No Higher Honor (37 page)

“It was very solemn,” recalled fireman Alan Sepelyak. “You're saying good-bye to someone who helped you save your life, and putting your life in the hands of someone you don't know. As hard as [Captain Rinn] was on us, that was how hard it was to say good-bye. He disciplined, yelled at you, patted you on the back, kicked you in the ass. After all that, you just didn't want to see someone take his place.”
¹⁹

Soon, most of the
Roberts
sailors changed into civilian clothes, hefted their sea bags, and filed down the brow. Leaving behind a skeleton crew of about forty, they crammed onto blue-and-white shuttle buses and headed for Dubai International Airport. In the terminal lounge there was an unexplained delay. Eckelberry, in charge, started to worry. “I had 130 guys in civvies, carrying their white uniforms in hanging bags, most without passports, and no Plan B,” he said.

The XO lifted a phone at an unattended podium and mashed buttons until he got the operations supervisor in the Dubai tower, who told him the crew of the chartered L-1011 was trying to find parts for their broken gyrocompass.

Just about then, the digital sign over the concourse doorway rolled from “Special” to “Iran Air flight.” Scores of Iran-bound travelers began filling up the lounge. The American officer smelled a potentially ugly situation.

“I grabbed a terminal guy that was wearing a blazer and carrying a radio and explained who I was and who my men were and how mixing them with these or any other Iranian passengers was really a bad idea and could he help?” Eckelberry said. “His eyes got pretty big, but he understood and took action right away. The sign rolled over to ‘Charter' and he came back and announced to the Iranians that there had been a gate shift and with his helpers, got all the Iranians moved.

“I never thought that any of our crew had any grudge against Iranians, but I didn't want any hassles for any reason.”

The crew cleaned out the Dubai duty-free shop, and an hour later the plane was ready. As everyone was buckling in, a flight attendant asked Eckelberry to come to the cockpit. The pilot introduced his flight engineer, who had fixed the gyrocompass—and who happened to be Iranian. Eckelberry asked whether he was flying with them. The aviators laughed, and the flight engineer pulled out a U.S. passport. The naval officer thanked them and headed back to his seat.

The celebration began as the dusty Dubai landscape vanished from the windows. The crew emptied the bar carts long before the plane landed for fuel in London. But everyone sobered up on the trip across the Atlantic, and two hours from Newport, everyone shaved and changed into whites. When the pilot announced their arrival in U.S. airspace, the cabin filled with cheers.

The captain also had a message for Eckelberry: more than just family and friends would meet the crew. The Providence tower was reporting a major welcoming party being planned—admirals, VIPs, fire trucks. Someone was even setting up a small stage. The surprised XO set about composing some remarks on a cocktail napkin.

The light was fading from the Rhode Island sky when the L-1011 touched down at T. F. Green State Airport across the bay from Newport. The hullabaloo began immediately. A pair of fire trucks escorted the plane to a hangar where more than 350 wives, girlfriends, kids, and other relatives waited behind a painted line. Behind them, a phalanx of reporters and cameramen were getting it on all on tape.

The passenger door opened; the hubbub of the crowd wafted in along with the smell of jet fuel. The commander of the Atlantic Surface Fleet strode in, Vice Admiral Donnell, the big bear of a man who had described the
Roberts
's mining to the Washington press. “We had no idea why this giant admiral wanted to see us,” Eckelberry said. “It must have shown on my face, because Vice Admiral Donnell started laughing.” The admiral offered a few words of welcome and then stood aside as the crew pounded down the ladder to the cheers of hundreds.

A somewhat stunned Eckelberry was greeted on the tarmac by Commodore Aquilino—at least for a few seconds. Then Mrs. Eckelberry blasted
past him and wrapped her husband in a hug. A photo of the moment played across the front of the next morning's
Providence Journal
.
³⁰

Dodging flowers and balloons and hand-painted signs, the sailors dashed into the arms of their loved ones. Lester Chaffin hugged his mother and grandmother amid the frenzy, and broke into tears. He was hardly alone. “It was so exciting, we were all crying like babies. It was good to be home on American soil. It smelled so good,” he said.
²¹

Glenn Palmer was mobbed by his daughters, Rachel and Rebecca, but he tenderly reached for his wife, Kathy, who held the son, Phillip, he'd never seen. Palmer played it cool with the reporters who asked him about coming home. “We were sent to do a job, and we did it,” the CSO said. “And it's very good to be home.” Kathy Palmer was not so reserved. Though she had held up well through the mining and the immediate aftermath, the waiting had become worse after the ship was laid up in Dubai. “I coped very well until May,” she said. “And then I just felt the frustration of not knowing what was going to happen. The demands got more than I almost could handle.”
²²

Even those without family exulted at the prospect of a month of leave. “It's great to be back! I'm going to a Cubs game,” one sailor shouted.

The commander of the Atlantic Fleet dubbed the
Roberts
crew national heroes. “The ship would have sunk had it not been for the crew, there's no question about that,” Donnell told the crowd.
²³

Paul Rinn relinquished command of his frigate several days later and flew home to Charleston. No crowds awaited him. Onlookers may have wondered why the tall man in naval whites was especially enthusiastic in his greetings to his wife and children.

BACK IN DUBAI
, it took a few more days to ready the
Roberts
for departure. In the meantime, readers of the daily London
Guardian
received this report:

Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency reprinted the article with glee. Pentagon spokesman Cdr. Mark Baker retorted, “The USS
Samuel B. Roberts
is going to Bath Iron Works to be repaired, period.”

High winds and heavy swells delayed the frigate's departure from Dubai for two days. The seas were still at three feet on 25 June, but the
Mighty Servant
's meter was running. The tugboat
Tornado
pulled taut a thick cable, eased the
Roberts
from the pier, and headed west. The rendezvous was set for deep water near the island of Abu Nu'ayr, some sixty miles from Dubai. It was as remote a spot as could be found along the busy UAE coast; nevertheless, Admiral Less sent a pair of frigates to enforce a five-mile off-limits zone. The tow cable parted a dozen miles from the rendezvous, and
Roberts
completed the trip the same way it had crept out of the minefield: ambling along on auxiliary thrusters at three knots.
²⁵

The crew of the
Mighty Servant
opened their ballast valves. The stern dipped as the ballast tanks filled, and water crossed the ochre deck like a rising tide. When only the superstructure remained above water,
Tornado
pushed
Roberts
into position. Sailors on the frigate tossed lines to the
Servant
's crew, who nudged the frigate into the correct place.

When frigate and heavy-lift ship were properly aligned in three dimensions, the
Servant
's pumps emptied the ballast tanks and the cargo ship began to rise. Navy divers and the
Servant
's closed-circuit cameras watched as hull met steel crib. They moved slowly, deliberately as the hull approached its cradle of posts. The margin for error was measured in inches. Hull mated with cradle, and the cargo deck kept rising. As it resurfaced, the
Roberts
's keel rose to the grand altitude of six feet above sea level. The docking had taken twelve hours.
²⁶

The trip home began on 1 July, which was eleven weeks to the day after the mine explosion. With its precious cargo securely aboard,
Mighty Servant
weighed anchor before dawn. Its departure time was part of a ruse; navy officials had hinted that the ships would run the strait under
cover of darkness. As the mated ships approached the Strait of Hormuz, a salute boomed from the five-inch guns of the guided missile cruiser USS
Vincennes
(CG 49). The navy had rushed the high-tech Aegis warship to the Gulf to escort the
Roberts
through the strait.
²⁷
Still, the skeleton crew of the frigate, now under the command of Cdr. John Townes III, was taking no chances. The forty officers and enlisted men stood guard on deck, gripping rifles, shotguns, and pistols, for the entire way through the strait. For many, it was the worst transit yet.

The same applied to the Suez passage. “Do you know how long it takes to go through the Suez Canal when you are holding a 12-gauge shotgun?” Ted Johnson wrote later. “Forever, man.”
²⁸

Their course for Newport was the mirror image of the one that brought them here, an eternity of six months ago. To pass the time, the men aboard the
Roberts
did maintenance, studied for advancement exams, and worked out. Van Hook took to daily laps around the
Roberts
on the cargo deck of the
Servant
. As a running track, it beat the frigate's tiny flight deck, hands down.

The ships entered Narragansett Bay on schedule on the afternoon of 30 July. Sailboats, motor yachts, Boston Whalers, and every manner of watercraft known to New England came out for a look. Navy ships presently shooed them away so that the
Roberts
could free itself from the
Mighty Servant
's embrace.

The following day began with fog that lifted only enough to become clouds.
Roberts
pulled into the naval station under her own power—the auxiliary propulsion units yet again—and tied up to Newport Naval Complex's Pier Two. The arrival ceremony was joyous, if not quite the spectacle of the T. F. Green airport homecoming a month earlier. A navy band played “Anchors Aweigh” as the ship was pushed to the pier. Their shipmates stood in ranks on the tarmac. A small crowd of friends and family jammed onto the pier between a long low building and the bay. Each wife wore a rose.
²⁹

IN LATE SEPTEMBER
the
Roberts
made its way up to Maine. It was a two-day trip at the end of a towline drawn by the USS
Hoist
(ARS-40), a low-slung, fifteen-hundred-ton salvage ship launched in the waning months of World War II.
³⁰

Their destination was not the city of Bath; those facilities were crowded with half-built
Ticonderoga
cruisers and modules for the new USS
Arleigh Burke
destroyer to be laid down three months hence. Instead, they headed for Portland, an hour south by car. During World War II, BIW had opened two yards in Maine's largest city, an hour's drive south of Bath. The yards had built 274 wartime transports, including one-tenth of the famous
Liberty
ships. But the southern facilities had not survived the postwar slump, and BIW shut them down.

After nearly four decades, shipbuilding had returned to Portland when the iron works, buoyed by the
Perry
program, decided to expand. BIW had opened a repair-and-refit facility there in 1983, built on abandoned rail sidings next to the long state pier. You could look down upon it from the city's Fort Allen Park, which held a cannon from the battleship USS
Maine
, blown up in Havana, and a mast from the cruiser USS
Portland
, part of the surrender of Truk. Crews replaced the rotting pilings by the railhead, erected two gantry cranes and a bridge crane, and poured concrete for an 800-foot finger pier. Meanwhile, work began on the project's centerpiece, an immense floating dock that had been rusting away a thousand miles to the south. Designated AFDB-3, it was an 850-foot-long, 83-foot-deep behemoth commissioned at the end of World War II to repair battleships. The nine-section dock was built in four states and saw a few years of duty as far away as Guam before ending its naval career in the James River mothball fleet near Norfolk. Maine took possession of the dry dock for one dollar—at eighty-one thousand tons, it was the largest object ever given away as U.S. government surplus—but the $23.5 million refurbishment consumed half of the yard's construction budget. Each section's buoyancy chambers had more than a hundred hand-cranked valves, a wartime profligacy of manpower no peacetime yard could afford. Over a year's time each section was towed to Boston, overhauled and fitted with remote-controlled valves, and brought up to Portland. Completed in October 1983, the hulking dock broke free of its moorings during a winter storm with its first hoist, a destroyer, up on blocks inside.
³¹

The yard was already busy when the
Hoist
and
Roberts
arrived on 25 September. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter was being refitted, and two frigates were being readied for sale to Pakistan.
³²
But the city was eager
to welcome the wounded warship to town. A small flotilla of pleasure craft gathered under the mid-afternoon sun as the
Hoist
and
Roberts
entered Casco Bay. A municipal fireboat, its fire cannons shooting watery arcs in salute, met the duo as they rounded Portland Head Lighthouse. A crowd of some two hundred sailors, BIW workers, and curious onlookers watched from shore as the frigate was unhitched from its tow and nudged by a pair of harbor tugs to its mooring alongside the great floating dock.