Out in the Atlantic, the ships from Newport were soon joined by the guided missile cruiser USS Wainwright (CG 28), out of Charleston, South Carolina, and yet another frigate, USS Jack Williams (FFG 24), sailing from Mayport, Florida. Together, the quartet of warships—by happenstance, all four were products of Bath Iron Works—made up Destroyer Squadron 22 (DesRon 22). Their thirty-five-day journey to the Persian Gulf would require the transit of one ocean, three seas, three gulfs, three straits, and a canal. The time would be spent wisely, in preparation for the hazards that would confront them from their very first day in the Gulf.
The commodore of DesRon 22 was Capt. Donald A. Dyer, a gravel-voiced man with a dead-calm manner. He called himself the Redman, after the brand of chewing tobacco he kept in his cheek; even over the scratchy bridge radio, you could practically hear the juice dripping. No one ever heard the Redman get excited. Rinn had gotten to know Dyer during squadron workups off Puerto Rico. He found the commodore as demanding as he himself—though Dyer’s controlled demeanor contrasted with the occasional explosion from Rinn. And the commodore did not hesitate to take the high-spirited skipper down a notch when necessary.
It had happened once during a large fleet exercise. The Roberts had passed a busy and successful couple of days, firing off a pair of missiles and completing numerous other assignments with the ship’s usual competence and efficiency. Pressed for time to reach his next assignment, the captain sent a message to Dyer’s staff, asking what the commodore intended for his ship and asking permission to depart. As time ticked away with no answer, Rinn jumped the chain of command and sought approval from the staff of the admiral who was running the exercise. This breached naval protocol. In his low voice, the commodore chewed Rinn out over the radio, and followed it up the next day in writing. “Juniors ‘request’ the assistance of their seniors, keep their seniors informed in a timely manner, think ahead, and are ready for flexible response,” Dyer wrote. “Asking you ‘your intentions’ is my prerogative. Change your tone.”1
The episode set Rinn back on his heels. “Here I thought we were going to get praise for the good things we were doing,” he said later. Instead, the message was: you’re getting too big for your britches. Rinn conceded almost immediately that he’d acted unprofessionally, and when the Roberts pulled into Mayport for inspections, he sent the commodore a meek blinking-light signal: “Quietly reporting for duty.”
Dyer laughed. “I just needed to get you back in the box,” Rinn recalled him saying. “You were running around doing great stuff, and it was clear that you had gotten to the point where you thought you were invincible, and you were going to get yourself in trouble.”2
As DesRon 22 made its way across the Atlantic, Dyer kept his four ships on their toes by pitting them against one another in various drills. Glenn Palmer particularly loved the no-notice gunnery contests. The radio would squawk, “Quickdraw, quickdraw, quickdraw, bearing 270, main gun,” and the game would be on.
Deep in the Roberts’s superstructure, gunner’s mates hastened to load their 76-mm gun. Topside, the lookouts and officer of the deck snapped their heads around to ensure that the target area was clear. Down the ladder in CIC, the tactical action officer and his subordinates checked the radar screens, requested the captain’s permission to fire, and let fly. Palmer’s team, always good, got better. By the time the squadron passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, the Roberts could put five rounds down-range in twenty seconds—a very quick reaction.
But gunnery, the defining measure of a warship in an earlier era, had long ago surrendered its primacy among a ship’s combat skills. Calls for naval gunfire were all but nonexistent these days. By contrast, the management of information was a crucial, round-the-clock occupation. Captain and crew sorted through a flood of oft-conflicting visual reports and electronic data to figure out what was going on around them—establishing and maintaining situational awareness, as the military called it. The task had grown more complex with the introduction of radio networks that shared sensor data between ships. A blip that appeared on one frigate’s radar screen automatically appeared on every other warship on the net—in theory. In practice, the computers had a hard time figuring out when two ships were looking at the same aircraft. So sailors spent a lot of time on the radio with their counterparts in other ships, trying to figure out which blips were real. DesRon 22 practiced all the way across the Atlantic. “My job, basically the whole way over, was getting proficient at it,” said Rick Raymond, the sheet-metalworker-turned-operations-specialist.3
Raymond and the others also learned a brand-new word: deconfliction, the process invented to keep Iraq’s aircraft from shooting U.S. warships. After the Stark incident, American naval officers had visited Baghdad to develop a set of radio calls to ward off approaching Iraqi pilots. And when a missile-laden Mirage lifted from its air base, U.S. radio operators passed the word from ship to ship down the Gulf, like lighting signal fires along a mountain range.
Yet Dyer also endeavored to keep the mood light and the crews loose. “Give the skipper a haircut on the forecastle,” the Redman rumbled over the bridge-to-bridge circuit one day. On four American warships, sailors tumbled over themselves to roust their barbers, run an extension cord out onto the deck, and set clippers buzzing around their captains’ heads.
The Roberts sonar operators were practicing new skills as well: mine hunting. There would be little call for their award-winning sub-hunting talents on this deployment, for no subs were known to operate in the shallow inland sea.4 But in the past year, Gulf crews had spotted more than a hundred mines, drifting alone or laid in fields. So the sonar operators had been trained to fire the ship’s machine guns at the floating weapons, and on the way over, they practiced shooting empty fifty-five-gallon drums rolled from the flight deck. “SBR has dropped so many simulated mines for targets, we now speak Iranian at meals,” Rinn quipped in one message to Aquilino.
Amid it all, normal training on the Roberts went on as usual: fire-and-flooding drills, man-overboard drills, collision drills. Sometimes it seemed like most of the day was spent at general quarters—GQ, the crew called it. Everyone learned to carry their lifejacket and gas mask as they moved about the ship. “GQ was likely to happen every day at all kinds of hours,” said Chris Pond, the newly arrived hull technician. “Day? Night? You never knew.”5 It was the same rigorous schedule that Eric Sorensen had helped launch almost two years earlier—with each new watch, a new exercise.
THE REWARD FOR the two-week Atlantic voyage was a four-day stop in Palma de Mallorca, a sunny Spanish island town crowded between mountain ridges and attractive beaches.6 It was the first glimpse of Europe for most of the crew, who swarmed ashore to take in the sights and grab a beer. The cooks restocked the pantry with local goods; bags of bread mix overflowed onto the serving line. Chief Dave Walker departed on an unusual errand: rounding up one of the island’s pygmy goats for delivery to the Jack Williams, whose skipper had made some sort of crack about the Roberts crew “eating goat.”7 (Walker later denied finding one, which does not explain the photos of a goat aboard ship.)
But the sailors paid for their liberty fun when they ran into a January storm halfway through the Mediterranean. For three days the frigate bulled its way through ten-foot waves that burst over the forecastle and splashed the bridge. The incessant rolling sickened the Roberts’s young sailors and left even old salts a bit green around the gills. “There were a couple of mornings getting up, where I’d wake up feeling okay, climb down from my third-up rack, and put my feet on the floor,” recalled Joe Baker, the fireman. “The ship would twist, and that would be it. I’d run to the head, puke, and start my day.”8 At night, Baker and his shipmates tried to wedge themselves into their racks by stuffing boots under the foam mattresses. But the fireman couldn’t even trust sleep for solace. One night he dreamed he was looking aft down Main Street, the big passageway between the hangars. He watched the helicopter on the flight deck as the ship tilted back and forth, back and forth. Eventually, the helo fell over the side and disappeared. Then the whole ship turned over. “I remember that dream like it was yesterday,” Baker said. But the fireman’s sea legs eventually arrived. “Suddenly, you’re walking down a passageway and the ship is forty-five degrees over, and you’re just walking, and don’t notice,” he said.9
The squadron ground on through the storm. Fuel was getting low, and they were scheduled for a rendezvous at sea with the oiler USS Seattle (AOE 3). The navy relied on underway replenishment, or “unrepping,” the ability to take on fuel without putting into port, to furnish a great tactical advantage over the Soviet navy, which had never quite gotten the knack. Even in fair weather, the maneuver had its risks. The receiving ship approached the larger oiler from behind, slowed to match speeds, and settled into a parallel course. Grunting and yelling, sailors dragged lines and hoses across the hundred-foot gap, all the while keeping a wary eye on the distance between the hulls. The Bernoulli effect created a low-pressure zone in the steel canyon, and ships that drew too close could be sucked into a collision.
Given the thirty-five-knot winds and lashing seas, Dyer wasn’t sure unrepping was even possible, but Rinn, to the dismay of his crew, volunteered to give it a shot. There was more than a mite of bravado in the gesture, but there was also a tactical need. The Roberts’s thirsty gas turbines had burned their way through two-thirds of the ship’s fuel, reducing reserves to a level no frigate skipper likes to see. The crew understood the reason for going after the fuel, but the curses that followed the call to refueling stations showed just how little enthusiasm they had for it.
“Everybody was freaking,” Fire Controlman Preston remembered. “‘God, we’re gonna die, man, we’re going to die,’ I remember guys saying. I was back there on a tending line, and it was nasty—raining and cloudy and cold. That big ship wasn’t moving much, but we were bouncing all over the place. I remember saying, ‘Oh God, don’t let us collide with that thing.’ I’ve seen pictures of what happened when ships collided, and it’s not pretty.”10
Rinn swung his ship around behind the Seattle and conned the frigate straight ahead into position off the oiler’s starboard side.11 The crew cursed and held their breath. The sailors got a pilot line across, but could not get the heavy probe to follow.12 Rinn eventually conceded defeat, but he remained proud that the commodore had allowed him to try.
A few days later the squadron arrived at the far end of the Mediterranean, and the Roberts led the squadron through the Suez Canal. Dyer, embarked aboard the Simpson, sent Rinn a pat on the back. A signal lamp blinked in Morse code across the blindingly blue water: “You do nice work, Paul.”13
THE ROBERTS FINALLY got the fuel it needed during a pit stop in Djibouti, a port city on the Horn of Africa that had long been used by the French as a base for naval operations in the Middle East. As boatswain’s mates tightened the mooring lines and hauled fuel hoses aboard, John Preston and some mates wandered onto the pier for a look around.
A small crowd was picking apart a bundle of used rags the engine-man had tossed over the rail. Brightly colored T-shirts—reds and blues and oranges—went quickly; green and brown clothes were left behind in the hot sun.14 A small boy was hawking souvenir trinkets, so the fire controlman pulled out a one-dollar bill. The young merchant’s eyes went wide, and he dug in his pockets and produced a little pile of coins and notes. “What are you trying to do?” Preston asked, and then realized that the dollar was more than the kid could change. The sailor told him to keep it. Stranger still was the sight of cattle being hoisted aboard a nearby ship by their necks. He watched as the animals made horrible sounds and expired in midair. Back under way, Preston chalked up his short visit to Africa as a turning point: his ship was far from home.
The captain of the Roberts was beginning to get that feeling as well. As the frigate sailed up the Yemeni coast, Rinn had received a sobering message from an old friend, now the captain of a minesweeper in the Gulf. U.S. forces were starting to find mines in the main shipping channel, the message said. If the Roberts were unlucky enough to discover one, the preferred course of action was to call the commander of the navy’s Middle East Force and hope there was an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team available. You could also shoot a mine, the message said, but far from detonating the device, bullets usually just pierced its buoyancy tanks. The weapon would sink, still live, into the shadows of the shallow sea.
On 11 February, one month after departing American waters, DesRon 22 squadronmates anchored off Fujairah, a United Arab Emirates port city on the Gulf of Oman. Four U.S. ships were waiting for them: three frigates and a cruiser heading home. Roberts paired off with USS Elrod (FFG 55), and for three hours, the frigates’ officers shared charts, documents, and advice. After a relatively calm January, the situation in the Gulf was turning for the worse.
Iran was starting to flex long-dormant aerial muscles. Many of its U.S. –built aircraft, purchased during the shah’s reign and grounded after the revolution by a U.S.–led embargo on spare parts, were returning to the skies, thanks in part to the White House’s Iran-Contra shipments of war materiel.15 In early February a Phantom fired two missiles at a Liberian tanker in the Gulf, the first such attack in more than two years. They missed. But days later, Iranian pilots shot down three Iraqi fighter jets over the southern Gulf.16
There were no deconfliction protocols to keep Iranian forces from firing accidentally on American warships. For that matter, the deconfliction agreement with Iraq was hardly foolproof. On 12 February an Iraqi Tu-16 Badger streaked toward the USS Chandler (DDG 996), ignoring the destroyer’s increasingly frantic wave-off calls. The skipper put a Standard missile on the rail, set the CWIS to auto-fire mode, and, as a last-ditch warning, popped a pair of defensive flares that burned white-hot arcs in the night sky. The Soviet-built bomber veered away—and fired two missiles that streaked off to explode somewhere in the darkness. Had the Iraqi been aiming at the Chandler and its convoy before it veered off? No one knew. For U.S. warships in the Gulf, the implications were clear: every airborne radar blip should be considered armed and dangerous.17
The Elrod passed along more than charts and advice. The Roberts took aboard Stinger antiaircraft missiles and two junior sailors trained to launch the shoulder-fired heat-seeking weapons. Stingers had gained fame in Afghanistan, where the mujahideen had used them to bring down Soviet helicopters. In the Gulf, they might provide a last-ditch shield against air attack.18 The Roberts also took on rolled mats made of Kevlar, the bulletproof synthetic fiber. Like most small warships, Perrys carried little armor, and the rug-sized mats were hung around various vital equipment spaces to provide a thin but welcome layer of protection.19
Rinn was grateful for everything the Elrod could provide. When the turnover was complete, the ships weighed anchor and moved off, each crew bidding the other farewell from the rails. Then it was time for DesRon 22 to split up. Dyer passed out awards for the transit to the Gulf, pronouncing Roberts the winner of the gunnery and shiphandling contests as well as “Top Hand,” the best overall performer. He bestowed a Redman Tobacco ball cap upon Palmer, who cherished it as a prized possession. Dyer also sent a cap to Rinn, who secretly believed his crew deserved the other two titles as well, and was being denied them to salve the feelings of the other ships’ crew members.20
On 13 February the Roberts arrived in the Earnest Will convoy assembly area, which encompassed miles and miles of open water in the Gulf of Oman. Commercial and naval ships of every nationality and every description milled about, some searching for their assigned escorts, others seeking shelter in any group they could find. Wags dubbed the area “the K-Mart parking lot.”21
The Roberts dropped anchor for the night just a few hundred yards from a Soviet Udaloy-class cruiser, spitting distance in naval terms. The next morning, the cruiser’s helicopter buzzed the frigate. Several U.S. sailors waved; the Soviet pilot returned the gesture. Preston, on deck, entertained the fleeting thought that the superpowers had spent billions of dollars and rubles for nothing. But a furious Rinn leaned out from the bridge wing and yelled at the .50-caliber gunners, who jumped to point their weapons at the enemy aircraft.22 It was time to get serious. Two years of exercises would not compare in danger and stress to the frigate’s first day in the Gulf.
SIMPLY GETTING INTO the shallow sea was a dicey proposition. The two-hundred-mile Strait of Hormuz was a classic naval choke point. The waterway squeezed past the Iranian mainland, narrowing to thirty-six miles as it made a hairpin turn around the Omani Peninsula. Its inbound and outbound shipping channels were narrower still: only two miles wide, separated by a two-mile “median strip.”
A trip through the strait took a ship past Iranian air bases and naval stations, radar installations and powerboat havens. Perhaps even more ominous was the “Silkworm envelope,” the swath of water covered by Iranian missile batteries. A Chinese copy of the Soviet radar-guided Styx, the Silkworm could sink a warship from forty miles away. Iran had never launched one in the strait, and the Reagan administration had publicly vowed to wipe the batteries from the earth if they did. But in the northern Gulf, a Silkworm had blinded the American captain of the Sea Isle City. And the Iranians had proven they didn’t need missiles to wage their naval war. The burnt-out ship carcasses that lined the strait offered silent testimony to that.
In the early hours of 14 February 1988, the Roberts rounded up the two reflagged Kuwaiti ships that would form its convoy. One was MV Townsend, a 294,700-ton oil products carrier; the other, a 46,700-ton liquefied natural gas ship renamed Gas Princess. They were soon joined by the Chandler, which was fresh from its nerve-rattling encounter with the Iraqi Badger. Together, they formed the convoy designated EW88011, the eleventh Earnest Will escort mission of the year.23
They would not go alone into the strait. Overhead, an E-2 Hawkeye surveyed the airspace with its dorsal radar saucer, while an EA-6B Prowler electronic attack jet sniffed for the telltale emissions of enemy missiles. Some miles away, A-6 Intruder attack jets and F-14 Tomcat fighters circled over the Gulf of Oman, standing by to render aid.
To deal with any small Iranian ships, the convoy would have the temporary aid of a pair of Mk III patrol boats, the sixty-four-foot mainstays of barge operations at the Gulf’s other end. A pair of oceangoing tugboats would lead the way, trolling for mines with half-inch steel cables festooned with bits of gear. Guided by small fins, the cables stretched behind the tugs in a fifty-yard “V” that trailed some feet below the surface. Their steel blades, rigged with explosive charges, were designed to snip a mine’s tether, allowing it to bob to the surface and be destroyed. The navy had hired the tugs from the Kuwaiti Oil Transport Company in the wake of Bridgeton’s mining. The ersatz minesweepers had found no mines at all in nine months, and their plodding progress limited the convoy’s speed through the strait to about eight knots. Nevertheless, no convoy commander liked getting under way without them.24
Just before dawn, the Roberts fired up both gas turbines and went to general quarters. Down in CIC, the radar operators took note of their surroundings; there was an Iranian frigate lurking off the nearby Ras Shuratah shoal, and an Iranian C-130 airlifter on patrol far ahead.25 The warships shepherded their reflagged charges past the lighthouse on Didimar, the canted hunk of rock that marked the beginning of the Strait of Hormuz. The transit would take nine hours.
In a small space behind the pilothouse, fire controlman John Preston hunkered down among the cases of electronic radar equipment and stared at the new Kevlar mats on the bulkheads. This was his regular general quarters station, a cramped and air-conditioned space where he fixed the occasional balky piece of gear. It was a fine place to ride out drills, close enough to the bridge to eavesdrop, but Preston usually longed to be in CIC manning a console instead of stuck up top playing Maytag repairman.
Not this time. For once, Preston was relieved to let someone else do the job. The lives of all his shipmates might well depend on the fire controlman on duty. “It may have been a cowardly reaction to the massive responsibility of protecting the ship, but I also knew that I would be sitting on those consoles later on and would have my share of worries,” he wrote.
But by the time the convoy emerged in the Persian Gulf, Preston decided the trip wasn’t any better in the radar shack: “Staying at general quarters for half the day, puckered up, thinking a Silkworm missile might have your name on it.”26
Action soon picked up. The ships’ aerial escort headed back to their aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. Not coincidentally, the Roberts’s radar soon picked up a pair of aircraft barreling south from Iran. In CIC the electronic-warfare operator bent to his scope. His computer digested the planes’ electronic emissions and spit out a verdict: two hulking F-4 Phantom fighter jets.
The Roberts’s CIC team had practiced this scenario a hundred times. They had shot down scores of ghosts in the Point Loma simulators and had honed their skill against U.S. Air Force fighters off the coast of Massachusetts. Now, for the first time, it was real. The air traffic controller issued the standard radio call: “Unknown aircraft, you are approaching a U.S. Navy warship. Divert your course immediately.” He received no response.
Rinn sent the ship to general quarters. The deep synthetic bong-bong-bong of the GQ alarm sent sailors scurrying around the ship, pulling on brown flash hoods and tucking pants into socks. Within minutes, the ship was ready for battle.
The captain ordered a missile readied for action. On the forecastle, the ten-ton launcher performed its mechanical dance, whirling to accept the white Standard missile that whisked onto the launch rail. Then the captain told the tactical action officer to illuminate the Phantoms with tracking radar. This was the modern naval equivalent of brandishing a sword.
Like many warships of the day, the Roberts carried two kinds of air-defense sensors. The long-range SPS-49(V)5 antenna revolved on its mast just abaft the pilothouse, sweeping a powerful electromagnetic beam through a dozen circles a minute. The ship’s 1970s-era computer gathered up the faint echoes from an airborne fuselage and displayed range, speed, and heading. But for altitude data, and for the frequent pulses required for accurate gunnery, the ship carried two short-range tracking sensors: an egg-shaped pod atop the pilothouse and a stubby dish amidships. These radars pulsed several times a second, fast enough to guide a missile or the 76-mm shells from the ship’s gun. To shoot down a plane, therefore, an operations specialist found it with the air-search radar and then locked it up with a tracking radar. A fire controlman would confirm the lock, and, upon the captain’s order, depress the weapons-release button.
Every pilot of a jet-age fighter knew when he’d been painted by fire control radar. Cockpit instruments sounded gently when brushed by search beams, but beeped urgently when hit with tracking frequencies. The noise told the pilot that a fire controlman’s thumb hovered over the missile-release button.
The Phantoms closed to a distance of twenty-one miles, just seconds away by missile flight. Then they veered off. The Roberts and its wards sailed on into a gathering thunderstorm.
Later in the night, the frigate’s radar operator called out another contact. A single aircraft approached from the north. As before, radio calls went unanswered. But this time, the plane’s emissions mystified the electronic-warfare operator.
For the third time in a day, the ship went to general quarters. Rinn studied the radar screen and ordered a missile onto the rail. “Lock him up,” he told the tactical action officer. But the electronic warning that had turned away the Iranian F-4s had no effect on this mystery plane. Ignoring the radar blasts and the urgent calls from the Roberts’s air traffic controller, the aircraft bore in from the north.
Once again, a fire controlman’s finger waited near the release stud. Rinn continued to issue orders through the tactical action officer, as CIC doctrine prescribed and as the Roberts had always practiced. But the captain moved over to stand behind the enlisted man’s shoulder. Rinn wanted no misunderstandings and no accidents.
The Roberts was allowed to fire if fired upon, but could not take the first shot without authorization from Middle East Force headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Rinn told a radioman to call in. When the command ship answered, the Roberts requested permission to fire. “Wait one,” the answer came back.
The green blip of the mystery plane drew closer to the center of the radar operator’s round screen. Seconds ticked by. The captain weighed his options. Shoot blindly? Or risk sharing the Stark’s fate?
The radio crackled again. “That’s an American aircraft,” the Middle East Force radio operator announced.
The frigate held its fire as the plane approached. An awful moment passed. The plane rumbled overhead and continued south.27
The aircraft turned out to be part of Eager Glacier, the CIA’s secret effort to gather intelligence on Iran using U-2 spy planes, small business jets, and even helicopters.28 Every U.S. warship that arrived in the Gulf was supposed to get a secret message describing the operation, but the Roberts had not yet received it. The spy plane’s pilot had detected the frigate’s radar, but decided to handle things by calling his boss, who called his boss, and so on up the chain of command until the message started coming back down through the navy. The decision nearly cost the intel pilot his life.
“That guy was lucky,” said Raymond, the operations specialist. “I will never forget the look on Commander Rinn’s face: ‘Oooo, that was a close one.’ He was happy we all did our job. And he was, I think, just as nervous as everybody else was—pride and nervousness at the same time. Everything worked fine.
“After that, we watched everything more closely. It could be monotonous, especially to a young crew, but now, everybody paid a lot of attention. This was not the Med or the Atlantic.”29
For those who had somehow failed to get the picture, the ship’s executive officer, Lt. Cdr. John Eckelberry, spelled things out in the Plan of the Day, the photocopied sheet of schedules, reminders, and instructions that got tacked up in the ship’s workspaces every morning. “From now on, we are minutes or seconds from combat,” the XO wrote. “Each man on SBR is responsible for his own battle gear.” This included helmet or hat, long-sleeved shirt or jacket, life vest, gas mask and filters, and flash hood. “Keep it with you or at your GQ station. You may wear it on your hip or keep it with you as you work and sleep.” And don’t forget ship’s policy on personal cassette recorders, Eckelberry reminded them: only one ear at a time, and never on watch.30
The Roberts captain and crew had passed a test—hardly their first, and certainly not their last. Their first day in the Gulf showed just what kind of steel nerves would be required in the next few months.