No Higher Honor (39 page)

Measurements showed that the placement of the forty-five-foot, 315-ton module deviated from the ideal by just one-sixth of an inch laterally and one-eighth of an inch vertically. Even this tiny deviation required some machining of the stern tube, which had shifted about an eighth of an inch to port and a quarter of an inch up. Parts to fit the tube were taken from an
Arleigh Burke
destroyer under construction at Bath, then modified to suit the
Roberts
. By 9 March the shaft was back in place, its bronze blades remounted on their swivels. Three weeks later, under a sliver of midnight moon, the vast dry dock filled once again with water. As dawn and high tide arrived in Portland together, the frigate floated free. At an afternoon press conference, the
Roberts
's captain, Cdr. John Townes, took reporters aboard his ship and challenged them to find the seams. They could not.
⁴⁰

Still ahead was the reattaching of wires, cables, pipes, vents, and the rest of the mechanics that transport fluids, air, and electrical current around the ship. The difference between the module installation and the rest was “the difference between setting a bone and brain surgery,” Price said. “We're taking the next five months to do the nervous system.”

The workers laid more than eleven miles of cable to connect the combat systems, and twice as much to hook up the lights, heating, cooling, and the rest. It was grinding work—each of the hundreds of connections in each cable was tested twice—and it went on all summer long and into autumn.

But progress was steady. The new gas turbines were spun up for the first time in early August. The crew moved back aboard in mid-September. The engineers tested the equipment in October. And on a damp, chilly
Monday morning—16 October 1989—a crowd gathered on the Portland docks to bid the ship adieu. After thirteen months, the $89.5 million job was done, three weeks ahead of schedule and $3.5 million under budget.

The
Roberts
was moored pierside. Its crew stood in ranks on the flight deck. Hundreds of workers crowded onto the pier in hardhats, flannel shirts, down vests, jean jackets, and safety glasses. A clutch of VIPs sat in chairs and made brief speeches. There were three congressmen, the NAVSEA deputy for surface combatants, the Bath SupShip, an assistant secretary of the navy, BIW President Duane Fitzgerald, and of course, Bill Haggett.

In a short speech, Haggett declared that the technologically advanced repairs would have been impossible just a few years earlier. “We have proven that, by employing innovative methods, a severely damaged ship, which might have been scrapped only five years ago, can be returned to superb operating condition,” he said.

The navy's head shipbuilder added his praise. “Restoration of the ship required engineering skills and shipbuilding expertise not previously seen or experienced,” said Rear Adm. Robert Reimann, NAVSEA's deputy head for surface ships. “Many of the techniques used, such as preconstruction of the main engine room assembly, had never before been utilized in a battle damage situation.”
⁴¹

James Mackie, the chief union steward in Portland, put it this way: “We did something that nobody has ever done before in shipbuilding,” and he was right.
⁴²

THE FRIGATE DEPARTED
on 23 October. After a stop to pick up training weapons at Earle, New Jersey, the ship came home to Newport on a bright fall day. Dozens of cheering friends and family members packed the freshly painted Pier Two, waving balloons and pushing strollers. The
Roberts
was home, until duty called again.

T
he mine explosion that nearly sank the USS
Samuel B. Roberts
on 14 April 1988 sent ripples through the Gulf, the U.S. Navy, and the world. The American retaliation did more than destroy half of the ayatollah's naval striking force; it shattered the calcified state of war between Iran and Iraq. Khomeini, who did not start the eight-year conflict but had prolonged it, took Operation Praying Mantis as a sign that further fighting was useless, that Washington would not allow Iran to win. Subsequent events further eroded his resolve. Iraqi troops, likely fortified with U.S. intelligence, seized the strategic Fao Peninsula. The Saudi government, emboldened by the U.S. naval action, severed diplomatic relations with Iran. “The whole situation in the gulf changed tremendously in April,” a Bahraini official said the following month. “The Americans went farther, in the clashes on the 18th, than anyone expected they would and showed clearly, for the first time, that they were really serious about the security of the gulf.”
¹
The final straw came on 3 July, when the U.S. cruiser
Vincennes
, which had rushed to the Gulf to protect the wounded
Roberts
, accidentally downed an Iranian airliner near the Strait of Hormuz. The ayatollah, who believed the attack was a deliberate provocation by a newly aggressive United States, allowed his diplomats to be ushered to a United Nations bargaining table. In mid-July, before the
Roberts
had even reached Newport, Iraq and Iran agreed to a cease-fire.
²

The ripples widened. The Praying Mantis operations “illustrated the front edge of what would become a new philosophy about the role that the United States would play in the world,” wrote Craig L. Symonds, a Naval Academy history professor.
³
In the decade and a half that followed, the nation would emerge as a world policeman—sometimes reluctant, sometimes otherwise.

When Saddam Hussein invaded another of his neighbors—Kuwait—in August 1990, the Bush administration did not hesitate to send thousands of troops, scores of ships, and hundreds of warplanes to the Gulf. Among the many ships sent to support Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was the newly repaired
Samuel B. Roberts
, which returned to war as part of the USS
Kennedy
battle group in the Red Sea and eastern Mediterranean.

OPERATION PRAYING MANTIS
was a watershed battle in naval warfare as well. It was the first clash between groups of warships since World War II, and it featured the first missile duel between surface forces. Moreover, it was the first test of a new way of war that depended as much on electronic networks as it did on ordnance. “It offered only the first glimpse of the stunning technological revolution, already underway, that would over the next decade and a half make the United States not merely a ‘superpower,' not merely the greatest power on earth, but the greatest military power the world had ever seen,” the academy professor wrote.
⁴

But the mining of the
Roberts
also showed the limits of that power. The frigate had warded off warships and warplanes only to fall victim to a far more primitive weapon. A military empowered by and enamored of technology had demonstrated its inability to grapple with low-tech warfare.

The near-sinking of the
Roberts
did not persuade the naval service to take mines seriously. “The Navy was little better prepared in 1990 to deal with sea mines than it had been in 1987,” the service's own historians wrote.
⁵
Two more U.S. warships were damaged by underwater weapons during Desert Storm. One string knocked out the amphibious assault ship USS
Tripoli
(LPH 10), whose repair bill came to $5 million.
⁶
Another damaged the guided missile cruiser USS
Princeton
(CG 59), a billion-dollar ship commanded by Capt. Ted Hontz—the man who had advised Rinn to take Eric Sorensen as damage control assistant. “None of us got much training in mine warfare,” Hontz said later. “My officers and I had gotten what little there was at the various surface warfare schools over the years, but there was no specific training prescribed simply because we were going somewhere that was known to be mined.”
⁷

The
Roberts
attack demonstrated that a low-tech enemy could inflict dramatic damage, the kind that got on television and influenced public
perceptions. To Middle East scholar Anthony Cordesman, it foretold the future of conflict. Far overmatched in conventional military and political power, the enemies of the United States would henceforth use unconventional means to strike. “Any force which is not tailored to respond to all known low level threats from a given country is poorly planned and improperly equipped,” Cordesman wrote.
⁸

In October 2000, suicide bombers piloted a small boat up to the guided missile destroyer USS
Cole
(DDG 67), moored in the Yemeni harbor of Aden. They blew themselves up, killing seventeen
Cole
sailors and opening the engine room to the sea. The crew's response harkened straight back to the
Roberts: Cole
's sailors fought fire and flood to save their ship, and the destroyer was eventually hauled back to the United States aboard the heavy-lift ship
Blue Marlin
.
⁹

But the problem of low-tech weapons would only grow worse. In the years that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, hundred of U.S. troops died in the blasts of homemade bombs.

IN OCTOBER 1988
the Naval Sea Systems Command released its final report on the mining of the
Roberts
. The report concluded, first of all, that the U.S. Navy provided far too little damage control gear to its warships. It noted that the
Roberts
crew had run out of hose fittings and other vital equipment despite all the extras accumulated in predeployment scavenging. The navy needed to do better, the report said, echoing earlier criticism from Eric Sorensen, the
Stark
investigators, and the navy's own deputy undersecretary for survivability. “This reaffirms a
Stark
finding,” it noted dryly.

The report also concluded that a mine could have done even more damage to the frigate than it did. For one thing, the turbine exhaust plenum provided a ready-made pressure valve for the gas bubble. If the hull had been pierced in a space without a ready vent, the explosive force might have wrecked even more internal spaces. The ship was also fortunate that the seas were fairly calm during its transit to Dubai; larger waves would have increased the strain on the main deck, perhaps to the breaking point.

Above all, the report praised the crew of the
Samuel B. Roberts
for saving their ship. “The intensive training and repetitive drills provided
the baseline knowledge that allowed common sense, quick thinking, and innovation to successfully combat the catastrophic situation.”
¹⁰
The NAVSEA authors did say that the effort to wire the ship together with lifeline cables probably hadn't made much difference, but no one blamed the crew for trying.

In the wake of the
Roberts
mining, the navy modified its ships, equipment, and procedures. More gate valves were retrofitted to fire mains, emergency tag-out procedures were developed, and sterile sheets were added to the repair lockers. The report found that preparations taken between spotting the mines and the explosion undoubtedly saved lives. The engineers' order to come up from the bilges in a minefield was enshrined in navy regulations: “In a mine or torpedo threat situation, all personnel not required for the continued operation of the ship shall be moved as high in the ship as practical. Prior to a known torpedo hit or mine strike, personnel shall be warned to brace for shock.”
¹¹
And the next edition of the basic training manual led off its damage control chapter with a quote from Paul Rinn: “The events of 14–15 April 1988 have proven that solid damage control, good training, and sound leadership based on experience can save a ship that is on fire and sinking, to fight another day.”

Years later, William Rowden, the former head of Naval Sea Systems Command, was still awed by the damage control effort aboard
Roberts
and amazed that the ship had stayed afloat. “When you reflect back on it, it was a tougher task than the
Cole
, or the
Princeton
, or the
Stark
. She went to five thousand tons [total displacement]; she was on her way to the bottom, and those guys kept her together, and kept her afloat. I don't take anything away from
Stark
, but she was hit in the berthing space. The point was that it was a different set of casualties on the
Roberts;
they tended to put the ship to the bottom.”
¹²

MANY OF THE
officers and enlisted sailors who saved the
Roberts
went on to success in the navy. Executive Officer John Eckelberry was promoted to captain and commanded two warships. Combat Systems Officer Glenn Palmer retired as a commander after planning operations for an amphibious squadron and helping to test a new version of the Tomahawk missile launcher. Chief Engineer Gordan Van Hook received command of
the U.S. Navy's most fabled destroyer squadron: DesRon 23, the “Little Beavers” that were led in World War II by future three-time CNO Arleigh Burke.

Eric Sorensen spoke out against a skipper he found abusive and was transferred off his ship with a bad performance review. The former
Roberts
damage control assistant went to Nova Scotia as a NATO liaison officer and was forced out of the navy after fifteen years' service. He started a consulting business and wrote a well-received book about powerboats.

Many of the
Roberts
's enlisted sailors made chief petty officer: the injured Mark Dejno, Chuck Dumas, Serge Kingery, Kim Sandle, and more. Quartermaster Dan Nicholson was named 1995 Atlantic Fleet Sailor of the Year and later became command chief of the USS
Constitution
, the navy's oldest ship.

Chief Cook Kevin Ford was honored for his role in the damage control effort of 14 April 1988 with his induction sixteen years later into the Surface Navy Association's hall of fame. Gunner Tom Reinert became a fleet instructor in Little Creek, Virginia, and retired in 1991. Alex Perez, horribly burned in the main engine room, remained in the hospital for about six months, returned to active duty, and retired in 1993.