No Higher Honor (13 page)

Nevertheless, until the attack on the
Bridgeton
, naval leaders had remained largely complacent about the threat of mines in the Persian Gulf. It was a chronic oversight. U.S. Navy culture had long treated countermine operations as the ugly duckling of naval warfare. It was slow, painstaking, unglamorous work. And few admirals argued for spending money on bottom-search sonars instead of cruise missiles, fighter jets, and nuclear submarines.
²³

In the wake of the attack on the supertanker, the navy airlifted eight minesweeping RH-53D Sea Dragon helicopters to the Gulf. Four small wooden-hulled boats arrived a bit later on the back of an amphibious assault ship. But it took until late October for the navy to get its most capable mine hunters into action: six oceangoing minesweepers, none less than thirty-five years old, most relegated to the naval reserve, and so rickety that most of them were towed across the ocean to spare them wear and tear.
²⁴

Iranian officials, who had originally attributed the hole in
Bridgeton
's hull to “the hand of Allah,” confessed to laying mines after another merchant ship mysteriously sank near the Strait of Hormuz. But Tehran insisted that its weapons were meant only for “coastal defense.” By autumn, shadowy U.S. forces would expose that as a lie.
²⁵

By September 1987 Operation Earnest Will was in full swing. Almost every day a U.S.-led convoy would depart from the Fujairah anchorage and head into the strait, while another group of tankers, bellies heavy with oil and gas, left Kuwait for the open sea. Many of the reflagged ships carried a U.S. liaison officer—generally a reservist called up from a civilian
job, for the navy had not performed convoys since World War II and had no active-duty officers trained for the task. All told, the United States had nearly thirty warships in or near the Gulf, including the battleship USS
Missouri
(BB 63).
²⁶

But that was just the public face of the U.S. military operations in the region. The Pentagon also secretly dispatched an ecumenical group of elite forces: army special-operations helicopters, navy patrol-boat operators and SEAL commandos, marine security details. Operating under the classified code name Prime Chance, they set up shop aboard a pair of leased oil barges anchored in the northern Gulf. Mostly, they hunted armed speedboats operated by the Pasdaran, or Revolutionary Guards, a paramilitary organization whose naval role was attacking merchants with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
²⁷

Operation Prime Chance was also meant to catch Iranian minelayers, and on 21 September, it succeeded. After nightfall, a pair of army helicopters lifted off from the frigate USS
Jarrett
(FFG 33), their pilots flying with night vision goggles. They zeroed in on a small amphibious ship, the
Iran Ajr
, that was creeping along about fifty miles off the coast of Bahrain. As the pilots watched, Iranian sailors dropped heavy objects the size of fifty-five-gallon drums into the water. The army pilots radioed their findings to the navy commander in the Gulf, who responded: “Stop the mining.” The pilots sprayed the ship with rockets and machine guns, and a team of navy SEALs stormed the deck. They gathered up an intelligence bonanza—minefield charts and nine M-08 mines—then scuttled the ship in deep water.
²⁸

The sinking of the
Iran Ajr
hardly slowed attacks on merchant ships. Three dozen were hit in September alone. On 16 October an antiship missile flashed from its launch container on Iran's Fao Peninsula and struck the tanker
Sea Isle City
at anchor off Kuwait, blinding its American captain. It was the first attack on a reflagged ship since the
Bridgeton
, and it drew retaliation three days later. U.S. destroyers shelled a pair of defunct oil platforms that served as forward bases for Pasdaran speedboats. The chaos in the Gulf was getting worse.
²⁹

THE RUMORS STARTED
on a rainy Veterans Day in Newport. A late-autumn drizzle forced an American Legion memorial ceremony off a trim
park lawn and into the century-old city hall. As several dozen people rearranged themselves in the city council's chambers, a navy commander in dress blues stepped to the lectern. The event's organizers had invited Paul Rinn to make a speech, and characteristically, he had equipped himself with a relevant bit of history. The captain regaled his audience with tales of the 1st Rhode Island Artillery company at Gettysburg, and he asked listeners to remember the sacrifices of U.S. servicemen and women and the families they leave behind.

It was a moving speech—at least the editorial writers at the
Providence Journal
found it so. But an almost offhand remark by one of the speakers set tongues wagging across the waterfront: he wished Rinn and his crew smooth sailing in the Middle East. The next day's newspaper carried a denial by
Roberts
's executive officer that the ship had received any such orders. “The way it's set up, you have to join the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean first, then we get our assignments,” Lt. Cdr. William Clark said. “If we're ordered to the Middle East, we won't know until thirty days prior to deployment.” But he added that the navy considered the guided-missile frigate “the best kind of ship for that environment.”

As for the crew, Clark said, “I think the overall attitude of the ship would be like if you were driving down the highway and saw a bad accident that just happened. You can feel the adrenaline pumping a little stronger, and you're curious.”
³⁰

The XO was being cagey. He and Rinn had known differently for months. In late June the commodore of Surface Group Four had passed along a tip: the navy, in the wake of the
Stark
attack, had decided that every frigate once slated for a Mediterranean deployment would go to the Gulf instead. This required the
Roberts
to deploy in January, six months earlier than planned. “Know this news not the best you've heard today,” Aquilino wrote.

But now, despite Clark's official denials, the cat was out of the bag. Everyone took the news a bit differently. Gunner Tom Reinert was phlegmatic. For one thing, he'd been predicting this for months. Moreover, he'd been to the Gulf twice already. His only disappointment was that his antisubmarine warfare team, which had worked so hard and received such praise, would be largely idle in the shallow Gulf, where no subs sailed.
³¹

Others were not so sanguine. “In the late 1980s, the biggest fear for a young man just out of high school joining the navy was the possibility of finding himself on a ship in the dreaded Persian Gulf,” recalled Joe Baker, a fireman from New Mexico. “In civilian land, it's like a rumor. But in the navy, people were talking about it all the time.”
³²

John Preston recalled one gunner's mate who freaked out at the news: “I can't go there, man!” The tension showed in frayed nerves and squabbles. Preston recalled the argument that broke out between two junior petty officers in a forward passageway. As he watched, the ship's serviceman broke open a tin of red paint and dumped it over the engineman's head, spattering the missile magazine, the passageway, and both sailors. Preston just kept walking. That looked like a fun cleanup, he thought.
³³

The crew took comfort in the knowledge that no ship on the East Coast was readier for battle. In recent exams, gas turbine inspectors had declared Van Hook's team the best frigate engineering department they'd seen in two years. The aviation department earned the first flawless score the testers had ever issued. And in a no-notice damage control inspection, all three repair lockers received the highest possible grades—the best performance in the Atlantic Fleet.
³⁴
Palmer's combat systems team was ready to go as well. Over the course of the year, the frigate had shot off an unusual amount of ordnance: five thousand rounds of small-caliber ammo, three thousand rounds of CWIS shells, three hundred 76-mm shells, a pair of Standard missiles, and two Mk 46 exercise torpedoes.
³⁵

Off the Massachusetts coast, the CIC crew had dueled with air force fighters until they could bring them down in their sleep. When the F-15s came out to play, Rinn had his radar operators dim their displays until the pilots radioed in from twenty miles out. The fighters would kick in the afterburners, drop to 250 feet, and go supersonic. When they flashed overhead, dragging a roar that could dissolve teeth, the sonic boom hit the ship like a hammer. Books plummeted from shelves; the hangar door fell off its hinges. But down in CIC, the fire controlmen had locked up the jet in plenty of time to greet it with a missile. To Rinn, that skill was worth any incidental damage by shockwave.
³⁶

DEPLOYMENT WAS SET
for 11 January. The crew scattered across the country for the Christmas holidays and then returned for two hectic weeks
of “packing the ship.” The engineers checked off a long list of spare parts and supplies: synthetic lubricating oil for the gas turbines, mineral oil for the reduction gear, acetylene tanks for welding, refrigerants for the air conditioners, nitrogen for the flight deck. They loaded rags, logbooks, and paper forms; citric acid to clean the ship's freshwater distillers; canisters of bromine to make the water potable; and bales of cheesecloth to protect their machinery from the dusty Gulf air.
³⁷

Chief Cook Kevin Ford and his team of mess management specialists hustled to load their own refrigerated storerooms. In the rush, an order form typo brought the delivery of not one hundred, but one thousand five-pound bags of sugar—fully two and a half tons. An expert in the art of
cumshaw
, or barter, Ford had the extra sugar loaded aboard. He reckoned it might come in handy on deployment.
³⁸

A lot of new DC items arrived in the weeks before deployment. The
Stark
had revealed a need to keep smoke from spreading through passageways without obstructing firefighters. The navy had responded with smoke curtains—seven-pound, two-paneled drapes to be hung over hatchways. The service also sent a dozen portable radios.

Meanwhile, the crew stocked up on shoring beams. They obtained ten extra ten-foot four-by-four planks to add to their authorized issue of ten twelve-footers, and swapped six of their five-foot extendable steel supports for eleven-footers, giving them eighteen of the longer blue ones.
³⁹

The crew scoured the Newport waterfront for OBAs, the full-face masks that allowed firefighters to work amid the toxic fumes of a shipboard fire. The frigate was allocated 120 oxygen canisters—far too few.
⁴⁰
In Sorensen's ten-page post-Gitmo memo, he had noted that the
Roberts
had expended their entire store during the mass conflagration exercise. When the exam ended, half of the sailors were wearing strips of masking tape labeled “OBA” in place of the real thing.

The
Stark
proved his point. Before it left for the Gulf, the crew had rounded up nearly four hundred canisters—and this had not been nearly enough. In the twenty-four hours that followed the missile strike, the crew used them all up—plus hundreds more flown onto the burning frigate from nearby U.S. warships.
⁴¹
Sorensen recommended each frigate should deploy with no fewer than eight hundred canisters. The DC teams
scrounged up as many OBAs as they could lay their hands on. Even parts and carcasses were stripped and rebuilt to add to the total.

Sorensen would have been proud to see the effort, but he was no longer aboard the ship. He had been rotated off as scheduled, and turned the job over to a replacement, Ens. Ken Rassler. The crew of the
Roberts
would face its deployment without their first DC leader. They also had a new executive officer; Clark rotated off and was replaced by Lt. Cdr. John Eckelberry, a veteran of several Gulf deployments.

Eventually, even the last-minute tasks were done. All the extra gear made for a very crowded ship—particularly since FFGs weren't large to begin with, nor designed for extended patrols. The
Samuel B. Roberts
, mustering 215 souls and displacing 4,712.25 gross tons, was ready to go to war.
⁴²

ON 11 JANUARY
1988 Glenn Palmer awoke well before dawn. He switched on a light in his family's Newport house, rolled out of bed, and headed downstairs to collect a last batch of laundry. Rachel, a three-year-old in pink flannel pajamas, was waiting at the top of the stairs. “Hold me, Daddy,” she said, and stretched out her arms.

For Palmer, preparing to sail meant preparing his family to stay behind. This would be his fourth deployment—he'd been to the western Pacific, the Mediterranean, even around South America. His wife, Kathy, and their three children had developed rituals to help bear the separation. A construction-paper chain hung in the kitchen of their Newport house, 184 links long. Each morning one of the kids would tear off a colored loop, marking the slow but steady passage of Daddy's deployment.
⁴³

Putting to sea was always a risky business, and there had been plenty of tension during Palmer's Cold War missions. But for the first time in their nine-year marriage, the couple had talked about what the family might do if Glenn failed to return. Things felt more dangerous this time—his ship was headed for a combat zone that had already taken the lives of thirty-seven U.S. sailors. There was another reason as well: Kathy was pregnant with the Palmers' fourth child. The baby was due in March, which meant that Glenn would miss the birth—along with the couple's wedding anniversary and the birthdays of their three other kids.

The couple had decided that if Glenn died, Kathy and the kids would move in with his mother. And with that, Kathy laid the matter in God's hands. “I know there'll be times when I'm depressed,” she told a newspaper reporter who was writing about the imminent departure of the
Roberts
. “The first time it'll hit me will be when I have the baby, and I expect Glenn to bring me flowers and see the baby, and he won't be there.” Palmer, the son of a minister and a graduate of a Christian college in Michigan, shared his wife's faith and her sadness. “You can't say you love people and say you want to be away from them for six months,” he said.