November 1986: navy shipbuilding inspectors call Roberts best new FFG to date.The Roberts had been scheduled to go on to Kuwait with the convoy, but a change of orders turned it around and sent it hustling back out of the strait. It was part of duty in the Gulf: plans changed, and not infrequently or with much notice. The frigate headed to the Gulf of Oman’s “K-Mart parking lot,” where it met up with the USS Coronado (AGF 11), a command ship dispatched from San Diego for duty as the Middle East Force (MEF) flagship. Under cover of darkness, the frigate shepherded the converted amphibious landing ship into the Gulf. An Iranian P-3 Orion—a slow, deadly U.S.–built patrol plane—came nosing southward, and the Roberts hit it with a blaze of tracking radar. “Have a nice day,” the pilot radioed, turning away.1
The U.S. ships tied up at Bahrain, and the next day Rear Adm. Anthony A. Less helicoptered out to the frigate. Less had taken charge of U.S. operations in the region only a month earlier, but he was no rookie. From September through December 1987, Less had commanded the Missouri battleship group in the Gulf and the Ranger carrier group just outside it.
The MEF commander thanked the Roberts crew for delivering his command ship, but he had a more serious purpose as well. He described the missions they could expect over the next four months and the rules for carrying them out. Less informed his listeners that Gulf duty offered two basic types of operations. One was escorting convoys, and they already had some experience with that. The other was patrolling specific areas. In the waterway’s northern reaches, the frigate would protect the special-operations barges that were tamping down Iranian attacks. To the east, it would track the Iranian warships and powerboats that swarmed near the Hormuz bottleneck. In the center—well, nothing much had happened in the Gulf’s belly since the Iran Ajr had been caught laying mines there.
Less moved on to the rules of engagement. The Roberts was there to protect U.S.–flagged ships and enforce their right of free passage in international waters. Attacks on U.S. shipping were to be repelled, by deadly force if necessary. But assaults on foreign ships were a different matter. The rules forbade firing to defend anything without an American flag. This guidance came down from the White House, which was hip-deep in conflicting regional policies yet still hoped to avoid open hostilities. These rules could put U.S. sailors and aircrews in helpless witness to assaults on unarmed mariners. Even the rescue of foreigners was discouraged, though Elrod had wangled permission to take aboard two dozen survivors of a Christmas Day gunboat attack.
But Less noted that there was a gray area between shooting and standing idly, and he pushed his skippers to explore it. There was little the U.S. ships could do about Iraq’s air attacks on unarmed merchants. But a clever and determined captain might harass Iranian forces without drawing undue international attention. The admiral summed up the situation like this: “Hey, guys, we’re at war, the threat’s always there. We’ll support you to the hilt. In the meantime, protect your ship, protect your crew. Make sure we stifle and stymie anything that’s going on in this area. You’ve got radars, you’ve got systems, you’re looking at ships that are less than friendly. Don’t let ’em lay mines; don’t let ’em attack friendly shipping. The rest of the time, you’re going to get assignments on what ship you’re escorting and where you’re going. Carry out your duties. That’s essentially it. You’re big guys now; pay attention.”2
Rinn was delighted with this policy. He interpreted it as “distract and bother, but don’t get the U.S. Navy in an embarrassing position.” Like most American skippers, the captain of the Roberts regarded his Iranian counterparts as murderous bullies. It gave him great pleasure to think of breaking up an attack and “ruining an Iranian skipper’s day.” He and his ship had done this once already.
IT HAD HAPPENED during the Coronado mission. Somewhere west of the Sirri oil fields, the Roberts’s surface radar picked up an interesting pattern of blips. Rinn had ordered his SH-60 helicopter into the air for a closer look, and within a half hour, the aviators confirmed his suspicions: an Iranian frigate was stalking a U.S. tanker.
Rinn left the Coronado in the care of a nearby British destroyer, fired up his gas turbines, and headed off to investigate. Presently, the Iranian ship appeared over the horizon; the Roberts closed the gap. A lookout identified the ship from the name painted on its stern: Alvand.
The Alvand was one of Iran’s four Sa’am-class frigates. Built for the shah by British shipwright Vosper, the 311-foot Sa’ams were the most potent warships in the Iranian fleet. Each of the 1,540-ton vessels packed a 114-mm naval gun on the forecastle, a pair of 35-mm machine guns, and a triple-canister launcher for Sea Killer antiship missiles.3 Like the Perry frigates, the Sa’ams were swift, nimble ships propelled by gas turbines. The Roberts would soon become intimately familiar with their capabilities.
By the looks of things, the Iranian captain was maneuvering to fire on the tanker. The Roberts pressed on, pulling to within a mile or so of Alvand’s stern. The Iranian seemed to hesitate, and then punched his own engines. The Roberts turned with him, and a dogfight in two dimensions was on.
The ships turned this way and that, jockeying for tactical advantage. It was a form of contention as old as triremes and as modern as the jet turbines that screamed in the frigates’ engine rooms. Each commander strove to keep his ship where his weapons could strike the enemy, while keeping the enemy from doing the same.
Advancing technology had not rendered this a simple game, and naval warfare remained as much an intellectual challenge as a duel of horsepower and caliber. Though captains no longer sought the wind for motive power, the sea still harbored rocks and shoals and currents. And the shipboard introduction of electronics and rocketry brought their own constraints. An effective ship turned to keep its radio masts from blocking its fire-control radar beams and maintained sufficient distance from its prey to allow a missile to arm in flight. The wind itself was far from irrelevant. A stiff breeze could affect the accuracy of gunfire and missiles. It could even turn defensive antimissile flares, whose magnesium cores burned at thousands of degrees, into a hazard for an unlucky ship.
For more than three hours the ships wheeled around each other, matching wits and machinery. Their chessboard was measured in miles, yet at times the two crews were just a few hundred yards apart, their machine gunners nearly eyeball to eyeball. In this duel the Roberts enjoyed a distinct advantage over the Alvand. The American ship could hit targets in most of a 360-degree circle, thanks to its forecastle-mounted missile launcher and 76-mm gun amidships. But the Iranian ship had a far narrower field of fire, because the U.S.-led arms embargo had deprived it of missiles.4
Around 7:30 PM, the Iranian captain decided he’d had enough. The Alvand broke off and retired to the northeast. The tanker, a Greek ship named Tandis, sailed on unmolested. The Roberts rejoined the Coronado and escorted the command ship safely to Bahrain.
Rinn was exultant. Turning away high-speed jets was tense, but beating the pants off another skipper—well, that was just plain fun. “No easy kill tonight,” he wrote to his brother. “Crew on a high—captain’s got balls!!”5
The Roberts’s first tangle with an Iranian warship had gone well. But it would not be the last, and eventually, the Iranians would come after the Roberts two at a time.
THE ISLAND OF Abu Musa sits near the main shipping channel in the eastern Gulf, where the three-square-mile chunk of rock dominates the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Pasdaran paramilitaries had seized the disputed island early in the war—it was also claimed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—and established a radar station and harbor facilities for more than a dozen armed Boghammar powerboats. Aided by radar pickets on two oil platforms to the west, the speedboat crews had little difficulty homing in on slow-moving merchant ships.6 When the tanker war heated up, the waters around Abu Musa became perilous.7
Less was doing his best to fix that. He kept a warship or two on patrol in the area, where they could track Iranian ships, assist the convoys that passed by, and break up attacks. The admiral dispatched the Roberts to Abu Musa—and, unknowingly, toward a rematch with Alvand.
The frigate’s first patrol mission began with a poor omen. Once clear of the harbor, Rinn had his gunners fire a few rounds from each of the ship’s guns. It was an old habit, intended as much to clear liberty-induced cobwebs from sailors’ heads as to ensure the guns were working. The 25-mm and .50-cals worked fine, rattling slugs into the water, but the 76-mm main gun jammed. “Lousy time for gun casualty,” Rinn wrote.8
The gunners’ mates investigated, pulling cowlings from the complicated mechanism that drew the two-foot shells from a rotating magazine. One of the guide rails had bent. There were no spares aboard. Someone summoned Chief Dave Walker from his haunt in engineering. Walker was no expert on the 76-mm gun, but he had a knack with broken machines, and he climbed up to have a look. After some inspection, he fetched a towel rod from the chiefs’ quarters and carefully bent it to mimic the damaged part. When he put it in place, the shells rode into place like clockwork. The jury-rigged solution broke all sorts of regulations, Walker acknowledged later, “but we were in the combat zone, and it had to be fixed.”9
Once on station near Abu Musa, Rinn made a beeline for an Iranian oiler named Bushehr. The five-thousand-ton oiler served as mother ship to Pasdaran powerboats and as a picket in the shipping channel. The Roberts approached the larger ship, allowing the Iranians to study its gun and missile launcher through binoculars. He wanted the Iranian captain to think hard before starting anything violent. “Now we know each other,” Rinn wrote to his brother.
Some hours after dawn, the radar operators on the Roberts spotted a warship beyond the northern horizon, and Rinn sent the Seahawk for a closer look. It was the Alvand, and its skipper was apparently still smarting from his recent encounter with the Roberts. As the SH-60 hove into view, the Iranian commander silenced his radios and radars, turned his bow toward the American frigate, and accelerated to twenty knots. Rinn sent his crew to general quarters and cranked up his own gas turbines. The warships approached each other in a forty-knot game of naval chicken.
The Roberts painted the Alvand with both fire control radars, and Rinn sent a radio message for good measure: “Unknown vessel, this is a U.S. Navy warship. Divert your course. I intend to stand on.” The Iranian hung in for several minutes, and presently the Roberts’s forward lookout could distinguish the water creaming at Alvand’s bow. But the Iranian skipper lost his nerve at three miles’ distance, veered off, and disappeared over the horizon. Rinn let him go.
But the Roberts was waiting for the Iranian ship the next morning, thanks to a bit of detective work by the radar operators. At the suggestion of XO Eckelberry, the combat team had dug through the ship’s electronic memory, looking for patterns in the Alvand’s behavior. They discovered that the Iranian captain began each day’s patrol at dawn in the same place. The Roberts mounted a stakeout. When the Alvand appeared at 5:30 AM, the U.S. warship began to shadow it from the horizon.
The work paid off a few hours later. The Alvand closed on an unescorted tanker and radioed orders to heave to and prepare to be boarded. This kind of thing happened every day, and the situation could go several ways. Sometimes the Iranians would send a whaleboat over to search the target ship for Iraq-bound arms and military equipment. But sometimes the radio call was just a ploy: once the merchant stopped, the warship opened fire.
The Roberts, whose crew had been monitoring the conversation on the bridge radio, accelerated toward the tanker and frigate. The Alvand warned the U.S. warship to stand clear, and when Rinn ignored the warning and stood on, the Iranian bugged out to the northeast. Score one for Detective Roberts.
The American frigate was just getting warmed up. A few days later, the teleprinter in the ship’s radio room rattled with reports that a trio of Boghammars and a Sa’am frigate had been spotted in the Hormuz strait, headed southwest toward Abu Musa. Rinn doused his running lights, shut down his radars, and set out to hunt. By 4:30 AM, the U.S. ship had settled about three nautical miles off the Iranian frigate’s quarter. It was a perfect tactical position: near enough to keep an eye on his quarry, distant enough for a Standard missile to arm itself in flight. “Got him!” Rinn crowed to his brother. “No higher honor!”
For half a day, the Roberts stayed glued to the tail of the Sahand. The Iranian captain changed course several times in hopes of shaking his American shadow, but to no avail. Around 3:00 PM, his patience snapped. He hauled his frigate around, pointed his bow southeast, and headed for the Roberts at twenty-eight knots. The duel was on: guns and gas turbines at five miles. Rinn cranked up his engines and veered to meet his adversary. The Iranian frigate approached, its bow riding a bloom of white water. The Sahand’s skipper seemed to be made of sterner stuff than his colleague aboard the Alvand, and the gap between the ships closed to less than a mile.
Rinn waited, waited—and then turned sharply to starboard. The Roberts heeled hard, letting the Sahand speed by. The U.S. frigate kept turning, rudder straining against the sea, until a full circle put it back on the Iranian’s tail. Sahand jinked north and then cut back hard to starboard, crossing the bow of the Roberts and heading east. Rinn took his ship northward and then doubled back to face the Sahand. The Iranian turned northeast across the Roberts’s bow once more, and the American frigate barreled through its foe’s dissipating wake. The Sahand captain finally ran out of ideas. He gave up and steadied on a northeast course. The Roberts settled back into its trailing position.
Rinn was ecstatic. “This moment [is] one of the most exciting I’ve had in the Navy,” he wrote.
Around 8:00 PM, Middle East Force called the Roberts off the hunt, instructing the frigate to drop back over the horizon and track the Sahand by radar. The message praised the ship’s work and included a word of warning against being too provocative.10 Rinn shrugged. “Tomorrow is another day,” he wrote. The next time Roberts tangled with Sahand, the U.S. crew would need help.
By the first day of March, Rinn was starting to worry about fuel. The high-speed duels with Alvand and Sahand had burned off oil by the ton, and the Roberts had just wrapped up a quick escort mission, ushering a single reflagged tanker through the strait. The big tanks in his engine room were down to 42 percent, raising the uncomfortable possibility that the frigate might get into a tussle it couldn’t finish.
Rinn sent a message to the Coronado asking for advice. “Hope they are paying attention,” he wrote his brother. “I’m starting to worry. Prolonged surface engagement or bad weather could be problem.”11
Two hours past midnight, Roberts crew members spotted Sahand about fifty miles off Abu Musa. The Iranian seemed to have learned from Rinn’s playbook: he extinguished his ship’s lights and radar, made a twenty-five-knot rush toward the American ship, and painted the Roberts with fire-control radar. This guy was definitely more aggressive than the Alvand.
The radar pulses tripped the electromagnetic sensors on the Roberts’s mast, touching off an alarm in CIC. The electronic warfare team bent to their computers, which identified the Iranian emission: it was the guidance system for the Italian-built Sea Killer, a sea-skimming missile with a fifteen-mile range. This was a bit unexpected. Alvand had carried no missiles; was Sahand better armed? The Roberts replied by returning the favor, locking up Sahand with tracking radar of its own. But it began to look like this engagement was going to involve more than dueling radar beams. Rinn ordered the 76-mm gun readied for action. Two-foot rounds moved from a rotary tray up the screw feeder. The ships sped past each other and began to jockey for position. So far, so good.
The engagement took a new twist when Sahand broke off to pursue a container ship that had appeared in the channel. The frigates were some miles apart at this point, and over the radio the Roberts crew heard Sahand order the ship to stop. The merchant was registered in the Iraqi port of Basra—not a good omen—and the Roberts was, for the moment, too far away to help. Rinn had his radioman call for help.
An answer soon arrived from the French frigate Montcalm, some fifteen miles distant. The U.S. and French crews had met a few days earlier when they dropped anchor and exchanged small groups of sailors for dinner. Rinn and a few officers spent a fine evening on the foreign ship, enjoying crusty bread and trading tactical tips. Now, Montcalm heeded the U.S. frigate’s call—and just in time.
The French warship appeared on the horizon just as Sahand lowered a whaleboat to the water. Clearly, a boarding party was headed over to the container ship. Roberts and Montcalm firmed up their plans via flashing light signals and closed on the Iranian from different directions. Rattled, the skipper of Sahand recalled his whaleboat and sent the merchant on its way. The allied warships steadied up about three miles off the Iranian’s stern, one to port, the other to starboard. Montcalm kept up the tail for a few hours; Roberts dropped back to eight miles’ distance and stuck there for a day. Sahand stopped no more ships.
Two days later, with fuel reserves down to 39 percent, Rinn got the order he was looking for: break off and go fill ’er up. The message specified no tanker for the rendezvous—simply a time and a location: off the tip of the Omani Peninsula, just fifty miles from the Iranian coast. That was odd.
The frigate presently dropped anchor at the appointed place. A thick mid-afternoon haze settled over the water. Not long afterward, the bridge-to-bridge radio crackled. “This is MV Yusr,” said an accented voice. “I come along your port side now, Roberts.” A small black-hulled tanker with a beige deckhouse and red stack glided into view. Inflatable Yokohama bumpers dangled along its sides.
“Any idea who these guys might be?” Rinn asked Eckelberry.
“No, sir,” the XO responded.
The captain of the mystery tanker maneuvered his big ship expertly alongside the smaller frigate. The U.S. sailors exchanged lines and hoses with the mariners, who looked Asian, perhaps Chinese. As the hazy sun faded into the sea, 124,000 gallons of F-76 flowed from tanker to warship. When it was done, the tanker skipper collected a navy voucher from the Roberts, plus a dozen FFG 58 ball caps for his crew, and his ship slipped away into a starless night.
“Why,” Rinn wrote to his brother, “do I feel like a chapter out of Lord Jim?”12
WHEN KEVIN FORD had a spare moment or two, he documented what he could of the deployment with his bulky video camera. The ship’s chief cook and unofficial videographer, Ford had recently wrapped up a tape to send home to the Roberts families in Newport. His first video production featured scenes from the Mediterranean and the Suez passages and some footage from the Gulf. After an introduction by the captain, the tape cut to Ford himself. A compact, broad-backed figure with a straightforward look and a wisp of a mustache, Ford led the cameraman around the ship, describing things in a Rhode Island accent. He pointed out a shipmate who was patrolling the deckhouse in bulletproof vest and rifle. “Ya see that sailuh, all dressed up like a soljuh? He’s gahding the ship, making sure no bad guys come aboard while we’re all out here.”
The twenty-seven-year-old Ford was about as young as a navy chief could be. A native of East Providence, he had enlisted the day after he turned eighteen, seeking adventure and military service. He chose to become a cook—in navy argot, a mess management specialist—because he liked the hours. Cooks stood no duty watches and, on large ships at least, worked just three or four days a week, albeit in fifteen-hour shifts. But Ford was far from lazy. Possessed of a cheery acumen and a can-do attitude, he rose through the ranks as fast as the navy would let him take the advancement tests, and donned the khaki uniform of a chief after just nine years.
On the Roberts Ford ran a team of twelve cooks, plus the junior sailors lent to the kitchen as busboys. Together they served their roughly two hundred shipmates three meals a day—plus plenty of post-midnight snacks to boost morale during long nights. Ford also developed a knack for picking up extra jobs around ship: besides videographer, he was a member of the damage control training team and a line captain during underway replenishment.
Belowdecks, his camera found a mess cook in a T-shirt, who grinned, flexed, and laid a kiss on a bulging bicep. Another muscular fellow in a yellow lifejacket told the camera, “We’re all out here doing okay. We can’t wait to get back.” A tall sailor with jug-handle ears looked up from a book. “I don’t have anybody who really knows who I am,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
The video wound up with shot of Rinn in a thin olive sweater out by the exhaust stack. “It’s February 28, 1988, and we’re on Abu Musa patrol in the southeastern part of the Gulf. It’s been a hotspot for the past two months, with about twenty ships coming under attack by rocket-propelled grenades. We’ve been on patrol for seven or eight days here, and I’m happy to say I think we’ve been instrumental in preventing any attack being conducted in the area.” Ford edited the tape on his camera and mailed it off to Newport.
ONE REASON THINGS had gotten worse around Abu Musa was that the violence had largely been quashed in the northern Gulf. In fact, no merchant had come under fire there since November, and the credit belonged largely to the secret forces of Operation Prime Chance. Like cops shooing street thugs from the neighborhood, the army helicopters and navy patrol boats had forced the Iranian raiders to ply their deadly trade elsewhere.
But the unsteady peace was shattered on 5 March. Not long after midnight, the Roberts bridge radio crackled with dispatches from USS John A. Moore (FFG 19), a frigate on patrol near the barge Wimbrown VII. A pair of Iranian speedboats was approaching, Moore reported. The frigate tried to warn them off with radio calls and then put two 76-mm shells into the water in front of the boats. The Boghammar drivers just poured on the speed. They whipped past the warship at forty-four knots, opening up with chattering machine guns. The frigate returned fire, sending nearly a hundred rounds after its nimble antagonists. The boats soon faded from radar, and the frigate gathered up bits of wreckage, but it was far from clear that the boats had been sunk.13
The Moore’s skirmish was the first exchange of naval fire in the Gulf in three weeks, and Admiral Less quickly dispatched six of his sixteen ships to squelch the fighting. The Roberts was headed northwest at full speed. Rinn found the Moore’s captain understandably exhausted but confident that he’d performed well.14 The next morning, Less sent the Moore to Bahrain for a rest and put Rinn in charge of protecting the barges. “SBR’s got the bag!” he wrote his brother. “Things are getting interesting.”
The attack on the Moore came by sea, but the skies around the barges were even more full of peril. They seethed with warplanes. The geography of the northern Gulf funneled Iraqi strike jets southeast to their watery hunting grounds and drew Iranian fighters hungry for air-to-air battle. To the Roberts, every one of them might as well have had “frigate killer” painted on its nose.
The first night—6 March 1988—set the tone for two tense weeks. At three in the morning, a radar operator called up from CIC: “Iraqi Badger inbound, speed 330 knots, altitude 200 feet, CPA four miles.” The last bit stood for “closest point of approach.” The plane, a Soviet-built medium bomber, would pass within four miles of the Roberts—much too close for comfort. Rinn sent the ship to general quarters. The alarm bonged throughout the ship. Sailors rolled from their bunks and rushed to their stations. A Standard missile slid onto the launcher rail, and gunners switched the CIWS from manual to automatic.
The air traffic controller in CIC radioed the Badger pilot, warning him to divert his course or face deadly consequences. The Iraqi pilot was just nineteen miles away—a handful of seconds of missile flight—when he acknowledged Roberts’s command and veered south to miss the frigate by less than a dozen miles.
At 5:30 AM the alarms sounded again, and a weary crew scrambled to GQ stations. This time it was a trio of Mirage F1s, screaming toward the ship at 385 knots, right down on the deck. They closed to twenty-three miles before turning away.15
And there was one more development. Sometime in the night, the Roberts had welcomed aboard a mysterious pair of small black helicopters. The call to flight quarters confounded sailors who knew that the ship’s own aircraft was tucked snugly in its hangar. The mystery only deepened as two choppers approached the ship, their landing skids barely clearing the waves. Rotors whirring softly, the aircraft climbed up to land on the flight deck, both squeezing onto a platform that barely accommodated a ten-ton Seahawk. The pilots disembarked, and the deck crew tucked the tiny helicopters into the frigate’s starboard hangar.
The new shipmates remained a mystery to most Roberts sailors, who knew them only as some sort of special-ops army aviators. They wore their hair long. They slept by day and flew at night, low and fast over the black water, night vision goggles clamped to their helmets. The Roberts was accustomed to running without lights, but went super-dark whenever the army guys had a mission. Sometimes the black helos took off with a load of rockets and landed with empty canisters. “A buddy of mine, Ron, asked them what they did one day,” recalled Mike Tilley, a junior engineman, “and he said, ‘Mind your own fucking business.’ Just like that, point-blank. Ron said ‘Sorry.’ The guy said, ‘No problem; just don’t worry about it.’”16
The soldiers were, in fact, five pilots and four mechanics from the army’s 160th Aviation Group (Airborne), the elite unit formed after the disastrous attempt to rescue U.S. hostages from Tehran in 1979. They flew AH-6 Little Bird helicopters, small and agile craft armed with 7.82-mm mini-guns and 2.75-inch rockets. They operated at night, lights out, with their landing skids just six feet above the waves. “You’ll know you’re too low when you get wet,” their pilots told one another. They were nicknamed the Night Stalkers, and they were part of the secret Operation Prime Chance. Even aboard a warship, their identity was strictly need-to-know.17
For the next ten days, Roberts patrolled the waters around the barges. The crew dubbed the area Badger Alley. In just the first week, watchstanders warded off a dozen Iraqi Badgers, two Blinder bombers, and fourteen Mirage fighters. Iran’s air force generally kept its distance, but the frigate’s radar operators spotted Iranian C-130s, F-4s, F-14s, P-3s—even Bell AB-212 helicopters. And the frigate was doing some hunting of its own. During the day, the Roberts’s Seahawk swept the area by sight and radar. At night, the army helos emerged from the hangar, lifted from the flight deck, and flew off to do their thing.
Rinn described the feeling a few weeks later. “The type of operation that we do over here is one of the most demanding physically and mentally that you can do . . . I think the saving grace and tribute to these guys is that we survive in that environment and do our jobs—fully aware all the time that we can go from a semi-relaxed environment to an absolutely hostile one ready to fight. It never goes away; it can’t go away. That’s our job.”18
The job was always toughest on the midwatch. By longstanding naval custom, midnight duty lasted until four in the morning. The pilothouse was darkened, its fluorescent lamps extinguished, the better to keep eyes sharp for the unknown dangers beyond the ship’s skin. Black came in shades and texture: obsidian sea, dusty sky, plastic instrument panels. Bulkheads and windscreens faded into the surrounding night.
Here and there, light pricked the void: the red letters of gauges, the running lights of ships, gas flares atop unseen derricks. From time to time there were streaks of tracer fire and the quick blooms of antiaircraft shells. Far off, lightning flickered, the tocsin of a coming thunderstorm.
A dozen watchstanders went about their business in near-silence, just the way Rinn wanted it. Lookouts screwed binoculars to their eyes. The watch quartermaster studied his charts for shoals; the officers bent to the rubber visor of the surface-search radar, or eyed the spectral green images of night vision goggles. Any blip on the radar screen could be an armed ship, boat, or aircraft looking for things to shoot. The idea was unnerving enough during the day, when human sight could help sort things out; at night it could rattle the coolest crew.
A radar operator called out a contact: an Iraqi Badger, inbound. The radio operator warned the pilot off, but the jet was less than thirty miles away when it finally turned to port. Under a brilliant quarter moon, the bridge crew watched a missile flare beneath the jet’s wing. The rocket motor ignited, transected the dark sky, and hit its target. Flames rose above the silhouetted shape of a tanker, well short of the horizon. The helmsman drove the ship onward, leaving a trail in the Gulf’s pale green bioluminescence, tracing endless fourteen-by-seven-mile boxes in the dark water.
Fatigue dogged the bridge watch. They might have grabbed an hour’s sleep before coming on duty, but each had worked a full day before dusk and would work another after dawn. And yet the watch demanded closer attention at night; darkness concealed the dangers of the enemy, and the sea. Even more than in daytime, the sailors on the bridge cradled their shipmates sleeping below. So the watchstanders drained mug after mug of coffee, watched the passing Gulf traffic, and, bored, half-wished for something to happen. They indulged in wry, clipped conversation, or nibbled on welcome gifts from the galley: a late-night plate of chocolate-chip cookies or an early batch of breakfast rolls. From time to time the radio squawked, breaking the quiet with a burst of static. Most of the messages were fully routine, the expected traffic in a crowded sea. But every so often a high manic voice would break from the speaker: “Hee hee hee! Filipino monkey!” No one knew who the caller was, or what he meant by his strange message. It became part of the background, just another reminder that the ship was in foreign waters.
Ennui mixed with apprehension; the resulting brew could make standing watch just a bit giddy. Mike Roberts recalled taking the signalman’s watch one night. “It was black as hell out,” the petty officer said,
and the bridge was dark like the chart table light was out. I stood there trying to adjust to the dark, when some anti-aircraft tracers silhouetted a gang of guys over at the chart table. The whole bridge crew was just standing there, silently, staring at the chart. I went over to see what it was all about and found that the previous watch had very carefully penned a “W” in front of OMAN. We all just stood there and quietly stared at the word for awhile. Then, without saying anything, we just split off and went back to our stations.19
The quartermasters, who tracked the ship’s position in neat pencil lines, wore through one chart, and then a replacement. The bridge watchstanders drummed their fingers and waited for their relief.
Day or night, the rest of the crew had their own problems. Most could be chalked up to the Gulf climate: hot, humid, and dusty. Sand and dust shrouded radio masts and radar antennae, clouding the frigates’ electronic eyes. Airborne grit dust clogged the seals on the big SPS-49 radar, which leaked big globs of muddy oil down onto the sailors manning 50-cals on the deck below. The engineers wrapped cheesecloth around air intakes and changed it almost daily. Frustrated aviation mechanics struggled to clean the dirt from the crevices of their aircraft. Even the warm water played havoc with a ship built to fight in the cool Atlantic Ocean. It took more time and fuel to distill hundred-degree seawater into drinkable fluid, and algae built up in the intakes. Water-cooled systems fared poorly, including the frequency converters that turned 60Hz electricity into the 400Hz variety required by the ship’s weapons.20
“The hot sticky days turned into hot sticky weeks,” Preston wrote. “Every day I was glad we had discovered Freon. Without air conditioning, I would have died in the Persian Gulf.”
The pace and the conditions wore on everyone. People lost weight; Ford, despite his hours in the kitchen, was twenty pounds slimmer by mid-March. The officers had it particularly bad. Their assigned duties, plus drills, plus watchstanding, plus taking care of their sailors yielded far too little rest.21 “You don’t get eight hours’ sleep. You get four or five here and there, but you find you do without a lot of sleep,” Glenn Palmer said. “There’s a lot of tension, there’s a lot of pressure, and you just sort of live on a high.”22
Commanding officers sometimes got even less sleep than their subordinates. A running joke among skippers held that command tours generally lasted eighteen months because you just couldn’t stay awake much longer than that. And Rinn was one of those captains who loved to prowl his ship at all hours, surprising engineers at 3:00 AM or just sitting in the dark on the bridge, fostering the perception that The Skipper Never Sleeps. But in the Gulf, this propensity, combined with the hectic pace, frequently left Rinn exhausted. One morning, just after dawn, he started a letter to his brother. “This place is crazy,” he wrote, and fell asleep atop the bed’s undisturbed covers, still wearing his uniform khakis.23
Rinn tried to get by with catnaps but occasionally fell asleep standing up.24 Eckelberry finally stepped in after the captain chewed out the bridge watch for failing to alert him to a radar contact. “Sir, we did call you—three times,” the XO said. “You’ve got to cut that out.” Abashed, Rinn apologized to the watchstanders. He admonished them not to let him slumber through anything again. “If that happens, send somebody down. Drag me out if you have to. God, don’t be intimidated.”25
His officers preferred their captain to simply get more rest, and so they plotted to keep his unconscious hours undisturbed. Someone rigged his cabin door with a “traffic light,” a brass box the size of a soap bar that glowed green for awake, red for asleep. Only Ens. Rob Sobnosky dared disobey; the CIC officer had orders to wake the captain whenever a strange ship approached. The rest of the wardroom dubbed him “Red Light.”26
The conspiracy eventually gathered the entire crew, who began passing the word whenever Rinn put his head down. The announcement “set condition Circle Zebra,” a play on damage control conditions, went around the ship via sound-powered headsets. The idea was to keep things quiet—dog the hatches gently, easy on the course changes, no loud maintenance. CIC watchstanders used the door near the sonar console instead of the one that opened next to the skipper’s cabin. It was some weeks before Rinn discovered his crew’s well-intentioned conspiracy of silence.27
AMID IT ALL, the ship kept up Sorensen’s training routine: every four hours, a new watch, a new team on duty, a new damage control drill. The mock situations were as realistic as possible; from time to time the engineers would bleed smoke from a generator into a space so the firefighting teams could practice in obscured conditions.28
“There’s nothing worse than having the duty late at night, and your section leader has a bug up his butt to do these drills,” said Jim Muehlberg, an electronics technician second class. “And you wind up doing a fire drill at midnight. And you’ve got the four to eight [AM] watch.”29
But even all the drills, all the work, all the time at battle stations couldn’t fill all the hours at sea.
Official working hours ended at 5:00 PM, after which came dinner. At 6:00 PM, the ship broadcast its very own nightly news program, live and quite unrehearsed from the broom-closet workspace of the ship’s interior communications technician. Kevin Ford, who handled the sports roundup, traded wisecracks with fellow newsreader Senior Chief Storekeeper Earl Crosby Jr. Even with all the joking around, the closed-circuit program was the crew’s main source of information about the world beyond their hull.
Sailors with no pressing tasks might hang out for a few hours on the mess deck, where a television showed selections from the videotape library: hundreds of movies, sitcom episodes (ALF), and TV dramas (L.A. Law). There was usually a game of hearts or Monopoly going, or just knots of sailors sitting on plastic swivel-seats and shooting the bull. Some of the crew wrote letters home, or answered mail from the two grade-school classes the ship had adopted as pen pals.
Mail was the sweetest escape aboard ship, a breath of the faraway familiar. “When mail call goes down, the work day just about ends,” said Dick Fridley, a boatswain’s mate first class. “You let them get their mail. You don’t bother them. You let them go where they want to go and then relax and listen to their tapes and watch their videos. . . . That’s when they’re spending their time with their families.”30 But tinfoil packages of cookies or cling-wrapped fudge were shared, lest unfortunate things befall the addressee.
For more urgent matters, there were telegrams. On 1 April a message arrived from Newport, addressed to Glenn Palmer, reporting the birth of his fourth child. The combat systems officer was overjoyed to hear that mother and infant were doing fine—and yet the separation made it the worst moment Palmer had endured since leaving home. Mercifully, perhaps, duty soon distracted him. “Right after it got there, we had a helicopter that came close to the ship,” he recalled, “and I was right back on the console in the combat information center.”31
In late March a pair of Roberts engineers had taken pen in hand to write to the editors of the Wisner News Chronicle, a Nebraska newspaper. The small-town paper had become regular reading in the engineering spaces, thanks to a shipmate whose mother had taken out a subscription for her son. The News Chronicle featured headlines like “Persons Interested In Housing For Elderly Should Contact Clarence Schmitt,” and had become a crew favorite, passed around until the graying pages were torn, grease-stained, and soft as rags.
“Dear Editor,” the two engineers wrote,
We are currently serving aboard USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf. One of our shipmates, David Claus, is from Pilger, and receives your paper almost every “mail call.” All of us enjoy reading it, because it helps us “escape” the gulf for a short time. We are engineers and concern ourselves with keeping the ship moving and the lights turned on. So for us, things can quickly become boring and routine rather quickly, but after reading several of your newspapers, we feel that we are becoming part of your community. We are also waiting for the next editions. (Go Lady Gators!) I’m sure you can understand our meaning by us being eight thousand miles from home.
Our deployment is only half over, and it seems like an eternity, but the Navy has given us port visits in Palma, Spain, a quick stop in Djibouti, East Africa, then on to the Persian Gulf, where we have had liberty in Bahrain. While in the gulf, we have seen things like Iraqi aircraft, and Russian ships and aircraft, along with that of our allies. A sister ship to us found an Iranian gunboat drifting. We had it in tow for a few hours, until we passed it to another American warship.
Things here for the most part are quiet, and we believe we aren’t in any real danger as long as we do our jobs and remain alert. If anyone would like to write us (or send cookies) we would be more than happy to write back. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
GSM2(SW) Randy Tatum and HT2 Ted Johnson32
Many found escape in exercise, pumping iron on the ship’s weight machines or riding the stationary bike. Out on the flight deck, Chief Engineer Gordan Van Hook and Gas Turbine Chief Dave Walker led daily calisthenics—“snipercise,” they called it. You could even jog on the miniature airfield if you could endure a left turn every ten paces.
And an enterprising crew could carve out time for fun, even in a war zone. Every month or so, Ford’s cooks set up barbeque stands on the flight deck—“steel beach picnics,” the crew called them. “Just being able to eat back there, relax, listen to music, talk to people you haven’t seen in a couple days—it just relaxes you,” said Fridley, the boatswain’s mate.33
Mike Tilley, in particular, knew how to take relaxation to the limit. When one steel beach picnic was declared a no-uniform zone, the young seaman showed up without a stitch of clothing. The engineman striker from Missouri had a knack for trouble. During precomm duty in Norfolk, he’d been cited for having an altered identification; when the ship visited the Bahamas, he’d helped set adrift someone’s dory. Rinn had no time for troublemakers, but there was something about the junior sailor that showed promise, and the captain had let him off with some stern words. And when Tilley joined the burger line au naturel, Rinn just laughed—and had a chief send him below to get dressed. “We’re in an environment where twenty-four hours a day we have to be ready,” Rinn told a visiting reporter. “We can get by with a barbecue even though we’re in a tough situation, but everybody has to know that within two or three minutes they’ve got to get that barbecue over the side and into their battle station.”
In early March, cryptic missives began appearing in Rinn’s cabin.
I walked in my cabin one day and there’s a note stuck to my mirror that said, “Beware the Ides of March.” And every time I went to the bridge, there was a note on my chair that said, “Beware the Ides of March.”
So I said, “What the hell is going on around here?” It’s not a lot, but it’s there, and I’m getting the sense: who’s screwing around with me? It’s the XO or someone, and I have no clue. I’m not going to go and ask, “What the hell’s going on?”
But I think I did bring it up in the wardroom at lunch one day. Lunchtime at the wardroom was a great social event for me, and the rule was, I would never discuss work, talk business. And if I did, I would apologize and say, “I’m sorry.” So I asked one day, “Does anybody know what’s going on?” and they said, “No, no.”
So, lo and behold, we’re on the bridge one day and five Iraqi Mirages go by. We’ve got a live missile on the rail and we’re doing twenty-five knots, and the Iraqis go by and we track, and they do what we tell them to do, and they go away. Eleven-thirty, lunch-time, and everybody goes down to the wardroom. I’m on the bridge, and the XO says, “Captain, are you coming down?”
“Start without me, I’ll be there.”
Ten minutes go by, and the intercom rings, and they say, “Captain, are you coming?” I said, “Yes, start without me.”
Five minutes later, it rings again. “We’ve got something special.”
And so I said, “Okay, I’m coming.” Nobody ever bothered me like this so—stupid—I get up and I go down to the wardroom.
We’re twenty-five miles off the Iraqi coast, we’re running around with live missiles on the rail, we’re in modified Condition Zebra, we are a full-up round ready to fight—and here’s my entire wardroom in togas. Hail Caesar! They’ve got wreaths around their ears. I took one look and I started laughing so hard I fell over one of the chairs and onto the floor.
Later on, they said, “We were sure glad you laughed when you came in that room.”
It was tremendous. That was the kind of attitude about them. It was a really good bunch of guys.34
On 18 March the Roberts relinquished its northern patrol duties and its coterie of army aviators and headed southeast for a well-deserved port visit in Bahrain. It would be the crew’s first liberty since entering the Gulf, and it would be a blessed relief from hidden mines, hostile speedboats, and missile-flinging warplanes. Rinn celebrated with his first full night’s sleep in weeks.
The frigate tied up next to a garbage scow at Sitrah pier in Manama, and sailors streamed over the brow. For many, the first stop was the phone booths pierside, where three-minute calls to the United States cost a wallet-scorching eleven dollars. Then they hit the whitewashed desert town, savoring beer and pizza at the navy canteen, haggling for souvenirs in the souks. They bought hammered gold jewelry by the ounce, rugs from afar, and the traditional Arab headgear that sailors called the “tablecloth and fan belt.”35
Fire Controlman Preston purchased a gold Seiko watch for his girlfriend, Shelley, and tried to relax. The long weeks on his CIC console had tied him in knots. He’d heard shipmates express frustration with the rules of engagement and talk about how they wished their ship could be free to fight back. Once in a while he’d even voiced such sentiments himself. That scared him.
“What was I turning into?” Preston wrote later. “I know I just wanted to go home, just like everyone else on the ship did, and if that meant being involved in all-out combat, then let’s take our chances and possibly set a new order in the Gulf.” Preston had to consciously remind himself on watch that he was “still a rational, logical, human being and that by my actions I could mess up everything some high-paid civilian and military decision makers were trying to do over here.”
It didn’t seem to do much good to try to talk about the pressure. He’d tried, once or twice, to describe what it felt like to sit at the missile console as an armed aircraft bore in. He wanted his shipmates to feel the fear, the exhilaration, the anger of knowing just how close the Roberts had come to “kill or be killed.” But no one wanted to hear it, or if they did, they blew it off like it was nothing. “Maybe it was their way of coping with something they had very little control over. I stopped telling people after a while,” Preston wrote.
But with ten weeks to go in the Gulf, he wondered whether he was going to keep it together. He worried that “I was going to flip out and maybe shoot when I wasn’t supposed to, or worse, not shoot when I should have.”36 He could not have known that the Roberts’s patrols would end much sooner than that.
ON 22 MARCH the Roberts weighed anchor, test-fired its guns, and headed back to the war zone. The frigate was slated for several weeks of convoy duty, starting with the mission designated EW88018.
Over the three-day weekend, violence had flared again. Iraqi war-planes had bombed two Norwegian supertankers, killing 90 percent of their sailors, and Iranian forces had hit another seven merchants.37 Even the weather had turned nasty. The Roberts headed into a desert shamal, battering eastward through fifteen-foot waves as sailors fell from their bunks and DC gear skittered from its racks.38
The convoy was already assembling in the Gulf of Oman. By the time Roberts arrived in the K-Mart parking lot, the USS Reuben James (FFG 57) had corralled the merchants: Gas Princess; the 290,000-ton supertanker Middletown; and—rarity of rarities—an honest-to-God unreflagged American ship, the 36,000-ton tanker Courier.39
The five-ship group got under way on 25 March, accompanied as usual by various ships and aircraft. Two minesweeping tugs, Hunter and Striker, led the way. Next came the Middletown, a double-hulled giant that stood the best chance of absorbing a mine without fatal consequences. Courier trailed it about a mile back. Last in line, as far away as its captain could be persuaded to stay, was the Gas Princess. Its spherical tanks held liquid natural gas at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit, giving Princess the look of a seagoing banana split. But no one laughed; the potential energy bottled up inside was equivalent to that of a small nuclear bomb.40 The Reuben James brought up the rear, ready to shoo off any Iranians who tried to sneak up from behind.
The tugs led the convoy through the strait and then broke off; a pair of fighter planes far above returned to the carrier Enterprise in the Gulf of Oman. But the convoy retained several uninvited participants: four merchants, none under U.S. flag. They tagged along, huddling close, hoping to sail through the danger zone under the convoy’s protective wing. Some of the ships sported real American flags; others merely ran up the crew’s best attempts at vexillogical forgery. Rinn had become accustomed to maritime hitchhikers flying red-white-and-blue banners with four stars or ten stripes.
They would jump in the line, and you were supposed to tell them to get out, but it was difficult to do. What were you going to do? They would ignore you.
I think everyone over there driving a destroyer or a frigate was very much averse to what the Iranians—and later the Iraqis when you got further up the line—were doing, so we tended to tell them to get out, and if they didn’t, not do anything about it, and escort them. They really didn’t cause problems. A lot of times, they’d tag on to the tail end of the formation. Other times, they’d sneak into a gap in the line, which made it even more difficult, and when they got to the point when they could peel off and go to their port, they’d simply turn and go.41
When Rinn was the convoy commander, he liked to put the Roberts in the middle of the line, where he could be reasonably safe from mines but able to react to any moving threat. The crew kept a live missile ready to go, pushed 76-mm rounds up below the breech, and scrutinized the radar screen. Any ship big enough to show up as a blip would get a stern message if it came within five miles: “You’re standing into harm’s way. We want you to stand clear.” When nothing threatened, the Roberts would take a spin around the miles-long string of ships, just to reassure the merchant crews that their U.S. Navy sheepdog stood ready to drive away the wolves.
“The hardest part of the mission is that you have to stay ready 24 hours a day. There’s no time, really, to let your guard down,” Rinn told a trio of reporters who came aboard for a few days as part of the Pentagon-run media pool. “I’m never going to allow my ship to be shot at and hit.” The Stark’s fate, he added, “is not lost on us.”42
But there were always surprises. One day, the Roberts’s Seahawk spotted a twenty-one-foot boat headed for the convoy. When it repeatedly ignored radio calls, the frigate prepared for a confrontation. But from what the aviators could see, the two mariners on board weren’t armed. Maybe they were Revolutionary Guard sailors testing the U.S. defenses, but maybe they were just fishermen in a hurry. So the pilot descended, and as the rotor blades whipped the seas into a furious chop, the little boat turned away and headed for Iranian waters.
Three days and 550 miles after setting out, convoy EW88018 reached its destination off Kuwait. As usual, each tanker captain sent over a token of thanks, a bottle of scotch or some such gift.43 Roberts dropped anchor in thirteen fathoms over a bottom of shell and mud, and waited for an oiler to refill its tanks.44
Over the next two weeks, the frigate escorted five more convoys. Some missions went without incident. Others, such as EW88023, did not. On 7 April the Roberts and the John A. Moore picked up four tankers off Bahrain and were ushering them toward the mouth of the Gulf when two Iranian warships converged on the group from the north. One was a Sa’am frigate; the other an aging U.S.–built, steam-powered Sumner-class destroyer. Both were painting the convoy with fire-control radar.
Rinn described it later as an “immediate problem.” The Roberts had to get between the convoy and the Iranians, while staying positioned to fire on both of them with missiles or guns. Moving matchbooks on a tabletop to retrace the curving paths of the combatants, he described the engagement:
I cannot wait on this. I have to take the initiative or they will definitely outfox me.
I had on two occasions watched the British escort convoys, and had seen Iranians get inside of them and just run roughshod over them, run all through the formation, and they were powerless to stop them. So I maneuvered up very quickly and crossed the formation, and came after the Iranian [frigate] who was to the north. He needed to break off, or I was going to engage him. I brought a missile up immediately. He questioned my right to do that, and I told them they were both illuminating their fire control radars on me, and I said, “I’m going to give you a five-minute warning to disengage and move away.”
About three minutes later, the Iranian frigate turned away, heading north.
As soon as he did, I turned toward this [destroyer] guy and told him immediately that I was going to engage him if he didn’t disengage—keeping an eye on the Sa’am frigate the whole time. It was a very bad situation, and I think this whole evolution was done at about twenty-eight to thirty knots. We were moving very fast.
The second ship seemed much less interested in getting into it. As soon as I turned—he was an older ship—he turned and started moving [westward].
The beauty of that was, his missile launchers were all forward. On this first ship, his launchers were aft, maybe. When the second ship turned, his illuminators were blocked. I could tell as they went off, they were incapable of engaging. As number two headed south, the guy I was more concerned about was the gas turbine ship, because he was faster than me—forty-knot-capable—and could turn right back around. So I turned and came back at him.45
For two hours the Roberts kept its sights on both Iranians. Rinn had planned his attack, should either one swivel guns or missiles to fire: take out the destroyer, which was a few miles distant, with a trio of Standard missiles with fragmentation warheads; then go after the nearer Sa’am gunfire. It didn’t come to that; two hours after the engagement began, the Iranians backed off and disappeared over the horizon.
ON 14 APRIL 1988 the Roberts dropped off the two tankers of EW88025 and headed back south, following the convoy track in reverse. The frigate was slated to rendezvous and refuel with the oiler USS San Jose (AFS 7) in mid-Gulf and then would head back north for barge escort duty. Rinn dashed off a note to a Charleston-based friend asking him to order birthday flowers for Pam.
The ship was halfway through its deployment: three months gone, three to go. In the past ninety-four days, it had spent eighty-nine days at sea and had completed eight convoy assignments.46 The crew was weary but still on top of their game, and they were proud of the accolades their ship had received.
Weeks earlier, the crew had submitted its entry for the squadron Battle E awards. The list of plaudits and accomplishments was rather breathtaking:
November 1986: navy shipbuilding inspectors call Roberts best new FFG to date.
May 1987: highest damage-control scores ever recorded by Norfolk testers.
June–July 1987: best ship in two years at Guantanamo Bay, with best passive antisubmarine warfare scores ever seen.
August 1987: best missile firing in FleetEx 4-87.
November 1987: aviation inspectors find no problems, a first for a frigate.
January 1988: deployed five months ahead of schedule.
The package noted various Roberts dispatches that had been forwarded to all Atlantic Fleet ships, and the memo that had been added to the Newport course for prospective commanding officers.47 It went on for pages, and may have been a bit of overkill.
But when the results arrived in early April, they were everything Rinn and his crew were shooting for. For the October 1986 –March 1988 battle efficiency awards cycle, Samuel B. Roberts earned Mission E’s in eight categories: antiair warfare, antisubmarine warfare, antisurface warfare, electronic warfare, engineering, and three others. Only one other of Surface Group Four’s sixteen ships equaled that accomplishment.
Best of all, Roberts had won the squadron’s Battle E, beating out seven other frigates.48 The awards were public acknowledgement of the Roberts’s excellent performance, and set the frigate among the fleet’s elite. Van Hook’s engineers lost no time affixing a poster-sized red “E” to each side of the ship’s stack.
Aquilino sent his warm regards and wished them well in the second half of their deployment. “Congratulations on reaching ‘Humpday,’” the commodore wrote from Newport. He noted that the Roberts families were preparing for the traditional celebratory dinner that marked the halfway point. Organized by several crew members’ wives, it was set for the evening of 14 April in the officers’ club at the naval station. Among the featured attractions would be Ford’s first videotape, which had just arrived in Rhode Island. “It’s downhill from here,” Aquilino wrote.49 He could not have been more wrong.
A FEW DAYS earlier, the Roberts had passed through the central Gulf, the lone warship assigned to the two tankers of EW88025.50 North of Bahrain, they passed a group of American mine hunters at work. This was somewhat alarming.
The mine threat seemed to have receded since the minesweepers were rushed to the region in the wake of the Bridgeton attack. Mines had damaged or sunk seven ships in 1987, but there had been no incidents at all in 1988. The sweepers could take partial credit; they had found a mine on their first day of Gulf operations and had since cleared several dozen devices from three fields. An equal share of credit belonged to the forces that kept the black spheres from going in the water at all: the barge crews, Eager Glacier spy planes, army aviators, navy warships.
And yet the threat remained. Every week or so, a merchant sailor or naval lookout found a lone mine drifting with the current or anchored in place. Three such mines had been spotted in a recent ten-day stretch. The Roberts’s own helo had spotted a drifter as the ship made its way toward the mysterious refueling off Oman. Iran Ajr was at the bottom of the Gulf, but everyone knew how easy it was to turn almost any ship into a minelayer.
So what was going on in the central Gulf? Rinn had received no warning about mines nor a recommended Q-route—a swept and safe course. He put in a call about it to Middle East Force, but received no reply. Long after it might have helped, he learned that the minesweepers were responding to a CIA report of Iranian mines in the vicinity.51