The DC effort atop the deckhouse had begun while the mammoth fireball was still dissipating into a charcoal smudge on the late-afternoon sky. Flaming debris fluttered down to the deck, and sailors soon stamped the pocket-sized blazes into extinction. But there was clearly a more serious fire to fight. Dark fumes boiled from the stack and wafted up from cracks in the deck. Somewhere in the steel maze beneath their feet, flames were spreading.
The response by the sailors atop the deckhouse, mostly signalmen and quartermasters, was all but automatic. Treading paths worn in countless drills, they flaked out hoses into long canvas lengths on the deck, screwed them into knee-high fireplugs, and attached the heavy brass nozzles. Signalman 1st Class Chuck Dumas and other petty officers directed traffic as junior sailors set up fire parties. Within a few minutes of the blast, a pair of hose teams was ready to go: nozzleman, two hosemen, plus three or four helpers behind. A team leader gave the signal to charge the hose. Someone turned the valve on the fireplug. Nothing came out.
What was the problem? No one knew. But they had seen this before, in drills. When a fire hose lost pressure, it often signified a gash or leak in one of the ship’s fire mains, the eight-inch copper-nickel pipes that carried water from fire pump to fireplug. Someone in the repair party would go find the leak and turn the nearest cutoff valve, closing the pipe as a surgeon might clamp a bleeding artery. The hose would be connected to the nearest plug that still had pressurized water, and the battle against the flames would go on.
The Roberts sailors soon determined that there wasn’t a working fireplug aft of the mast, but they found pressure farther forward. Willing hands unscrewed fittings from dry plugs, broke out more hoses, and began daisy-chaining them forward in fifty-foot lengths. In moments, someone opened the tap on another fireplug, and the nozzleman drew on his control ring. A stream of cooling liquid arced over the ten-foot lip of the stack and disappeared into the smoke.
The pressure wasn’t great, because of the missing fire pumps and the long draw through 1 1/2-inch hoses. But it was a start. A minute later another hose team opened up on the blaze.
Then the water flow slowed to a trickle and stopped once more. Someone yelled back from the pilothouse: the electricity was out, and the fire pumps with it. The stream of smoke emanating from the stack became a flood of boiling black vapor. The deck plates grew warm beneath their boots.
The power returned as suddenly as it had vanished—thanks to whom the firefighters did not know—and the fireplugs began once again to operate. But the pressure was even worse than before. Somewhere, something was definitely wrong with the fire main system.
But there was more than one way to skin this cat. Two decks down, on the quarterdeck, groups of sailors under the direction of Chief Sonarman John Carr connected hoses to a pair of P-250 gas-powered pumps. One pump drew seawater from the port side; the other from starboard, and both sent it up to the hose teams two decks above. At about four gallons a second, the pressure was weaker than a fireplug’s, but it was all they firefighters had. They resumed their work, playing the relatively light flow of water over a stack fire that was clearly getting worse.1
GUNNER REINERT HAD hustled aft from the bridge when the mine went off, stomping a few pieces of flaming insulation into charred fluff along the way. Then he stopped, caught by the sight of controlled bedlam before him. His junior shipmates were throwing themselves into the damage control effort with impressive abandon. Looks just like a drill, he thought.2
Twenty minutes after the blast, the topside firefighting effort was going full bore, dumping dozens of gallons of seawater down the stack each minute. But the smoke was only getting thicker. Reinert tried to picture the fire’s progress through the superstructure. By this point, he figured, the heat must be spreading from the engine room through the ship’s steel beams and plates—but to where? He looked down at the cracks in the deck. One of them extended all the way across the top of the deckhouse, snaking past the covered voids that descended to the engine room, exhaling hot gray fumes along its entire length. The fissure was less than a dozen feet from the 76-mm gun turret. Suddenly, Reinert began to worry.
The munitions stacked in a warship’s magazines can be as dangerous to their own crew as to their targets. Exposed to the heat of a shipboard fire, they can explode. The United States lost several ships in World War II when bombs and shells cooked off. The navy failed to absorb these costly lessons, and cook-offs killed scores more aboard the aircraft carriers Enterprise and USS Forrestal (CV 59) in the 1960s. Those disasters had at last galvanized efforts to create heat-resistant munitions, and so the shells and warheads aboard the Roberts were designed to keep their cool.
But Reinert wasn’t taking chances. Descending to the main deck, he stopped by the torpedo magazine. It contained the ship’s Mk 46 torpedoes—each eight feet long, thicker than a telephone pole, and tipped with ninety-six pounds of high explosive. The magazine also held Zuni rockets brought aboard for the army helicopters. Zunis had a bad name in the navy; earlier versions had caused both of the carrier fires.3
This mag should be safe from the fire, Reinert reasoned. A thwartships passageway separated it from the fires boiling up through the exhaust plenum. But when he laid a hand on the aft bulkhead, the aluminum was warm. He sent for buckets and mops, and sailors to wield them. His instructions were brief: swab the warm bulkheads with cool seawater, and don’t stop until everyone else puts the fires out. It would be a nerve-wracking job, standing fire watch amid deadly weapons, but someone had to do it.
The chief headed up one deck to the 76-mm magazine. The space backed up to the exhaust plenum, and he expected warm bulkheads. But when he undogged the hatch, plastered with red and gray warnings, the air itself was warm, and his nostrils picked up a whiff of smoke. Reinert looked around. The magazine held hundreds of two-foot shells stacked vertically in metal racks. The blast had knocked two racks loose from their mounts. He stepped past the gun’s rotary feeder, a massive cylinder that dominated the space. Dark wisps wafted through a three-inch rent in the aft bulkhead. The chief laid his knuckles on the metal plate. It was not merely warm; it was hot.4
Mops and swabs would not fix this. The obvious move was to evacuate the shells from the magazine, but that decision had to come from the commanding officer, and the sooner the better. Reinert sent word to DC Central and waited for the response. The wall thermometer registered one hundred degrees.
Rinn hated to give up his most flexible weapon, but it was far from clear that the gun could still shoot accurately, or safely, or even at all. And he knew that if the shells cooked off, the battle to save the Roberts would come to a quick and unsuccessful end. The captain passed the order back to Reinert: toss the shells overboard.5
The chief sent for help—lots of help. As the word flashed around the ship, several sailors converged on the magazine and scrambled to take their places in a bucket-brigade line. The shells, each a fifty-pound cylinder of brass, fuse, and high explosive, were soon moving from hand to hand. Gunners muscled them one at a time from their racks and passed them out the magazine’s doublewide hatch. Still cradled in their packing cases, the shells moved around a corner and down a ladder, through yet more arms to the port quarterdeck. One by one, the munitions went over the side and disappeared with a splash.
Inside the magazine, Reinert sweated with his men. He didn’t tell them what he had learned from DC Central: that there was no water pressure in the sprinklers. If fire broke out, they would get no help from the automatic system, which had become just another bit of emergency gear knocked out by the mine.
The temperature kept going up: 110 . . . 115 . . . 120.
IN CIC, RINN put in another call to the Coronado. When Admiral Less got on the horn, Rinn described the loss of the main engine room and propulsion, the fires, the flooding, the wounded sailors. Less asked, “Considering your situation, what do you think about remaining with the ship?” For years afterward, instructors in Naval Academy leadership classes would ask their midshipman students to ponder that decision. The question is: was the prudent choice to get the crew off the ship before it went down and took them with it? To Rinn, then and later, the answer was crystal clear.
Was I confident that we were going to save the ship? No. Did I think we had a fighting chance? Yeah. Did I think that was the best decision? Yeah. Was I going to give up my ship? Not a chance. They don’t put people in charge of ships in the United States Navy who are going to abandon them.
In fact, it wasn’t clear to me that if I gave the order to abandon ship, many guys would have gone. They were sticking around, and they were into it. It’s a decision made based on all that I know, but one made based on faith in the crew, and their faith in me.
And as bad as things were, piling into life rafts would make them far worse. The Roberts was still in a minefield; the rafts would have been at the mercy of current and winds. There were sharks and sea snakes out there. And who would come rescue them? No, the best option was to stay and fight.
Rinn’s reply came back in a flash. “I haven’t thought about that at all. I have no desire to leave the ship. We’ll stay with the ship and fight it. Right now, I have no other choice. In a nutshell, we’re in trouble.” It was the last time Less brought up the notion.6
“Do you have anything else to pass?” the admiral asked.
“No higher honor,” the captain said, and signed off. He headed up to the bridge, where he gathered the nearby officers. “I want you to give me a rundown,” he began. “Here’s what I already know: we’ve lost the main engine room, there is flooding in AMR 2, but it seems to be under control; there is flooding in AMR 3.”
Rinn stopped. His officers were staring at him.
“We don’t have ‘flooding’ in AMR 3,” someone said. “AMR 3 is gone!”
The captain said, “You’re telling me my other main engineering space is gone? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” they said.7
Rinn stepped out onto the bridge wing and looked aft. Smoke was still pouring from the stack and the cracks in the deck. The sun was getting low on the horizon. Something was bothering him, something tickling the back of his mind, telling him he’d forgotten something important.
He decided to take another look around the ship. Down on the mess deck, the floor was covered with glass shards. The sight of the soda vending machine reminded him that the ship was out of drinking water. He told someone from the supply department to open up the machine and distribute the cans to thirsty sailors.
Then Rinn headed aft. As he picked his way through the midships passageway, steaming hot water dripped on his bellcap and flowed down the bulkhead. It was the runoff from the fire hoses two levels above him, heated by the deck plates. Water was pouring into the stack, but also running across the deck, draining through the gaps down into the hull. This is an odd situation, he thought. Water above me, fire below.
On his previous tour of the ship, Rinn had walked onto the flight deck and pulled aside Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Kim Sandle. A member of the flight-quarters team, Sandle had nearly been decapitated by the helo’s flexing rotor blades during the mine blast. Rinn had a vital task for the serious young sailor. The ship’s number, 58, was painted on the side of the ship about four feet below the flight deck and—under normal conditions—about nine above the waterline. The ship was riding low, and Rinn had told Sandle to watch the number. He wanted to know just how bad things got.
Now the captain pulled the nearest phone from its hook and called the poop deck.
“Where’s the water?” he asked Sandle.
“I don’t know,” the boatswain replied.
This ticked Rinn off. I gave him a direct order and he can’t tell me where the water is?
“The reason I can’t tell you the relationship of the numbers to the water,” the petty officer said, “is because they’re underneath the water, Captain.”
This was surprising. They said there wasn’t any flooding in the main storeroom. Is there water in some space, some void I don’t know about?
“Sandle, how bad is it?”
“Captain, if I get down on my hands and knees on the poop deck, I can put my hand in the water.”
Rinn looked down at his shoes, wet with seawater.
Something came back to him. It was a lesson as old as the Normandie and as recent as the Stark, concisely stated in Eric Sorensen’s little blue DC handbook: “One of the hazards of fighting a fire aboard a ship is that it is possible to sink the ship while putting out the fire.”
Rinn realized with a shock that his damage control teams were putting ton after ton of seawater into the skin of his heavily damaged frigate. We’re sinking ourselves!
The captain charged back up to the bridge. It was 5:23 PM, about thirty-five minutes after the explosion. He ordered the quartermaster to make a note in the deck log: the captain orders the cessation of fire-fighting efforts aboard the ship.
Before the sentence was two seconds out of his mouth, Rinn felt a hand clamp onto his arm. It was the XO: “Can I talk to you on the bridge wing?”
Eckelberry waited until the pair was out of easy earshot of the rest of the bridge team. Then he said, “Have you lost your mind? What are you doing?”
Rinn said, “No, we don’t have to worry about the fire. In a little while, we’re going to be underwater and the fires won’t matter anymore. We’ve got to stop putting water into the skin of the ship. We’ve got to hold back on that until we can get control of the flooding.”
Eckelberry relented, rogered, and stepped back inside. Soon, the word was going out over the 1MC: stop fighting the fires until further notice. The ship’s survival depended on the damage control team down in Auxiliary Machine Room 2.
AMR 2 WAS beginning to look like the mine had blown up the ship’s laundry instead of the engine room. Along with a small pile of mattresses, there were pale blue-striped sheets and pillows, plus random items of clothing. But more orthodox damage control gear was also making its way down the ladders. Ford and his team were especially grateful to get metal shoring beams. By placing one end of the adjustable beams against something sturdy, they found they could extend the other to—finally—hold soft patches in place. When they ran out of extendable beams, they called for wooden four-by-fours and handsaws. The results weren’t the textbook examples of shoring they’d completed in Guantanamo training, but things were moving too rapidly for perfect carpentry.
Somewhere in the madness, someone had noticed that diesel number three was running out of lube oil. The fluid cooled the diesel; without it, the engine would soon overheat and fail.8 There wasn’t time to diagnose the ailment; they settled for symptomatic treatment. The sailor rigged up a hand pump and hoses, connecting the nearby lube-oil tank to the diesel’s filling port, and took turns cranking away at the pump. Joe Baker, who had found his way down into AMR 2 after Tilley got his diesel running, took one of the first shifts. The diesel’s appetite for lube oil had turned voracious. Gallon after gallon of oil flowed from the tank to the engine, propelled by the arms of one sailor after another. It would be hours before they discovered that the diesel wasn’t burning the oil; it was just flowing out a crack in the bottom of the engine block.
Light smoke wafted through the air; more hoses and eductors came down the ladder. Ford and crew raced to set them up. About a half hour after the mine blast, they got one of the perijets working, which was a big help. The suction began to pull water from the bilge.
They had also rigged two P-250 pumps—the extra pair the crew had scrounged up in Newport. Small knots of sailors had lugged them down to the lower deck, and now they were helping to turn the tide. The pumps and perijets were sucking up a combined 750 gallons a minute and sending it overboard through a discharge fitting. But the noise, added to the roar of the diesels, was almost overpowering. Ford dispatched Alan Sepelyak, a junior sailor, to sick bay for more earplugs.
And meanwhile, the team had finally stanched most of the major gushers in the bulkhead. Water was still leaking in, but no faster than it was flowing back out through drainage pipes and hoses. About 5:25 PM, Ford sent word to DC Central that the water level in AMR 2 was six inches below the deck plates and holding there.
Ford, Frank, Fridley, Jackson, and Raymond, with the help of dozens of their shipmates, had kept the Roberts’s serious wounds from turning into mortal ones. Now the crew could return to fighting the infection of fire.
AGONIZING MINUTES FOLLOWED Rinn’s order to stop pouring water on the fire. The hose teams atop the deckhouse watched the smoke pour unchallenged from the stack. The minutes ticked along like hours.
The deck was getting hot, very hot. Rubber-soled boots began to stick to the metal plates. Some men just stepped out of their melted footwear and left them adhered to the deck as they high-stepped away to fetch new shoes.
One of them, a chubby sailor who’d never managed to pass his damage control test, rushed past Rinn, then stopped and turned around in his stocking feet. “Captain, does this mean I’m DC-qualified?”
The skipper smiled. “No,” he said.
“Damn,” the sailor said, and hurried on.
About ten minutes passed, and finally the good news about AMR 2 arrived from DC Central. What was more, pumps had been set up near the main engine room and AMR 3, and the water levels had stabilized there as well. The captain lifted the ban on fighting the fires. The hose teams needed no urging to get back to work.
Rinn’s mind was still on the weight of the ship. He had ordered some other things thrown overboard. A helicopter engine had already been tossed out and the position marked for salvage later. The water was only 150 feet deep here; divers should be able to bring it up, once the EOD guys cleared the mines. Rinn wondered what else might go. Maybe we should jettison the torpedoes along with the shells?9
Then he started having second thoughts about the entire notion of tossing ammo overboard. In the first place, it seemed too much like giving up, and that was the wrong signal to send to his crew. And second, if they did save the ship, it was going to be a monumental headache to explain where all the ammunition had gone. The men had already transferred thirty-four rounds, plus one charge designed to clear a jammed gun, from the ship’s magazine to the briny deep. Rinn sent word down to Reinert: stop throwing the shells away—stack ’em on the forecastle instead. The gunner passed the word for more men and added them to the bucket brigade. The line of sailors grew, made a left turn on the quarterdeck, and stretched forward through the breakwater to the forecastle. About forty crew members were now working to clear the magazine, one-fifth of the souls on board the Roberts.10
SOON AFTER AMR 2 reported things under control, Rinn received another bit of good news from Lt. Cdr. Tim Matthews, the senior officer of the Roberts’s air detachment: the ship’s helicopter might soon be ready to fly.
Matthews had been powering up the Seahawk from the left cockpit seat when the flight deck surged upward beneath him. His instrument panel lit up in red, and the engine shut down. Liquid gushed from the turbine. But when the ship’s motion subsided, the helo was still clamped tightly to the deck.
The frigate was equipped with a RAST (Recovery, Assist, Securing, and Traversing) system, a movable winch built to draw helicopters onto heaving decks in bad weather. Matthews liked to use it as a safety belt when his helo was out on deck. This habit had probably saved half a dozen lives. Untethered, the helo could have tipped over. Its spinning rotors could have tilted into the deck and shattered into deadly shards. The helo itself may well have rolled off the deck and into the sea, taking Matthews, his copilot, and the enlisted aircrewman with it.
What actually happened was nearly just as hazardous. The blades had flexed, their tips whirling to within a yard of the deck, narrowly missing Sandle and the rest of the flight deck crew.
The pilot had shut down his battered bird and climbed out. His maintainers surrounded the aircraft, scrutinizing it for evidence of damage. There was almost no conceivable way that a helicopter subjected to such a blow would soon fly. There was too much that might have broken—engines, transmission, flight controls. The working hypothesis on the liquid was that a fuel line had severed, possibly flooding the engine with JP-8 jet fuel. Even the landing gear, which had absorbed most of the shock, might collapse if tested again.
But a half hour later the aviation mechanics gave Matthews a surprising verdict: odd as it sounded, they couldn’t find anything that looked too broken to fly. They’d replaced some leaking seals in the tail rotor and tightened the fittings on a pump that was oozing hydraulic fluid, but if the aviation commander wanted to ignore training, instincts, and rule-book, the helo looked good to go.11
It was hard to beat a helo pilot for the propensity to see disaster at every turn. The job demanded it. A helicopter, it was said, was less an aircraft than ten thousand parts flying in tight formation. The potential for harm multiplied when such an aerodynamically unstable flying machine operated from a tiny moving platform at sea.
So when Matthews approached Rinn around 5:30 PM, the captain was surprised to hear the lieutenant commander ask for permission to fly. Rinn wasn’t initially inclined to approve. If the helo went into the drink, no one could save its crew.
Matthews proposed that he take things in stages: power the helo up. Then try hovering. Then orbit the ship a time or two before finally landing to load the wounded men.
Rinn recognized the risk. But he also had sailors who were going to die unless they could get off the ship. The captain sent the crew to flight quarters and told Matthews to call when he was ready to go.12
ECKELBERRY HAD TURNED the bridge into a backup DC Central, plotting the damage control effort on the chart table with the aid of Yeoman 1st Class Paul Hass. It was standard practice to duplicate the engineers’ record keeping on the bridge; a second perspective on the problem was always a good idea. But the executive officer had elevated the concept to include occasional broadcasts to the entire crew over the 1MC. These kept everyone informed about the DC effort, where the problem areas were, and most important, who needed help. Eckelberry, for example, had helped round up sailors to empty the 76-mm magazine and had urged otherwise unoccupied sailors to get down to AMR 2 and lend Ford a hand.
Some minutes after the bucket brigade had started sending 76-mm shells to the forecastle, Eckelberry caught the impossibly incongruous sounds of rock music. He stepped out to the bridge wing and looked down. Neat cordwood stacks of shells had begun to take shape between the deckhouse and the missile launcher. Someone had plugged in a portable cassette player and cranked it up. “It was almost comical,” the XO recalled. “Ship’s on fire, sinking aft, these guys are moving ammunition out of a hot magazine and they’ve got a boom box playing music on the forecastle. It was one of those things where you stop, and your jaw drops, and you say, ‘I’m in Fantasyland.’”
Eckelberry also helped direct the movement of injured sailors to various first-aid stations established by the ship’s corpsman, Hospitalman 1st Class James Lambert. A tall, lean man, Lambert was the closest thing the ship had to a physician. Inevitably, everyone called him Doc. Two months earlier, Ford’s video camera had caught him in the galley, wearing a deadpan expression and a white turtleneck emblazoned with a red cross. “Here’s bread,” the corpsman informed the camera, placing a loaf in the automatic slicer, “and it goes in here, and the lever goes down, and here’s the finished product: sliced bread. So, kids, if you ever wondered, now you know where sliced bread comes from. It comes from the Persian Gulf.”
When the mine went off, Doc Lambert picked himself off the sick bay floor and considered his options. The frigate had two spaces intended as emergency treatment wards: one was far aft under the flight deck; the other was farther forward but surrounded by racks of DC gear.13 Neither was usable in the current circumstance, thanks to passageways full of smoke and hoses and equipment. So Lambert consulted with Rinn and Eckelberry about setting up a triage area atop the deckhouse, just behind the signal bridge.
It was hardly an ideal location for a makeshift infirmary—two levels up from the main deck and only a few dozen yards from the hose teams that were pouring water on the smoke-belching exhaust fire. But at least it wasn’t inside the ship, which looked as if it might sink at any moment. It was also close to the whaleboat. If Matthews and his mechanics couldn’t get their helo running, the Roberts might have to send its most severely wounded out by motorboat. So Eckelberry got on the 1MC and told anyone with an injury to make his way to top of the deckhouse. Privately, he thought, We’re going to lose some of these guys.14
Lambert had already begun treating several of the hurt men below-decks. In engineering’s Central Control, he applied burn salve to Wayne Smith and Dave Burbine, who was shivering uncontrollably despite the blanket wrapped around him. He sent others up to the triage area behind the signal bridge. They were met by Lambert’s phone talker, Master-at-Arms 1st Class Stanley Bauman, and Ens. Steven Giannone, a disbursing officer who had arrived aboard during the deployment and become Lambert’s medical assistant. Giannone and Bauman took in the new arrivals and tried to make them comfortable.
Forty minutes after the blast, Lambert joined them. He checked on Bobby Gibson, who had been tied to a stretcher and carried up to the aid station. The boatswain’s mate had tried to join a repair party after the mine blast had flipped him from his lookout’s chair, but the pain had soon debilitated him. Lambert bent over Gibson, sweat dripping from his brow.
Chewing ice chips to keep himself hydrated, Lambert moved from patient to patient, applying Silvadine antibacterial cream, pushing IV needles into their arms, starting drips of Ringer’s lactate to replenish their fluids. As his supply of bandages dwindled, Lambert sent a junior personnelman, Charles Morin, and a seaman named Richard Klemme down to his sick bay for more. Just cut the lock off the medical supplies, he told them.
Several of the burned engineers eventually arrived. Lambert worked to stabilize them. Severely burned patients are at great risk of shock, and Lambert knew that their chances for survival depended on better care than he could provide on the frigate. But he took hope in the news that the ship’s Seahawk might become available for an evacuation flight. Leaving Lt. (jg) Robert Chambers, the ship’s electronic readiness officer, in charge of the IVs, Lambert headed down to the hangar to establish a medevac station.
The supply officer, Lt. Bradley Gutcher, had beaten him to it. Anticipating the need, Gutcher had raided the aft battle-dressing station, gathered up all the first-aid supplies he could carry, and hauled them in a blanket to the hangar.15
Eckelberry passed the word over the 1MC, and injured men began to show up at the hangar. Several dozen had wrenched their backs and limbs, either in the initial blast or by slipping on the various liquids that were being tracked around the ship: water, fuel, AFFF. Some had gotten oil and smoke particles in their eyes, yet had been unable to bear to use the ship’s eyewashes to clear the gunk out. Lambert slit open saline bags and gently cleansed their faces.
Presently, the sailors began to make their way down from the deckhouse aid station. Bill Dodson, an electrician’s mate third class, was working in the midships passageway when one badly burned shipmate hobbled past. “Everyone was yelling and we were moving ammo around or something. Lots of heavy things. And I looked up to see two people escorting GSM Welch aft to the helo deck. He was naked, and completely burned and bloody. He had a gray blanket draped around him. It was a bad scene, and everyone hushed as he walked slowly by. I couldn’t believe he could walk.
“After he went by, I think our efforts took on a new sense of urgency.”16
Outside the hangar’s aluminum roll-up door, an aviation mechanic gave Matthews a thumbs-up as the aviator powered up the Seahawk. The cockpit lit up green, and he twisted the cyclic, willing the aircraft off the deck. It shuddered, lifted, and came to a hover off the starboard quarter.
Rinn radioed the pilot and asked him to circle the ship. Against the setting sun, Matthews could see the orange glow of flames through the deckhouse cracks and sparks floating amid the black smoke that still boiled from the stack.
When the helo set back down, Lambert had picked his first medevac patient: Welch, who had second-degree burns over 40 percent of his body. Volunteers loaded their burned shipmate onto the helicopter.
About 6:15 PM, the Seahawk took off again and bore away into the darkening east. His destination was the amphib Trenton, which was making its best speed toward the wounded frigate.
Years later, Matthews told Rinn that as he flew away with the wounded man, he never expected to see the ship afloat again.17