The sun set at six o’clock. “I swear the sun went down faster that day than I ever saw it,” firefighter Ted Johnson recalled. “It got so dark, so fast. And sea snakes, they were everywhere when you looked over the side.”
With the new moon just two days away, the coming night would be dark indeed. Lookouts on the bridge wings played searchlights over the water, straining to spot drifting mines. All they saw were the five-foot snakes.
Lester Chaffin figured the ship’s moaning had drawn every terrifying resident of Davy Jones’s locker to the scene. With a start, the ship’s Protestant lay leader remembered that he had neglected to read the evening prayer over the 1MC the previous night.1
The damage control effort had continued nonstop for an hour and a half. Belowdecks, electricians checked power connections while engine specialists tended their diesels. Shoring teams worked to strengthen strained bulkheads. Everyone who wasn’t passing 76-mm shells from the magazine seemed to be humping pump gear and hoses from place to place or helping their injured shipmates move toward medical aid. The captain moved around the ship, dispensing “attaboys” and drawing inspiration from his crew. On the quarterdeck he watched passing sailors touch the bronze plaque, brushing their fingers across the raised names of their predecessors on DE-413.
Up on the deckhouse the hose teams were still doggedly throwing water on the pillar of spark-flecked smoke coming from the stack, and pouring it through the cracks under their feet. Under the direction of Chief John Carr, the hose teams had begun to add fire-smothering foam AFFF into the water. The flow of AFFF through the permanent reels was intermittent, thanks to uncertain electricity and fluctuating water pressure, so the firefighters had rigged their nozzles to draw the soapy chemical straight from the blue five-gallon drums. From time to time Carr sent word down to Reinert, who interrupted the flow of 76-mm shells to send more blue canisters up to the roof.2
The twin needs for firefighting water and drainage had nearly exhausted the ship’s supply of hoses and fittings, so much was done with improvisation. Chris Pond yelled to Johnson, “Ted, Ted, I need a two-and-a-half-inch plug and I can’t find one! What do I do?”
Johnson responded in true sailor fashion: “Just use a two-and-a-half-inch nozzle and shut it,” he said.3
Still, the crew was making progress with the stack fire; the smoke from the starboard vent seemed somewhat dissipated. But the hose teams were becoming increasingly frustrated by the on-again, off-again flow of water. Sometimes they would get only five or ten minutes of continuous pressure before the hoses ran dry. AFFF refused to foam up at less than 150 pounds per square inch, and some of the more irritated sailors had taken to pouring the stuff straight from the can into the cracks.4
Down in Central Control, Van Hook and the engineers were trying to figure out what was causing the problems with the water pressure. All the clues pointed to a major fire-main leak in the main engine room. The engineers tried various tactics to deduce the exact location of the leak, turning the water on and off, experimenting with various cutoff-valve settings. Unless the damaged pipe could be found and cut off from the others, the firefighters were never going to get the smooth flow they needed.
Finally, a repair team in the still-smoking engine room spotted a bubbling trickle of AFFF under the oily water. That suggested a leak in the fire main’s port upper loop. The sailors closed valves to cut the flow to the damaged pipe, crossed their fingers, and applied pressure to the entire system. It worked. Four minutes after they’d shut down the fire main, there was pressure again—at least in the starboard lower loop. The repair crews decided to detour the water around the leak, and began the forty-minute process of rigging jumper hoses to restore pressure in the port upper loop.
Around 6:45 PM, about two hours after the mine blast, the hose teams had one good source of water again. The return of pressure set one hose to jumping. The nozzle had somehow jammed or been left open when pressure went down, and now it whipped around on the deck, spraying water like a spitting cobra. As firefighters backed away from the nozzle-turned-wrecking ball, Lt. Dave Llewellyn pounced on it. Rinn, who happened to be on deck, watched in horror as the heavy nozzle smacked his ship’s control officer square on the forehead. “I thought he was dead, but he just shook it off and got up,” the captain said.5
The pressure stayed steady for a half hour, flickered for a nerve-wracking minute as two teams hunted for another suspected break in the line, and then held steady.
NOT LONG AFTERWARD, a bit of help appeared on the horizon, in the form of helicopter running lights. They belonged to a CH-46 Sea Knight, call sign Nightrider, flying from the San Jose, the replenishment ship Roberts had been slated to meet that eternity of two and a half hours ago.
Lambert had heard about the inbound CH-46s, but he didn’t see how that was going to help. The double-rotored Sea Knights were even bigger than the Roberts’s ten-ton Seahawk. That’s not even going to fit on the flight deck, he thought.6
Nevertheless, Lambert and his helpers readied eight of their patients for evacuation. The corpsman used a marker to scrawl treatment notes on the sheets of their bedding, a technique he’d picked up during a stint in an emergency room. Headed out were the badly burned Perez, Burbine, and Smith. Gibson, who had been diagnosed with a concussion, would go as well. So would Radioman 2nd Class Doug Thomas, who had become dizzy while moving 76-mm ammo; Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Randy L. Thomas, who had strained his back at the same task; Fire Controlman 3rd Class Jack Paprocki, who had been thrown against the bulkhead of the CIWS control room by the mine blast; and Seaman Recruit Richard A. Bailey, who had been carried to the hangar bay by two shipmates after his legs went numb.
Sonar Technician 1st Class Joseph D. Boyd, “J. D.” to his friends, had been fighting the stack fire for hours when a team leader sent him forward to the bridge to rest. It was only when Boyd sat down that he felt the pain in his midsection, a possible hernia. After a quick check from Lambert, Eckelberry told the sonar tech to grab the next helo flight to the San Jose.7
The Roberts’s air traffic controller got on the radio with the Sea Knight and told its pilots to be prepared to evacuate as many men as possible. The pilots replied that they were carrying a large fuel bladder on board. It had helped them make the long trip from the San Jose, but it was really more a redundant safety move than a necessity. They asked whether they could leave the bladder with the Roberts.
Negative, the Roberts controller replied. We’re on fire here. So the crew of the Sea Knight kicked the flexible rubber tank out the helo door instead. It landed with a splash near the ship and began to float as the CH-46 came in for a landing.
Sandle was in charge of guiding the aircraft to the flight deck. As it approached, the boatswain’s mate realized that the deck was fouled by the RAST gear, the harness that had saved Matthews and the Seahawk. Sandle decided to land the helicopter crossways, giving the forty-five-foot-long helo about six inches of clearance on each side of its landing gear. He had seen Sea Knights perform aerial ballet, but he’d never seen one land with so little room to spare. Guiding the helicopter down with illuminated signal flashlights, he stared at its wheels until they touched down less than a tire’s diameter from the safety nets at the deck edge. The pilots kept the rotors turning, ready to lift off if the ship took an unexpected roll.
As Lambert and his helpers lifted their shipmates into the big aircraft, one of the CH-46 pilots snapped a photo. That irritated the corpsman. What the hell are you taking pictures of? But when he turned around and stepped out of the aircraft, the reason became clear. The ship was lit up like a Christmas tree, every floodlight and spot shining away. All the doors were open, with hoses snaking this way and that. Atop it all, the stack was still belching sparks like a chimney. I guess that would make a good picture, he conceded.8
A little after 7:00 PM, the twin-rotor helo lifted off, bearing the eight Roberts sailors toward the San Jose and a doctor’s care. The aircraft would return in less than an hour with hoses, DC gear, food, and water.
ONE MAN WHO was not aboard the helicopter was Hull Technician 1st Class Gary Gawor, whose knee had been banged up in the blast. Rinn found him perched on a stool in the hangar, a matted red bandage around his leg. The captain told Gawor to get on the helicopter, but the hull tech was having none of it. He had spent two hours directing the flow of DC people and supplies from his stool, and he wasn’t about to stop.
“Captain, I’m not leaving,” Gawor said. “I got a job to do in this hangar.”
Rinn nodded and moved on to the flight deck. He spotted a dark shape in the water off the starboard quarter. It was the discarded fuel bladder, now illuminated by a magnesium flare that floated nearby, burning piercingly bright at thirty-six hundred degrees.
Rinn turned to Ensign Sobnosky. “Rob, what’s that?”
“Captain, it’s a smoke float,” the junior officer replied.
An ensign with an amazing grasp of the obvious, Rinn thought. “I know it’s a smoke float. What’s it doing in the water?”
“When the ’-46 came in, they had a fuel bladder, and when they left with the people, they couldn’t carry it, so they threw it in the water.”
“Okay. Why is there a smoke float in the water, a magnesium smoke float?”
Sobnosky said, “I thought you’d want to know where it was.”
This, Rinn told himself, is not my best day in the navy.
Then the captain noticed some other objects bobbing alongside the ship. They were 76-mm shells, each still in its plastic wrapping. God, don’t tell me I had to tell these guys to open the damn canisters before they threw the ammunition over the side.
Rinn decided that minefield or no minefield, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. He returned to the bridge and spent a few minutes alone with the navigational chart. His engines might be in pieces, but he still had the electric-powered APUs. Rinn checked the load requirements with engineering, then ordered the electricians to start up the port pod. By a process that was far more gut than reason, Rinn picked a southeasterly heading. If the crew thought he possessed some special knowledge or training that had helped him select the course, so much the better. In his best command voice, he told the helmsman to come to three knots and 146 degrees and just keep going.9
In the coming days, EOD teams sent to clear the minefield would discover that the retreating Roberts had tiptoed past nine other mines.
NEARLY THREE HOURS had passed since the explosion, and all traces of sunlight had faded from the sky. The frigate’s decks were flooded with every spotlight aboard—an uncomfortable condition in the Gulf. The ship had been accustomed to working at night with the barest of anticollision lights showing. Now it glowed like a beacon.
Somewhere in the ship, the fire still burned. Smoke was still coming from cracks in the deck superstructure; the crew could smell it everywhere. But where was it? Van Hook decided to take a look inside the gas turbine ventilation system.
Gas turbines required air in prodigious quantities. On a Perry frigate, air came in horizontally through a set of louvers on each side of the superstructure and then headed down three decks to the engines. About one-third of the air was used to sustain combustion, the rest to cool the gas turbines. The exhaust went out the back of the module, straight up four decks, and out through the stack.
Grabbing flashlights and breathing devices, Van Hook and Boatswain’s Mate 3rd Class Eduardo Segovia headed for the engine intake plenum. They opened a little-used hatch in the deckhouse. Smoke billowed out. They crawled inside. Picking his way through the fumes, past dust filters and deicers and dehumidifying equipment, Van Hook crawled to the vertical shaft. He peered over the edge and looked thirty-five feet straight down into a fiery hell. On his hands and knees in the fire-lit dark, he realized what had happened. The mine had ignited a fire within the gas turbine modules. The sea had eventually inundated the engine room, putting the modules underwater—but the fires roared on in the intakes.
As Van Hook wormed his way back into the passageway, he considered his options. The ship’s designers had built Halon dispensers into the enclosures, where the LM-2500s heated their exhaust gases to more than nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. But Van Hook also knew that the fire-suppressing gas hadn’t been released from its tanks. (Later investigation revealed that the blast had cut power to the dispensers’ electrical panel.) The enclosures had a pair of small maintenance hatches, but they were under five feet of black oily water and likely jammed to boot. The final assault on the fire would have to come from above.
There was no room for a hose team to work in the cramped plenum, but Van Hook had another idea. The vertical air shafts had a second purpose: they allowed the gas turbines to be winched out of the engine room for repair or replacement. The massive cylinders rose up on rails and emerged between the 76-mm gun and the smokestack.
Back atop the superstructure, Van Hook drew the captain’s eyes to the heavy steel plate that covered the starboard hatch. “We’ve got to attack this through the engine removal port. That’s the only way we’re really going to get at it,” the chief engineer told his commanding officer.10
Rinn wasn’t immediately convinced. “I don’t know, Cheng,” he said. “The minute we take that off, there’s going to be this huge blast of air going in there, and it’s going to explode right back at us.”
Van Hook countered that it was unlikely to provide more air than was already coming down the big intakes.
“Okay, go ahead,” Rinn said. “Get ’em off.” The time was about 7:35 PM.
Van Hook gave the word, and about a dozen crewmen leaped to loosen the seventy heavy-duty bolts that sealed the plate to the deck. In an eyeblink—or so it seemed to the engineer, who was still wondering where they were going to find enough wrenches—the sailors had the bolts off. Chief Firecontrolman Al Jochem stuck a crowbar under the lip.
Jeez, I hope I’m right, Van Hook thought.11
When Jochem’s crowbar opened a crack between plate and deck, flames boiled up, licking at pant legs and nearly taking eyebrows off. Everyone jumped back, leaving the plate lying askew atop the hole.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Van Hook announced. “Maybe we should do this tomorrow.”
But the fire shrank back after the flare-up, and sailors rushed to pour AFFF-treated water down the hole. Within minutes the smoke changed from black to white, and shortly thereafter it went out completely.
That was the big one.
There were other, smaller fires to be put out. In a final, dying gasp, the stack belched up some hot cinders that fell onto a weather-deck tarp and set it alight. At 8:05 PM, fires reignited in both exhaust plenums. Hose teams quickly smothered the fire and set reflash watches to spray cooling water.
But thousands of tons of steel hold a nearly unimaginable amount of heat. Even after the flame is gone, the danger persists. A few minutes past 9:00, one of the gas turbine modules flashed back into flame. Once again, the watchstanders quickly put it out, and that was the last of the fires aboard the Sammy B.
At 9:05, the blazes that had burned aboard the frigate for four and one-quarter hours were, at last, extinguished.
WHEN WORD WAS passed that the fires were out, many of the men slumped straight down onto the deck and fell asleep, drained from four solid hours of adrenaline-soaked exertion. Others found sleep elusive. They wandered the decks, checking on buddies. The damaged hull creaked eerily, a reminder that their ship was fragile and still in danger. Serendipitously calm seas had reduced the stress on the main deck, but even small ripples caused the hull girder structure to flex.12 Now that the noise and commotion of damage control had ceased, the groans of the damaged ship were inescapable.12
The captain ordered the crew into life jackets. He also told everyone to sleep out on deck, a safety-minded order that was generally, though not universally, obeyed. Quite a few sailors snuck down to their bunks for a few hours of well-deserved rest.
The cleanup started within hours of the final victory over the fire. Part of it was pride. Rinn was determined to show the world that the USS Samuel B. Roberts was but lightly fazed by adversity. Even before day broke, he was stomping around the hull passing the word: We’re going to look good for the cameras.
But part of it was the realization that a crew without work is a restless crew. Rudyard Kipling wrote:
When you think of the amount of work a ship needs even after peace manoeuvres, you can realise what has to be done on the heels of an action . . . And as there is nothing like housework for the troubled soul of a woman, so a general clean-up is good for sailors. I had this from a petty officer who had also passed through deep waters. “If you’ve seen your best friend go from alongside you, and your own officer, and your own boat’s crew with him, and things of that kind, a man’s best comfort is small variegated jobs which he is damned for continuous.”13
So Rinn pushed his shipmates—those who weren’t utterly exhausted—to start restoring some semblance of order to their battered ship. It was a daunting proposition. Fuel and oil had been tracked the length of the ship. Spent OBA canisters and empty AFFF jugs littered the decks. Red, green, and gray hoses covered the passageways like tricolor spaghetti.
The first order of business was dealing with the tangled mass of hoses. The damage control teams sorted through them, picking out those that could be disconnected, rolled up, and returned to their racks. Some were left in place, in case some undetected hotspot flared up in the night. And the dewatering hoses remained in place; both P-250s and ship’s fire pumps kept running at full capacity. But as longer lengths of hose were put in place of spliced-together shorter ones, many of the fittings borrowed from other ships came free.
Within hours, Eckelberry was surprised and impressed to see the damage control lockers beginning to resemble their orderly selves. The DC teams had carefully taken inventory, noted what equipment was still usable, and carefully stowed it away. Neat rows of OBAs all but dared disaster to strike again.
The XO was checking on the new hose configuration when the ship’s weary-looking senior yeoman approached him. ‘Anything else I can do for you, sir?” Paul Hass asked.
“Yeah,” Eckelberry replied. “Where’s my Plan of the Day?”
A bit horrified, Hass looked at the officer to see if he was kidding, or had perhaps gone a bit crazy. The executive officer was neither. Within an hour, as if a hole had never been blown in the Roberts’s hull, a weary Hass slipped the photocopied schedule into its slot.14
The sun came up at 6:00 AM. “The dawn meant to me that I was going to live,” Signalman Roberts recalled later. “I don’t know why, but the dawn meant that time had passed, we were a ways from the mines, and we weren’t going to sink. Eddie Segovia took my picture then, and had me take his. I swore I would keep that picture in a prominent place for the rest of my life. So far I have.”15
Against all odds, there were morning showers. Months ago, the engineers had turned a forecastle void into a freshwater holding tank. Now someone rigged a pump, and sweat-caked, smelly sailors stripped naked for a brief and welcome wash-down.
Along came news helicopters, cameras rolling. There wasn’t much to do but wave.
One of the San Jose’s Sea Knights arrived with breakfast: 250 English-muffin sandwiches, Snickers bars, and grape and orange soda. Ted Johnson bit into a sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwich. It was the best thing he had ever tasted.16
The fires were out, but the ship was still weakened and in peril. Soon after dawn, someone passed the word to start shoring up the forward bulkhead of GSK, the ship’s main storeroom. On the other side of its forward bulkhead was tons of seawater in AMR 3. So far the bulkhead had held, but it had started to bow inward. Tatum helped haul shoring timbers from storage in after steering. Damage Controlman 1st Class Ward Davis and Electronics Technician 1st Class James Aston directed the work. It took seven pieces of twelve-foot four-by-four, notched to fit together like eight-foot letter “K”s. The completed shoring drew a lot of attention from shipmates, and later, damage inspectors. It was truly a textbook job.17
Led by Senior Chief Frost, a group of hull technicians and others gathered on the deckhouse to think about stabilizing the ship. The superstructure had cracked from main deck to roof, widening from a hairline at the main deck and widened to six-inch gaps near the 02 level. It was eerie to watch the cracks as the ship rode the light swells on the Gulf: the cracks widened and narrowed perceptibly. Clearly, the wave action was affecting the ship. Perhaps there was a way, someone mused, to tie the superstructure together.
Frost remembered the heavy-weather lifelines stashed away in the boatswain’s locker. These were three-quarter-inch phosphor-bronze cables that formed the safety “railing” around the edge of the weather decks. Six lengths of the cable would be enough to rig a figure that looked like a square with an X in the middle for cross-bracing. Frost sketched a plan on yellow legal paper and presented it to Rinn. Why not? the captain said. Do it.
Under Frost’s direction, Raymond and other sailors drew the cables around the 76-mm gun mount, wrapped them around the lips of the gas-turbine access ports, and through various pad eyes around the deck. Then they cinched it tight with turnbuckles. It didn’t stop the flexing, but Frost and the rest swore the rigging dampened the movement.18
Some time later, Lt. (jg) Mike Valliere, the auxiliaries officer, had another idea for lending support to the flexing main deck: I-type shoring in the main passageway fore and aft of the cracks. Frost helped with that as well, using up the last of the steel and wooden shoring members to erect seven-foot “I”s marching down the passageway.
Later, on 15 April, the oceangoing tug Hunter—the same minesweeping craft that had led the Roberts through the Strait of Hormuz—arrived to take the wounded frigate in tow. The Roberts had come halfway to Dubai on its APUs, but there were still 120 miles to go. The ship would complete its trip to safety at the end of a thick steel cable.