point, he figured, the heat must be spreading from the engine room through the ship's steel beams and plates—but to where? He looked down at the
cracks in the deck. One of them extended all the way across the top of the deckhouse, snaking past the covered voids that descended to the engine room, exhaling hot gray fumes along its entire length. The fissure was less than a dozen feet from the 76-mm gun turret. Suddenly, Reinert began to worry.

The munitions stacked in a warship's magazines can be as dangerous to their own crew as to their targets. Exposed to the heat of a shipboard fire, they can explode. The United States lost several ships in World War II when bombs and shells cooked off. The navy failed to absorb these costly lessons, and cook-offs killed scores more aboard the aircraft carriers
Enterprise
and USS
Forrestal
(CV 59) in the 1960s. Those disasters had at last galvanized efforts to create heat-resistant munitions, and so the shells and warheads aboard the
Roberts
were designed to keep their cool.

But Reinert wasn't taking chances. Descending to the main deck, he stopped by the torpedo magazine. It contained the ship's Mk 46 torpedoes—each eight feet long, thicker than a telephone pole, and tipped with ninety-six pounds of high explosive. The magazine also held Zuni rockets brought aboard for the army helicopters. Zunis had a bad name in the navy; earlier versions had caused both of the carrier fires.
³

This mag should be safe from the fire
, Reinert reasoned. A thwartships passageway separated it from the fires boiling up through the exhaust plenum. But when he laid a hand on the aft bulkhead, the aluminum was warm. He sent for buckets and mops, and sailors to wield them. His instructions were brief: swab the warm bulkheads with cool seawater, and don't stop until everyone else puts the fires out. It would be a nerve-wracking job, standing fire watch amid deadly weapons, but someone had to do it.

The chief headed up one deck to the 76-mm magazine. The space backed up to the exhaust plenum, and he expected warm bulkheads. But when he undogged the hatch, plastered with red and gray warnings, the air itself was warm, and his nostrils picked up a whiff of smoke. Reinert looked around. The magazine held hundreds of two-foot shells stacked vertically in metal racks. The blast had knocked two racks loose from their mounts. He stepped past the gun's rotary feeder, a massive cylinder
that dominated the space. Dark wisps wafted through a three-inch rent in the aft bulkhead. The chief laid his knuckles on the metal plate. It was not merely warm; it was hot.
⁴

Mops and swabs would not fix this. The obvious move was to evacuate the shells from the magazine, but that decision had to come from the commanding officer, and the sooner the better. Reinert sent word to DC Central and waited for the response. The wall thermometer registered one hundred degrees.

Rinn hated to give up his most flexible weapon, but it was far from clear that the gun could still shoot accurately, or safely, or even at all. And he knew that if the shells cooked off, the battle to save the
Roberts
would come to a quick and unsuccessful end. The captain passed the order back to Reinert: toss the shells overboard.
⁵

The chief sent for help—lots of help. As the word flashed around the ship, several sailors converged on the magazine and scrambled to take their places in a bucket-brigade line. The shells, each a fifty-pound cylinder of brass, fuse, and high explosive, were soon moving from hand to hand. Gunners muscled them one at a time from their racks and passed them out the magazine's doublewide hatch. Still cradled in their packing cases, the shells moved around a corner and down a ladder, through yet more arms to the port quarterdeck. One by one, the munitions went over the side and disappeared with a splash.

Inside the magazine, Reinert sweated with his men. He didn't tell them what he had learned from DC Central: that there was no water pressure in the sprinklers. If fire broke out, they would get no help from the automatic system, which had become just another bit of emergency gear knocked out by the mine.

The temperature kept going up: 110 . . . 115 . . . 120.

IN CIC, RINN
put in another call to the
Coronado
. When Admiral Less got on the horn, Rinn described the loss of the main engine room and propulsion, the fires, the flooding, the wounded sailors. Less asked, “Considering your situation, what do you think about remaining with the ship?” For years afterward, instructors in Naval Academy leadership classes would ask their midshipman students to ponder that decision. The question is: was the prudent choice to get the crew off the ship
before it went down and took them with it? To Rinn, then and later, the answer was crystal clear.

And as bad as things were, piling into life rafts would make them far worse. The
Roberts was
still in a minefield; the rafts would have been at the mercy of current and winds. There were sharks and sea snakes out there. And who would come rescue them? No, the best option was to stay and fight.

Rinn's reply came back in a flash. “I haven't thought about that at all. I have no desire to leave the ship. We'll stay with the ship and fight it. Right now, I have no other choice. In a nutshell, we're in trouble.” It was the last time Less brought up the notion.
⁶

“Do you have anything else to pass?” the admiral asked.

“No higher honor,” the captain said, and signed off. He headed up to the bridge, where he gathered the nearby officers. “I want you to give me a rundown,” he began. “Here's what I already know: we've lost the main engine room, there is flooding in AMR 2, but it seems to be under control; there is flooding in AMR 3.”