No Higher Honor (36 page)

The decision meant less work in Dubai, but the ship needed plenty of attention before its journey. One week after Sorensen and his team departed in early May, a second group arrived to start planning the permanent repairs in Bath. They stayed until the end of the month, measuring, testing, envisioning. Meanwhile, the hull had to be strengthened for towing out to deep water. The damaged gas turbines and other equipment had to be pulled out, boxed up, and shipped back to the United States. The interior had to be turned back into a clean, safe place for the crew members who would ride her home. Much of the effort to prep the damaged ship for its journey fell to the Dubai Drydock workers, and it began in earnest the day after Crowe's medal ceremony.

Surrounded by scaffolding, connected to the dock's high wall by catenaries of hose and cable, the
Roberts
resembled a trauma patient in intensive care. Like surgeons excising damaged tissue, the Dubai yard workers began with incisions. They peeled crumpled and wrinkled plates from the hull and cut out the twisted crosspieces that supported them. They removed a thirty-square-foot section around the hull breach and then twenty-foot-wide strips up the sides, slicing into undamaged plating in order to ensure a good patch. The resulting hole took the shape of a fat cross, wrapped around the bottom of the ship.

They debrided the wound, descending to pull battered, waterlogged equipment from the chaos of the damaged compartments. From AMR 3 they withdrew generators, evaporators, and high-pressure air flasks; from the main engine room they removed the great reduction gear and tons of equipment-turned-scrap metal. They pulled the gas turbines from their
mangled mounts, lowering them gently to the dry dock's oil-spattered floor with chains and thick cables. The broad bronze blades of the screw came off the hub with bolts. Over the course of two days, the long propeller shaft was withdrawn from its sheath. Once empty, the damaged spaces were stripped of insulation and scrubbed down.

Filipino workers armed with welding torches cut away the HY-80 steel that held the main reduction gear in the ship. Ted Johnson stood watch as fire marshal on the
Roberts
deck, sweating and arguing with the yard men about which was harder to take: the Gulf heat or the Wisconsin cold.
⁹

The
Roberts
crew had work to do as well. The ship's electricians disconnected damaged motors, switchboards, and controllers, hauling box after box of waterlogged components up and out of the ship. Prying open the cases of brass and painted metal, the sailors spread them under the beating Gulf sun to dry on the dock wall. Bent, Chaffin, and the others rewound motors and made additional repairs themselves; they sent more complicated work to the shipyard's repair shops. Chaffin often came away from such visits dumbfounded at the casual violations of safety doctrine; it was hardly uncommon to find one worker hosing down a floor while another's powerful electrical arc welder sizzled just a few feet away. Other sailors restored the air-conditioning units, patched up the ship's fire mains, and repaired the shattered serving tables on the mess deck.

But for much of the crew there was little work to do after putting the ship's living quarters back in good order. The sailors mustered each morning at 7:00
AM
on the flight deck, where the temperature was often already ninety degrees. Most days, liberty would begin at 9:00
AM
, and a stream of sailors would issue across the brow and into the sweltering heat. They explored Dubai's markets and other sights during the day and sampled the city's limited nightlife after the sun went down. Municipal regulations against public drunkenness were strict, and the
Roberts
sailors were generally careful to stay within their bounds. Still, Chaffin, who often volunteered for shore patrol duty—it beat standing watches aboard ship—retrieved more than one inebriated shipmate from the local police station.

Still, many
Roberts
sailors might have gone half mad with boredom if not for the expatriate community, who welcomed them as heroes and took them under their wings. Led by the American and British employees
of foreign oil companies, the expats and their families fed and feted the crew, inviting them home for dinner and showing them around the small country. Employees of Conoco opened their firm's compound to the crew, who received passes to the swimming pool and the local beach club. Chaffin fondly remembered the weekly all-you-can-eat buffet, with its bar-bequed shrimp, octopus, squid, and every kind of seafood imaginable. The duffers in the group were treated to greens fees at the golf course just outside the city. If you ignored the sandy brown landscape in the background, it was “just like any championship course here in the States, complete with water holes,” Reinert marveled. The weather was uniformly great, if you hated overcast days and loved heat. Jim Muehlberg, the electronics technician, didn't see a cloud for two months.
¹⁰

On 10 May the crew gathered on the flight deck for a short ceremony. One week shy of a year since the
Stark
attack, the
Roberts
observed a moment of silence for those who died in the event. Rinn had sent a message to the commander of Mayport Naval Station, where the
Stark
crew awaited the repair of their own ship. Days later and half a world away, the Mayport commander read Rinn's words to the sailors, families, and dignitaries gathered for a somber memorial ceremony.

BY 7 JUNE
local machine shops had completed the temporary hull modules that would close the hole in the hull and strengthen the battered
Roberts
for its journey home. The modules included new freshwater
distillers, high-pressure air flasks, and other bits of equipment the ship would need during its Atlantic transit. They also included something the originals did not: ballast.

The removal of the gas turbines and reduction gear had lightened the ship by many tons, raising its center of gravity and reducing its resistance to capsizing. Ballast had to be found, and it was, in the form of an Arabian resource even more plentiful than oil: sand. More than two hundred tons were packed into hundreds of woven plastic flour bags, which were tucked in place of the missing gas turbines.

Over a week's time, the giant patches were bolted and welded into place. In another week, the dry-dock workers finished what the navy's intrepid hull technicians had tried to do the night after the explosion: weld plates over the cracks in the
Roberts
's deckhouse.

The crew repainted the ship from stem to stern, and on 15 June the great dry dock was flooded once again and the
Roberts
towed out to a nearby pier. As the frigate floated free of its concrete cell, its vast battle flag fluttered from its mast.
¹²

There was but one task left for Dubai Drydocks: prepping the vessel that would carry the frigate home. The 558-foot
Mighty Servant 2
was an unusual ship for an unusual job. Bow on, its white-painted pilothouse and blue-ringed funnels looked normal enough for a twenty-nine-thousand-ton cargo ship. But the resemblance ended there. Its abbreviated superstructure gave way to a vast rusty platform that rode barely above the wave tops. The great slab of a cargo deck measured 450 by 120 feet, room enough to play a regulation game of soccer plus a few tennis matches. Even stranger, the
Mighty Servant
was designed to sink, at least partway. Ballast tanks allowed the ship to submerge its deck so that its outsized cargoes could be floated into place. When the tanks were once again pumped dry, the ship would rise up to shoulder its load. Its Dutch owners, the Wijsmuller shipping and salvage line, called the
Mighty Servant
a semi-submersible heavy-lift ship; they leased it to haul jack-up oilrigs across oceans. At just half the deadweight of a typical oilrig, the forty-one-hundred-ton
Roberts
would hardly strain the
Servant
's back.
¹³

The decision to use the
Mighty Servant
had occasioned some debate between Atlantic Fleet officials, who wanted to tow the frigate home, and NAVSEA Chief Rowden, who favored the heavy-lift option. “We had
a squabble, and we prevailed because I told the CNO that we had to certify the ship ready for tow, and I could not in good conscience do that,” Rowden said. “So we won.”

Rowden had his reasons. At a cost of roughly $1.4 million, the ride was more expensive than a tow, but the eighty-one-hundred-mile transit to Newport would take just one month, about half as long. Moreover, the frigate was so weakened that heavy weather could represent a real threat. “At six knots, you can't outrun a storm,” NAVSEA's Vinroot said.

Besides, Rowden was curious about
Mighty Servant 2
and its sister ship,
MS1
. How long would it take them to evacuate a damaged ship from a war zone? Might they help ferry the navy's diminutive minesweepers around the globe? “We sure are breaking new ground with this one,” Vinroot said.
¹⁴

When
Mighty Servant 2
anchored in Dubai Harbor, the dry dock sent workers out to weld a cradle to its deck. Triangles of I-beams and steel posts the color of red clay would hold the
Roberts
upright during its transit. After weeks in dock number two, the yard's engineers knew the frigate's dimensions to the quarter inch; there would be no repeat of the damage done in the first dry-docking. But there was a complication: the hull of the
Roberts was
to rest on the
Servant
's deck, but the frigate's chin-mounted sonar, fin stabilizers, and rudder protruded several feet below its keel. The Dubai engineers pondered the situation and, eventually, simply cut several rectangular holes in the
Servant
's deck plates. The repair bill wasn't going to add much to the already high fare.
¹⁵

For Paul Rinn the weeks passed busily enough. He oversaw the repairs and wrote up a few more shipmates for medals. But the days had a bittersweet edge. In sixteen years as a naval officer, he had bent his body, mind, and heart toward command at sea. The past half decade—ever since he received his command star in 1983—had been made up of long days and often sleepless nights filled with thoughts of little but the
Roberts
. Now his command was drawing to a close. His request to see his ship home had been turned down—he'd already overstayed the customary command tour, even for a commissioning officer.

Some moments were more bitter than sweet. When a naval ship or aircraft incurs major damage, the service holds a formal investigation. Called the JAGMAN after the document that guides it—the Judge Advocate
General's Manual—it was quite separate from repair surveys like the one Sorensen had helped conduct. Many careers had been ended by JAGMAN investigations.

As the senior navy officer in the region, Adm. Tony Less appointed the investigating officer for the
Roberts
incident, a captain who was the commodore of one of the Gulf destroyer squadrons. Less took pains to reassure Rinn. “This investigation is being initiated at my behest and the sole intention is to document what was done right, wrong and what can be done better,” Less wrote. “Your actions or those of your crew are not the subject of the investigation except to provide lessons learned. The lessons we discover will obviously help all of our ships in this volatile area.”
¹⁶

But Rinn disliked the investigating officer from the moment he arrived on the last day of May. The way Rinn remembered it, the officer walked on board and shortly thereafter declared his intention to prove that the
Roberts
should have been able to withdraw unscathed from the minefield. Rinn's annoyance grew as the weeklong inquest progressed; for one thing, he did not recall being interviewed for the record. Rinn finally wrote a note to Aquilino to complain.

Still, every day was a reminder of how lucky he'd been. As the change of command drew near, Aquilino sent Rinn a pat on the back: “With the eyes of the world upon you, you handled the greatest of adversity and avoided certain disaster. You have set the standard for CNSG-4 and the fleet.”
¹⁷

But no farewell gesture topped the one from Mike Tilley, a wiseacre to the last. The engineman had once joked to his captain that a window in the ship's hull would greatly ease the hours spent at general quarters. Now he took up an official memo form, typed out a message, and headed up to the captain's stateroom. Screwing up his courage, Tilley slipped it into the suggestion box. It read:

Rinn laughed. “Tilley, I'll never forget you,” he said.

In the late afternoon heat of 20 June, the crew of the
Roberts
assembled on the flight deck, turned out in their crisp whites. Rinn pinned silver cutlasses on several enlisted sailors who had used their slack time to wrap up their surface warfare qualifications. He told his crew how proud he was of them and said they should always remember what they had done together. It was the last time Rinn ever saw his crew assembled. Within a day or two, he would turn his ship over to his successor.