No Higher Honor (33 page)

“Since the discovery of the new minefield, five mines have been identified and destroyed by international forces,” a Pentagon official told reporters. “These mines were from the same series as those found on the
Iran Ajr
, leaving no doubt the mines were sown by Iran.”
¹³

There would be hell to pay.

IF YOU WERE
going to war in the Persian Gulf, you wanted someone like Tony Less in charge. A fifty-one-year-old aviator with more than sixty-two hundred hours in jet cockpits and over a thousand carrier traps, Less had flown A-7 Corsair II attack planes on scores of bombing runs in the Vietnam War. In 1974 his leadership and cockpit skills earned him command of the newly reorganized Blue Angels, the navy's elite aerial demonstration team. More recently, Less had served on the Pentagon's joint staff and commanded the
Missouri
and
Ranger
battle groups in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.
¹⁴

Within hours of the explosion—even before the divers had found the rest of the mines—White House officials ordered plans drawn up for military retaliation against Iran.
¹⁵
Less and his staff worked through the night to examine the options. By midday on Friday, 15 April, they had their recommendation: retaliatory strikes designed to hurt Iran's ability to mine the Gulf, bomb runs on the ports where the weapons were stored, and aerial attacks on the docks where minelayers tied up.

Less sent the recommendations off to his boss: the commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. George B. Crist, who oversaw U.S. military operations in and near southwest and east Asia from his headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Crist passed the package to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William J. Crowe, who carried them to a morning meeting in the Oval Office. President Reagan had gathered his senior advisers: Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, National Security Adviser Colin L. Powell, and Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The men swiftly agreed that military action was called for. But what, exactly? There were plenty of options, thanks to the Pentagon's practice of laying plans for almost every foreseeable contingency. They ranged from a simple show of force, to Less's limited attack, to a much broader campaign.
¹⁶

Crowe backed Less's reasoning. If there was to be retaliation, the chairman argued, it should be something that would reduce the Iranians' ability to harm U.S. forces in the Gulf.
¹⁷
The group discussed strikes on mine facilities and broadened the discussion to include an attack on Bandar Abbas, the port and missile base that covered the Hormuz strait. But Shultz argued that strikes on Iranian soil could escalate the conflict, entangling America deeper in the region's hostilities.

Eventually, the group warmed to a proposal to destroy two Iranian oil platforms in the south-central Gulf. Machinery on their steel lattices extracted natural gas from crude oil—some 150,000 barrels of oil a day, or 7 percent of the country's output.
¹⁸
They had military value as well. Revolutionary Guards had pressed the platforms into service as surveillance points, command posts, and even home ports for their raiding powerboats.

Crowe pressed for more. The admiral pointed out that U.S. forces had delivered a similar punishment—the destruction of two oilrigs—for the missile attack on the
Sea Isle City
. The damage to the
Roberts
, he argued, warranted harsher measures. He asked permission to sink an Iranian warship. After some discussion, Reagan granted the request—and added his approval to take out a third platform if no suitable man-o'-war could be located.

Having set the military in motion, the president headed for his retreat in Camp David, Maryland. Shultz flew to Augusta, Georgia, to keep a golf date. Carlucci remained in the capital to oversee military planning.
¹⁹

Two messages were drawn up and sent out. One went to Tehran: a diplomatic protest at the mining of international waters. The other went to Crist, who passed it to Tony Less: an order to draw up plans for Operation Praying Mantis.

On Saturday, 16 April, Less summoned the heads of his combat groups to
Coronado
, which was tied up at Manama's Mina Sulman pier. The commander of Destroyer Squadron Nine and another staffer flew in from the
Enterprise
battle group, while Capt. Donald Dyer, the Redman, helicoptered in from the
Wainwright
. By 3:30
AM
Sunday morning, they had a plan. Two groups of surface ships would take out the oil platforms, while a third would go gunning for one of the Iranian frigates. The
Enterprise
's fighters and bombers would join in as necessary.

Less had already summoned the ships he would need.
Roberts
's squadronmates—
Simpson, Wainwright, Jack Williams
—gathered in the southern and central Gulf, as did the
Trenton
and the destroyer USS
O'Brien
(DD 975).
²⁰
Four more warships soon arrived from Battle Group Foxtrot,
Enterprise
's group on station in the northern Arabian Sea. The destroyer USS
Merrill
(DD 976) and guided-missile destroyer USS
Lynde McCormick
(DDG 8) made it to the Gulf first. Their squadronmates, the frigate USS
Bagley
(FF 1069) and guided-missile destroyer USS
Joseph
Strauss
(DDG 16), heading south along Africa's eastern coast to Mombasa, turned around, refueled at sea, and made twenty-five knots through the Strait of Hormuz. The
Enterprise
itself drew to within 120 nautical miles of the strait; her two remaining escorts interposed themselves between carrier and shore against the possibility that Iran might send jets or small boats their way.

The first target, the Sassan oil platform, would go to Surface Action Group (SAG) Bravo:
McCormick, Merrill
, and the
Trenton
. The attack plan reflected the lesson of the October shelling: even a thousand five-inch rounds will barely dent the steel lattice of an oil platform. The destroyers intended only to sweep the facility clear of resistance; a U.S. Marine reconnaissance team from
Trenton
would destroy it with explosive charges. SAG Bravo would then stand by for its second mission: if the hunt for an Iranian warship proved fruitless, the group would move northward and take out the platform dubbed Rakhish.

Wainwright, Bagley
, and
Simpson
—SAG Charlie—were assigned to destroy Sirri-D, a platform near Sirri Island, a speck of land that supported a major oil terminal some sixty-five miles northwest of Dubai.
²¹
Their plan mirrored SAG Bravo's: the ships would shell the platform, and commandos from SEAL Team Two would board and destroy it.
²²

The remaining group, SAG Delta, which included
O'Brien, Joseph Strauss
, and
Jack Williams
, would go hunting for an Iranian warship. They would operate farther north, in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. intelligence indicated that the best available quarry would be the
Sabalan
, a
Sa'am
-class ship that had acquired a bad reputation during the tanker war. Most Iranian frigate skippers were content to shoot at tankers' hulls, unleashing hellish gouts of flame but rarely sinking the double-hulled ships. The tanker crews often escaped death and even injury, escaping in lifeboats or riding their moribund ships into port behind a chartered firefighting tugboat. The victims of
Sabalan
's attacks were rarely so fortunate. Its gunners aimed for the bridge and crew quarters. “The captain of
Sabalan
is a real fanatic,” one U.S. officer told a reporter. The radio operators aboard the Gulf's commercial ships had taken to calling him “Captain Nasty.”

Enterprise
's Air Wing 11 would contribute four F-14A Tomcats, two A-6E Intruders, and two EA-6B Prowlers. If things got really hairy, the
Enterprise
could launch a second wave of warplanes. The U.S. Air Force would lend a hand as well, furnishing KC-10 tankers for aerial refueling and AWACS planes to provide a “god's-eye view” of the battlefield.
²³

In Washington it was still Sunday evening. At 8:30
PM
Reagan gathered Crowe, Carlucci, Powell, and Shultz in the family quarters of the White House to review the plans. A half hour later, five congressional leaders were ushered into the room, and the president informed them of the impending battle. Sometime after 10:00
PM
—in the Gulf, it was 5:00
AM
—the president signed the order to execute Operation Praying Mantis and turned in for the night.

Powell left for home. Crowe departed for the Pentagon, where he settled into its National Military Command Center to monitor the action on expansive video displays. Shortly thereafter, U.S. diplomats notified their counterparts in Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium—NATO allies with naval forces in the Gulf. The governments of the Soviet Union, China, and several other Persian Gulf states, including Iraq, were informed of the plan just before the strikes began.
²⁴

The catalyst for all this furious activity, the
Samuel B. Roberts
, was relegated to the sidelines. Tied up to its Dubai pier, about sixty-five miles southeast of Sirri, the ship had received word that some sort of retaliatory strike was on way. Some crew members longed to take part—maybe shoot off a Harpoon missile if something came within range—but the idea of firing from a damaged ship in UAE waters was clearly out of the question. So sailors packed into the bridge and CIC and tuned the radios to the bridge-to-bridge frequencies that the various ships would be using during the operation. As spectator seats go, pierside in Dubai was not a bad place to be.
²⁵

And in a way, the first move of Operation Praying Mantis belonged to the wounded frigate. At dawn on 18 April, the
Roberts
's SH-60 Seahawk lifted from
Trenton
's flight deck and flew toward the Sassan platform. With Cdr. Tim Matthews at the controls, Magnum 447 buzzed off to give the platform a final visual check, and to stand by to evacuate wounded troops.

Soon afterward, the rest of SAG Bravo went into action.
Trenton
launched CH-46 helos bearing marines and armed Cobra gunships for protection. About 7:55
AM
, the
Merrill
's captain broadcast warnings in English and Farsi: “You have five minutes to abandon the platform; I
intend to destroy it at 0800.” Some of the Iranian soldiers on its metal decks trained their ZSU antiaircraft guns at the U.S. ships—safely out of reach about five thousand yards away. Many more rushed onto two tugboats and cast off. At 8:04, the
Merrill
opened up, silencing the ZSUs within minutes.
Lynde McCormick
briefly joined in the barrage. Both ships soon checked fire to allow a tug to evacuate the rest of the platform's besieged occupants.

The twin-rotor CH-46s swooped in about 9:25
AM
, and marines slid down two-inch ropes onto the deck. Demolitions experts set fifteen hundred pounds of plastic explosive charges while intelligence specialists scoured the facility. The charges detonated around noon, sending black smoke billowing into the sky.

A hundred miles to the west, SAG Charlie had started off the same way at the Sirri platform: warnings and then an 8:00
AM
bombardment. But the shells soon detonated tanks of compressed gas, turning the platform into an inferno and eliminating both need and opportunity to drop in the SEALs. An Iranian tugboat came by to pick up survivors in the water;
Wainwright
's captain dropped some of his cruiser's lifeboats as well.
²⁶

Only SAG Delta was left without a target. As the sun rose high in the sky, U.S. ships and aircraft crisscrossed the Strait of Hormuz, searching for an Iranian warship. Visibility was three to five miles, not bad for April, but the waterway was packed with tankers, fishing boats, merchantmen, and warships. Lookouts peered through binoculars at an endless series of hulls and masts, while radar operators in their darkened spaces studied a mass of green blips. Where was
Sabalan? And
the rest of the Iranian fleet?
²⁷

As it happened, the Iranian high command was a bit distracted. About an hour before the U.S. ships opened fire, Iraqi troops had begun to storm the Fao Peninsula, a strategic sliver of land between the Kuwaiti and Iranian gulf coasts. The offensive combined a northern feint, a barrage of missiles on Iranian cities, and artillery bombardments of poison gas. Compared to the assault on the western front, the loss of two oil platforms may not have struck Iranian commanders as a particularly urgent matter.
²⁸

Around 11:00
AM
, Iranian forces stirred themselves. Two F-4s lifted off from their base and headed for the strait. The attack was fairly crafty. Like thieves watching a guard's flashlight beam, their ground controllers
monitored the Tomcats' search radars, waited until the F-14s pointed southward—and then sent the Phantoms to engage. But they could not elude the full-circle radar sweep of the Hawkeye. When the Tomcats eagerly turned to fight, the Iranian pilots broke off and fled.
²⁹

Their comrades on the water had better luck, at least initially. A collection of small craft, including five Boghammars from Abu Musa, streamed into the southern Gulf, spraying machine-gun bullets and rocket-propelled grenades at ships, oilrigs, and pumping stations alike. As the American tug
Willi Tide
moved in to douse one burning rig with fire hoses, a trio of speedboats raked the tug with machine guns and sped off. “They are firing at anything and everything that moves,” one civilian chopper pilot radioed as he flew into the gritty haze offshore.
³⁰

Around 11:30
AM
, an Iranian patrol boat moved onto SAG Charlie's radarscopes. Bagley's helicopter identified it as the
Joshan
, out of the northern Gulf port of Bushehr. Built for the shah by French shipyards, the 147-foot patrol boat packed the same OTO Melara 76-mm gun as the
Roberts
. More ominously,
Joshan
also carried a Harpoon missile—the last of a dozen sold to Tehran by the United States shortly before the Iranian revolution in 1980. To U.S. forces, the Harpoon made the patrol boat the most dangerous ship in the Gulf.
³¹