In DC Central, Ens. Ken Rassler could begin to read a rough outline of the ship’s condition in the grease marks scratched on his deck charts. To Rassler, Sorensen’s successor as damage control assistant, the picture wasn’t particularly encouraging.
Ten minutes after the blast, the Roberts was dead in the water, its gas turbines damaged beyond recovery. The engine room was flooded to its upper level, AMR 3 to the overhead—spaces that totaled nearly one-fifth of the ship’s length. The amount of seawater already inside the ship would cover a tennis court to a depth of sixteen feet. More was coming in every second. There were fires in both compartments, and probably in other spaces as well. Smoke was pouring from the exhaust stack. The deckhouse had cracked in two places, and the aft end of the helicopter hangars had come loose from its foundation on the main deck.
Thanks to Tilley, Rassler was no longer doing his job in the dark. But three other generators were still offline. One of them was inundated in AMR 3, along with a pair of fire pumps, desalinators, and water chillers that cooled internal spaces and combat systems. The other two generators were in AMR 2, where the seawater was several feet high and rising.1 If the ship were to survive, someone would have to stop that flow.
Around the corner in Central Control, Walker was trying to resurrect his electrical control panel. He had been delighted when the power came back on, but juice was useless unless he could route it to fire pumps and whatever else needed it. For that he needed a working console. The chief turned to Wallingford, who had taken Bent’s place as watch electrician. The younger man was flipping switches, trying to bring the dead panel back to life.
“Chief, it’s all fucked up,” Wallingford said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Wally, I don’t give a fuck what you do, but you better get that thing running again.”
“You got any ideas?”
Walker looked around. He hoped the console wasn’t actually damaged, but rather had simply been cut off from its electrical supply when the engine room flooded. His eyes landed on the floor buffer, a fluffy-footed instrument the sailors loved to hate.
“Yes,” Walker said. “You see that buffer over there? Cut the fucking cord off that buffer.”
The chief explained his idea: take a fifty-foot length and strip the leads, producing a long extension cord. Next, find a connection to the panel’s power supply by severing its cable to the now-useless battery pack. Twist the buffer cord and battery lead together. Now you’ve got a console with a handy plug-in cord. Start trying 120-volt outlets until you find one that works.
“We can do that?”
“Fucking right we can do that,” Walker said. “Nobody’s down here to tell us we can’t.” Moments later, lights rippled across the electrical control console.
It was one small step, but Walker’s head was still spinning. The damage was far beyond anything he’d seen before, beyond even the sadistic imaginations of Gitmo instructors. The chief paused, unsure. His eye fell on a red, well-thumbed three-ring binder, and he pulled it from the shelf. This was the master light-off checklist, the MLOC, or “em-loc.” It listed the sequences of steps that would get the ship’s systems running, enumerating in endless detail just how to start the power plant—in short, it was a recipe book for bringing a ship to life. Walker had used it and its cousins thousands of times, every time he readied a ship to leave its pier.
Amid the chaos of a crippled ship, the binder was a lifesaver. As Walker scanned its pages, his mind cleared. To get the radars to work, he needed to get air conditioning back online. Air conditioning required compressors and dehydrators. Those required electrical power, which required generators and switchboards.
The chief took a few moments to organize his plan and then began to dispatch his shipmates on repair missions.2 Within just a few minutes, both of the generators in AMR 2 were back online. Number two came up first; after a quick repair job on a malfunctioning circuit breaker, number three started pumping out electricity as well. Soon one, then two, then three fire pumps started up. Fifteen minutes after the mine blast, seawater began to flow into the hoses atop the deckhouse.3
BENT HAD LEFT Central Control a few minutes earlier, just after the power came back on. Smoke was still drifting into the space from the engine room hatch, and the electrician had stepped across the passageway to close it. But as he moved to seal off the doorway, he heard another call for help.
For a second time, Bent ventured into the smoky engine room. The explosion had shattered every lightbulb in the space, so he picked his way onto the catwalk with his flashlight. He followed the yelling, and realized with a shock that a shipmate was trapped under the floor grate. It was Perez, badly burned but still struggling for his life.
Bent could see the chief’s oil-soaked head and hands through the grate. He dropped to his knees and tugged at the metal lattice. It did not budge. He searched for the bolts that anchored the grate to its metal frame, looking for exposed nuts that might come off with a wrench. To his dismay, he found only J-shaped bolts that could not be loosened from above. Bent knew he needed more help.
Leaving Perez, the electrician hurried to Repair Locker 3. He rounded up Chief Engineman George Cowan and Electrician’s Mate 2nd Class Ed Copeland. The crowbar was gone from the locker, but they grabbed an armful of other tools and headed back to the engine room. They flicked on battle lanterns, the battery-powered lamps that resembled small yellow lunchboxes, and began to attack the grate. Nothing worked. Their bolt cutter’s jaws could get no purchase on the smooth metal loops of the J-bolts. The three rescuers passed a succession of wrenches to Perez—all the wrong size. They tried a few ineffective whacks with a sledgehammer. And the fuel-drenched surroundings were hardly the place to use the blowtorch. “We were scared the place was going to blow. You could see the burning embers, hear all kind of weird noises,” Bent said later.
Copeland began to move down the catwalk, peering through the smoke, kicking at the grates. A few steps past Perez, he felt something give. He rammed a screwdriver under one of the J-bolts and yanked on it. It moved. He called to Bent and Cowan, and the three men tugged the grate free.
Now Perez had an escape route, an odyssey of three yards. He would have to duck under the fouled seawater and swim through catwalk supports and cableways to get to the opening. It would have been no easy task for an uninjured man, and Perez was badly hurt. Second-degree burns covered some 40 percent of his body. His eyes were filled with diesel fuel. In the initial fall, he had bruised a lung and fractured three vertebrae.
Perez took a deep and painful breath and dropped beneath the surface. Feeling his way through the submerged wreckage, the chief pulled himself hand over hand toward his shipmates, who beckoned with their battle lanterns and bellowed encouragement.
Eternal seconds dragged by. Then Perez surfaced. His three rescuers pulled him from the water, wrapped their arms around him, and helped the injured chief hobble toward Repair Locker 3.4 Their shipmate had endured a quarter of an hour in burning water. His injuries were far more severe than the ship’s corpsman could treat. If Perez were to have a chance at survival, he had to get off the Roberts.
ON THE BRIDGE, damage reports were coming in faster. Water was pouring through the fractured engine room bulkhead into AMR 2. There was a report of seawater in AMR 3, the aft machinery room—again, the words were something like “totally flooded”—and Rinn still couldn’t bring himself to believe it. But some minutes after the blast, the captain was beginning to add up the clues that arrived from around his battered ship. He imagined the hole in the hull, picturing it about the size of a home stereo. He was off by about two orders of magnitude, but his visions helped. He began assembling a mental picture of the ship and its systems and its people. If that’s what happened, here’s what we can do about it . . .
At least the muster reports were reassuring. Every single member of the crew was alive, even the sailors in the engine room, which seemed like some kind of miracle. And word was also arriving of the DC efforts starting up around the ship. Hose teams were moving out inside the ship and atop the superstructure, some following the leads from Rassler and the CCS engineers, others simply reacting to the flames before their eyes. In the main storeroom, aft of AMR 3, a shoring team was sawing up beams to hold the rear bulkhead steady. Down in AMR 2, a patching team was attacking the leaky bulkhead. But there was still too much Rinn didn’t know.
When word arrived from Central Control that the power had stabilized, the captain ordered Palmer to turn the surface-search radar back on and told him to get working on the fire control radar. A few minutes later, Palmer reported that fire control was back up as well, and the ship could once again track targets.5 Rinn told him to call the pilot of the Iranian P-3. “Make him understand that if he comes near us, we’re going to shoot him down,” he said.
It was far from clear whether Roberts could back up that threat. Palmer ordered the gunners to power up the 76-mm mount, and the automatic feeder loaded rounds without a hitch, which was a good sign. But there was no easy way to diagnose hidden damage, the kind that might cause the gun to blow up if fired. Moreover, the 76-mm turret and the fire control radar sat on opposite sides of the crack in the superstructure. Shooting from a misaligned radar would be like aiming a rifle at arm’s length. Could the ship actually hit anything?
This, and a thousand other questions, told Rinn he needed to see things for himself. It wasn’t an easy decision. In battle, a skipper generally belonged on the bridge or in CIC, where target data flowed and where a captain could communicate with his crew and to his own commanders.6 But the current problems had far more to do with things inside the ship, so the radars and other sensors were useless. And the reports coming over the sound-powered phone could tell him only so much. Rinn told the .50-cal gunners on the bridge wing to keep a sharp eye on the horizon, gave the deck to Eckelberry, and headed below.7
In CCS, Walker told Rinn that the main thing he worried about was the short circuits that might kick another generator or two offline. Without high-pressure air—the flasks had been destroyed in the main engine room—there might be no way to get them back up and running. On his way out, Rinn stopped by Burbine, who was shivering from his burns. “Captain, are we going to be okay?”
“We’re going to be okay,” the CO told his shipmate. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
Back in CIC, Rinn put in a call to the Coronado. He’d radioed the Middle East Force flagship once already since the mine blast. The conversation had been brief, because he didn’t have much to say: We’ve hit a mine, no reports of any deaths, damage to the ship unclear. This time Admiral Less came on the line. The news that Roberts had stumbled onto a minefield had reached the Middle East Force commander as he’d walked in the door of his small house outside Manama. His chief of staff reported that Rinn was about to start backing down the Roberts’s wake. “He’s the captain,” Less responded, “and that sounds as if that’s as good as you can probably do in a situation like that.” The admiral had raced back to the Coronado through sun-baked city streets.8
Now, some twenty minutes after the mine detonation, Less asked for a status report. Rinn told him things were not looking particularly good. The engine room was gone and there was flooding in AMR 3. But he said all his primary combat systems were operational, and the ship was ready to defend itself.
But, Rinn told the admiral, he was going to need medevac helicopters, and fast. The Roberts’s SH-60 had been knocked out, and there were more burn cases than the ship’s corpsman could handle. The clock was ticking on the Golden Hour, and people were going to go into shock.
Less told him help was on the way, in the form of the amphibious transport dock USS Trenton (LPD 14) and its marine helicopters. Rinn rogered and hung up.9
THE FIGHT TO save AMR 2 had begun within minutes of the mine blast. The phone buzzed in Repair Locker 2, and Senior Chief Frost, the locker leader and ship’s senior enlisted sailor, picked it up. While he talked, Rick Raymond and other members of Repair 2 waited in the starboard passageway. Is there another mine out there, ready to explode? Raymond wondered. The half-inch hull plates had never seemed so thin.10
Frost hung up. The call was from DC Central, which needed someone to confirm a report of flooding in the auxiliary machine space. The job properly belonged to Repair Locker 5, but most of that team was already up on the deckhouse laying out hose and getting ready to fight the stack fire. Others were rescuing Chief Perez; still others had been injured in the blast.
Frost sent five of his men down to check it out. The team was led by Kevin Ford and included Rick Raymond, Mess Specialist 1st Class Scott Frank, Radioman 2nd Class Gary Jackson, and Dick Fridley, the boatswain’s mate first class. They scooped some DC gear from their locker—mallets, wooden plugs, wedges—and headed out. They trooped through the mess room, swung open a soundproofed door, and headed down a ladder.11
Thirty feet long, AMR 2 was one of the bigger spaces on the ship, a two-deck compartment only slightly smaller than the engine room. Much of the space was taken up by the soundproofed enclosures that held generators numbers two and three. There was plenty of other gear as well: chilled-water circulators, fuel filters, and most crucially, two of the ship’s fire pumps.
The upper deck looked okay to Ford and his team, so they headed down a second ladder. They expected to see the ochre-painted bilge stringers several feet below the deck plates. Instead, there was only black water, six inches under their boots. But the sight of flooded bilges could not compare with the shock of seeing water pouring from holes in the aft bulkhead. The steel plates that separated AMR 2 from the inundated main engine room had buckled inward. Water was pouring from a half dozen cracks and punctures. Several holes were the size of basketballs. This forty-five-foot stretch of battered steel, obstructed by pipes, equipment, and the two generator enclosures, would become the front line in the battle to save the Roberts.
Raymond stepped past the pumps and panels that protruded like islands from the flooded bilges. He took aim at a two-inch split seam, wrestled a wooden wedge into the gushing water, and began pounding it into place with a mallet. This was standard DC technique; Raymond had done this dozens of times in the Buttercup. But the steel bulkhead responded in a way he’d never seen in the simulator. It split again, opening a new gusher about a foot above the original hole. The words of an instructor came back to him: “It only splits like that when there’s a ton of water behind the bulkhead.” Just how bad is it in here? Raymond wondered.12
Next to him, Ford was wrestling with another hole. The awkward, cramped space made his job far tougher than anything the simulator had ever thrown at him. The punctures and splits were obscured, hidden behind water pipes, fuel valves, and electrical junction boxes.
Raymond lay down atop an electrical distribution panel and reached down behind it to get to another leak. When he got up, Jackson was staring at him. “I didn’t want to tell you, but that thing was smoking,” Raymond recalled Jackson saying. “I was just waiting for you to get electrocuted.”
Soon, there was more bad news from the number two generator enclosure. The blast had shoved the aft bulkhead upward, opening splits as it bowed. Water was spurting onto the diesel’s engine block.
The sailors hammered away, but the wooden plugs weren’t working. In desperation they looked around for other materials, softer ones that would be less likely to cause new holes. In other ships they might have found rags floating up from the bilges, but the Roberts was kept too clean for that. So they began to tear off their clothes—chambray shirts, white hats, even their coveralls—and stuffed those in the holes. The water spit some of them right out, but others stuck.
It was several minutes before anyone outside AMR 2 knew how bad things were getting in the ship’s second-biggest space. Damage control doctrine called for one man in the repair party to don a pair of sound-powered phones and keep in touch with DC Central, but Ford and his team were too busy for that. It was too noisy for the phones anyway; the sailors were shouting just to hear one another. The big diesels were still roaring along, their soundproof doors open while Ford’s team battled the flooding. The aural assault of thirty-two cylinders was almost too much to bear.
Nevertheless, a steady stream of shipmates was soon flowing into AMR 2’s crowded space. At first they had joined Ford’s team at the aft bulkhead and lent a hand in plugging the leaks. But the chief cook soon found that the extra pluggers were more trouble than they were worth; everyone kept tripping over one another in the narrow spaces between the equipment.13 But there was certainly plenty else for them to do. Lt. (jg) John Sims, the main propulsion assistant, had arrived to help direct traffic. He assigned some sailors to ferry status reports to DC Central. Others he asked to fetch equipment: wooden and metal shoring beams to buttress the damaged bulkhead, gas-powered pumps and drainage hoses. It was time to start getting some of the rising seawater out of the bilge.
Within minutes, several sailors had rigged a pair of eductors, the two-foot pipelike devices that used pressurized water to generate suction. The supply hoses ran from nearby fireplugs; the wastewater hoses snaked up two levels from the bilge, across the mess deck, and out to a discharge fitting in the hull. But the eductors required water pressure to work—and at that moment, none of the ship’s fire pumps was operating. Two of five were underwater; the others had shut down with the electrical brownout. The sailors waited anxiously for the Central Control engineers to restabilize the electrical grid.14
They did not wait long. The eductors and hoses had been rigged no more than a minute when one fire pump, then the other, hummed to life just ten feet from the aft bulkhead. Seawater filled the Roberts’s eight-inch fire mains, branching into the feeder pipes that carried it to dozens of fireplugs around the ship. The water pressurized the hoses of the fire teams who waited atop the deckhouse. Dials showed the pressure at 150 pounds per square inch, right on target.
In AMR 2, water flowed into eductors. Their intakes burped and began to suck dark liquid from the bilges. Fifteen minutes after water had begun to flood the engineering spaces, the Roberts crew was starting to pump it off the ship. But all the eductors on board wouldn’t keep the water from rising if the DC teams couldn’t get some patches on the gushing holes. Ford realized that none of the hard patches they had been forming were going to work. And the shirts and coveralls were simply too small to stanch the flow. He needed something bigger. What, on a ship, was big and soft?
The cook had an idea. He picked a couple of the extra guys, told them to go get pillows and mattresses. And he added a kicker, intended to take the edge off the rising tension: Ford told them to go get the bedding off their chiefs’ racks.
The sailors returned several minutes later with broad smiles and several blue foam mattresses. Raymond emerged from the generator enclosure, folded one of the six-foot cushions in half, and carried it back in. He pushed the three-foot foam square at a corner leak and wedged it into place with a four-by-four-foot beam. Water was still flowing vigorously down the bulkhead, but at least it wasn’t splashing on the diesel. Raymond rounded out the patch with a couple of pillows someone had carried down the ladder. It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t even stop the leak, but it fixed one problem, and that was progress. But seawater was still coming in faster than they were pumping it out.15
AFTER RINN GOT off the phone with Admiral Less, the captain decided it was time for a look at AMR 2. He waded through the fire hoses that crisscrossed the mess deck and headed down into the machinery space. On the lower level, the captain stepped off the ladder into shin-deep water. Oh, fuck, this is worse than I thought. He could see that Ford and his team had done plenty already. Two big blue mattresses were pinned against the leaky bulkhead by steel shoring beams. Other holes were plugged by various bits of uniforms, boards, and even an entire toolbox. Two eductors were pumping away. But there was still plenty of water coming through.
Two sailors came by in their skivvies, having sacrificed their coveralls to the damage-control effort. Both were overweight; the captain recognized them as members of the ship’s weight-loss program. “You guys look pretty shitty with your clothes on, but this is almost unbearable,” he told them.
Rinn found Ford. The situation didn’t look so good, the captain said. “That’s nothing,” said the cook, and led Rinn into the generator enclosure. Raymond’s patch was keeping the seawater from spurting onto the diesel engine, but the wall was soaked.
“They’ve clearly got their work cut out for them,” Rinn recalled,
and I think it’s important that they know the gravity of the situation. I gather them together, not taking a lot of time, but a moment.
I said, “We’ve lost the main engine room, we’ve lost AMR 3. We can’t lose any more spaces. We’re going to hold GSK [General Store Keeper, the ship’s largest storeroom], I hear. But you’ve got to hold this bulkhead. If you don’t, we’re going to sink, and we’re going to sink very fast, and you guys are going to die right here. Simple as that. The bottom reality is, if you’re going to bail, do it now, because I need you here.”
The most amazing thing was, here I am telling these twenty-year-old kids that their reality was, this could be your last five minutes on the face of the earth, and you can die right here. It’s going to be pretty awful, to die in this stinking space. Not a one blinked, not a one said anything, not a one said, “Shit, that’s terrible; I’ve got to get out of here and save myself.”
Almost to a man, with Ford, they looked at me and said, “We got it. You get out of here; you’ve got other things to worry about. We’re not going to lose this space. We’re going to save it.”
I was incredibly buoyed by that.
Ford told the captain to give his team twenty minutes; they’d have things under control. “Okay, you got it,” Rinn told him. As the captain turned to leave, the strains of rock music caught his ear. In the din of the diesel and the yelling and the watery rush, there was also a boom box, perched on a refrigeration unit, blasting out tunes by the rock band Journey.
Halfway up the ladder, Rinn turned around. Raymond thought he looked worried. But for just an instant, the captain felt lighthearted. The music reminded him of a joke that had started after his teenage daughters visited the ship. The captain fears no man, the sailors said, but what he really fears is that he’ll come back to the house one night and see one of us in a Trans Am in his driveway with a Journey tape playing and his daughter in the front seat.
Rinn smiled. “Even in this situation, your choice of music sucks,” he told the room. The sailors laughed and the captain left. He wondered whether he’d see them again.