No Higher Honor (7 page)

Sorensen had paid his dues aboard the destroyer USS
Briscoe
(DD 977), starting out in charge of the line handlers and working his way into the combat information center. He had accepted orders to the yet-to-be-commissioned
Roberts
in hopes of earning the engineering qualification that would round out his resume. It would mean back-to-back tours at sea, but it would be worth it—if he could talk his way into an engine room job. So he was displeased to learn that his new skipper intended to make him the damage control assistant (DCA). Adding insult to injury, contemporary naval culture held that the job generally belonged to a very junior officer, not a lieutenant on his second sea tour.
¹
But Rinn was looking for a take-charge officer to make sure damage control drills were no afterthought. In Sorensen, whom
Briscoe
's skipper had called “bold and supremely self-confident,” he had his man.

Sorensen's deck plate confidence dated from his youth. Young Eric spent his childhood weekends working on the charter boats that plied the waters near his Cape Cod home. At seventeen, bored with home and high school, he dropped out to join the coast guard. The service designated him a boatswain's mate—a job for those saltiest of sailors who handle lines, helm boats, chip paint, and keep the decks shipshape—and sent him to serve on a long-endurance cutter in the North Atlantic. Sorensen, a very junior sailor, was given charge of a five-person whaleboat crew on
the cutter. Putting his small wooden craft into winter seas off Labrador, he learned what it meant to hold others' lives in his hands.

Sorensen made petty officer second class in a lightning-quick thirty months and then left the service. For a time, he ran a charter-boat service out of Cape Cod. But the waterfront life wore him down, and he eventually followed the advice of an older waterman and headed off to college.

A chance visit by a frigate to Boston Harbor stirred memories of his service, and as the semesters passed, the idea of returning to the coast guard—as an officer—took hold. A year before graduation, Sorensen applied to the officer candidate program and sent a copy of the application to the navy as well. Months passed without news, and Sorensen grew frustrated, then angry at his former service's indifference. When acceptance letters to both programs finally arrived, the former Coastie packed his bags for the navy's Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Newport.

OCS was the sixteen-week training program for officers-to-be who had neither matriculated at the U.S. Naval Academy nor taken ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) courses at a civilian college. Sorensen did well at the school, where his enlisted service gave him a head start on the coursework. Then he pulled a back muscle during one of the school's occasional field days (“mandatory fun,” the students called them), and by nightfall could barely move. After ten days in bed he learned that administrators were planning to drop him back to the next class of candidates. Sorensen dragged himself to the classrooms and attended lectures lying down on the buildings' heaters. He had missed seven exams, but they were in basic seamanship and navigation, so he took them without studying, and passed. Three weeks later he was appointed regimental commander of his graduation group, the Newport equivalent of class president. “The highlight of my fifteen-year navy career: OCS,” he said, dryly.
²

In July 1981 Sorensen reported to the
Briscoe
in Norfolk. He was given the job of assistant first lieutenant, the deputy to the officer in charge of keeping up the ship's decks. Sorensen passed the next six months much as he had his coast guard days: teaching knots, boat handling, maintenance, and other elements of traditional watercraft to the
Briscoe
's junior sailors. He qualified to drive the ship after about eight weeks at sea, a process that generally takes new officers more than half a year.

By the time Sorensen finished his
Briscoe
tour in November 1984, he reckoned he had the makings of a well-launched career. He had added stints as first lieutenant and combat information center officer to his service jacket, and he had a plan for his time aboard the
Roberts
. He intended to wangle the job of main propulsion assistant, second only to the chief engineer in responsibility for the warship's power plant. He would earn his certification as engineering officer of the watch and would emerge from the job with qualifications to conn warships, run their engineering plants, and fight their combat systems. In short, he would have punched all the tickets, as the saying went, and set himself squarely on the road to lieutenant commander.
³

Paul Rinn had other plans. The prospective commanding officer believed that damage control, like mine warfare, often received more lip service than priority. The navy spent billions of dollars on antiaircraft missiles and millions of hours learning to fire them—yet the U.S. surface fleet had not shot down a single plane since the Vietnam War. But a warship risked collision and grounding every time it left a pier, and a shipboard fire could break out any day of the week. “You drive for show, and putt for dough,” Rinn said.
⁴

A crew had to know how to fight their ship, but they also needed to know how to save it—and quickly. Trauma doctors and nurses speak of the “golden hour” that follows a life-threatening injury; the chances of survival sharply diminish if not treated within sixty minutes. The margin was even slimmer for a ship, where fires and floods could rage out of control in a mere quarter hour. Rinn intended to train his crew to fight fires and patch holes skillfully, without hesitation and in the direst of circumstances.

On a frigate, responsibility for DC training belonged, at least nominally, to the executive officer and chief engineer. In practice, the burden rested on the damage control assistant. It was the DCA's job to draw up training regimens and to lead senior enlisted sailors in drilling the crew.
⁵
But the junior officer who customarily held the office found it tough to compete for the crew's attention. And he often found himself woefully underprepared—reading the instructor's manuals one moment and teaching crews the next.

Rinn thought this a dangerous custom. He wanted someone experienced, someone with the rank and temperament to cut through the
welter of daily activities. He'd met Eric Sorensen aboard the
Briscoe;
as chief of staff of the destroyer's squadron, he'd read the fitness report that declared the lieutenant “bold and supremely self-confident.” Rinn was delighted when Sorensen received orders to the
Roberts
. He turned down the lieutenant's request for an engineer's post. “No,” Rinn told him, “I want you to be DCA.”

Sorensen squawked. “Captain, I don't want the job,” the lieutenant said.

“Well, Eric, I want you to be the DCA, and it's not your choice,” Rinn said.

Six months later, after absorbing the contents of various engineering and damage control schools, the new DCA reported in at Bath.

IT WAS EARLY
1985 and most of the crew was still in Norfolk. The
Roberts
was moored to a BIW pier but far from habitable, so Sorensen rented a small house on the river for $125 a week. For the next few months, his job consisted of learning every space and piece of equipment on his new ship—a task he shared with his boss, chief engineer Lt. Gordan Van Hook. Neither had any experience with
Perry
-class frigates, yet both were charged with knowing the ship better than their own bodies. Together, they made a game of it. “If I put my foot through this bulkhead, what's going to come through?” Van Hook would ask. “Is it air, fuel oil, water?”

As Sorensen worked to learn the ship, he roughed out a plan for teaching damage control to the crew. The first problem, as he saw it, was the
official textbook, which was overlong, boring, and repetitive. If something could be said in ten thousand words, he concluded, the navy would say it in twenty thousand. Sorensen decided to write his own handbook. Personal computers had begun to populate homes and offices, but the navy was having none of that. So Sorensen booted up the ship's SNAP II, a refrigerator-sized administrative computer with rudimentary text-handling tools, and began pecking away.

Thou shalt keep our ship watertight
, he began. It was easy enough for his students to understand why a hole in the bottom of a rowboat was bad news. When any hull and its contents outweigh the water they displace, the craft sinks. But things are a bit more complicated aboard a warship. For one thing, it is generally tougher for a single hole to cause trouble. The smooth gray hull of the
Roberts
hid a bewildering warren of more than a hundred compartments, but Sorensen taught his sailors to look for the bulkheads that ran from bilge to main deck. These vertical walls divided the ship into eleven watertight sections, reducing the amount of seawater that might accumulate through a single breach in the hull. This made it unlikely—though far from impossible—that a single hole might admit enough weight to sink the ship.

There were two caveats. First, the effectiveness of this compart-mentalization depended on the crew's absolute dedication to shutting the appropriate doors, hatches, and valves. One mistake could flood twice the space. Green sailors learned to dog the hatches behind them, often assisted by profanity-laced reminders from their senior shipmates.
⁷

Second, a flooded compartment is more dangerous than it may appear. Liquid flowing inside a hull reduces stability much more than the equivalent weight of a solid material. The phenomenon is called the free surface effect, and it is easily demonstrated. Fill a five-gallon bucket to the halfway mark. Pick it up with both hands, and tilt it back and forth to get the water moving. Now walk forward, and feel how the liquid's movement pulls you to and fro. A flooded compartment tugs a ship in much the same way. Picture a ship at sea in a storm, taking on seawater as it batters its way through the waves. With each roll, water rushes to the lower side of a compartment, weighing the ship down, slowing its return to vertical. Such a ship loses stability at a rate roughly proportional to the square of its flooded area. Things get much worse if the hull is
breached below the waterline. Laid open to the sea, a ship loses stability in proportion to the cube of the flooded area.

Thou shalt believe in our ship and her ability to withstand severe damage
, Sorensen wrote. A ship holed by a naval shell is not usually in immediate danger of sinking by flood, thanks to compartmentalization. While it is certainly necessary to begin plugging the leak immediately, water is not a ship's most fearsome enemy—it's fire. At sea, a small blaze can swiftly become a conflagration.

Many factors complicate the task of the naval firefighter. A warship contains a witches' brew of volatile materials: fuel, lubricants, coolants, paint, bedding—not to mention weaponry. What extinguishes one blaze may feed another; water douses a wastebasket fire but sloshes burning grease across the countertop. Cramped conditions prevail; firefighters to assemble in passageways too narrow for two to walk abreast and to wrestle pressurized hoses through steel warrens. High voltages, magnetic fields, and radar beams threaten invisible harm. Smoke builds to opacity when vents are shut to prevent its spread. Yet where sailors in flame-retardant gear find it difficult to move, fire does not. Heat passes easily through metal decks and bulkheads. Superhot gases scream down air ducts. Thick bundles of electrical cables become conduits for flame. And unlike municipal firefighters, sailors have nowhere to retreat. So the
Roberts
, like all warships, was stuffed with gear to help its crew extinguish blazes.

Thou shalt know the use of thy damage control equipment and keep it holy
, Sorensen wrote. For starters, there were six dozen portable extinguishers charged with carbon dioxide gas or potassium bicarbonate powder. But for serious blazes, the frigate carried enough firefighting gear to outfit a town's fire department. The list started with 160 fire hoses: fifty-foot lengths of tough cotton fabric, double-jacketed against punctures and rubber-lined against leaks. Each had a coupling that accepted a heavy brass nozzle, which could deliver a cannonlike stream or a dense cooling fog. As with any power tool, a fire hose under pressure required careful use. A dropped nozzle could lash out like a spitting cobra.

The hoses could screw together to make longer hoses, a simple concept that became complex in practice. For one thing, they came in different widths—mostly 1 1/2 inches, some 2 1/2—and there were fittings
that allowed, say, one hose to feed two more. Brass couplings helped everything fit together, but rigging for a fire could feel like doing a jigsaw puzzle.
⁸

The water for firefighting came from the sea. It was drawn into the ship by five pumps, pressurized to 150 pounds per square inch, and piped around the ship in eight-inch copper-nickel fire mains. It could be tapped at five dozen fireplugs, or, in certain compartments, rained down from overhead sprinklers.
⁹

There were options for fires that resisted ordinary water. Several of the ship's spaces could be flooded with inflammable gases. The missile magazines were guarded by six fifty-pound canisters of carbon dioxide. The engine room and machinery spaces could be pumped full of Halon, a colorless, odorless gas with a density nearly five times that of air. When these spaces were in danger, flashing lights and sirens warned their human occupants to get out or be suffocated along with the flames.