USS Bulkeley (DDG 84), central Persian Gulf, June 13, 2004, approximately thirty minutes after sunset:
“Red deck, red deck! Wave off the helo! Boats, on the 1MC: Commanding officer to the pilot house! Rescue swimmer to the boat deck!” The orders flew from my mouth as fast as I could get them out.
The captain was soon behind me, offering calm reassurance. “I’m here, Pat,” he said.
“Captain’s on the bridge, aye. Conning officer, get us there, twenty knots. Boats, get the translator back up here! Call away the low-visibility detail, Gold section. And find us some lights!”
Around 1745 that evening, I had taken charge of USS Bulkeley as officer of the deck, the captain’s direct representative in charge of navigation and safety of the ship. Earlier that afternoon, our helicopter had overflown a seventy-five-foot cargo dhow that appeared to be in distress, its crew waving a large orange tarp to signal for help. A dhow is a traditional wooden vessel used to make commercial journeys in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Cargo dhows, as opposed to fishing dhows, are relatively long and narrow and have a striking resemblance, as funny as it sounds, to a Twinkie sliced in half lengthwise. It is a law of the sea that mariners provide assistance to those in need, so our commanding officer ordered us to make best speed for them. We couldn’t get them on the radio to know exactly what was wrong, but after ninety minutes at thirty knots, we were about to find out.
The first part of the operation went smoothly. Our chief engineer and his sailors had a chance to pre-stage their equipment and brief the rescue and assistance detail. The boat engineer was on station with an M-60 machine gun for the boat’s bow mount, and the bow hookman and coxswain were reviewing the underway checklist. The boat officer stood by, armed with a 9-mm pistol, overseeing the preparations. In the back of everyone’s mind was a similar operation that had gone bad, so we took extra precautions. Less than two months before, a team from USS Firebolt, a crew with which we had interacted several times while on deployment, had two sailors and a coastguardsman killed while boarding a dhow not unlike this one.
Our boat covered the last hundred yards to the drifting vessel in seconds. Once on board, the assistance detail discovered that the dhow, al-Rashid Mum 131, had in its holds more than eight feet of water, which is enough to completely cover the engine and explained why it was dead in the water. Though our translator didn’t speak the same dialect as the Arab crew, we were able to determine that they’d been drifting for two days. There were eleven men on board, and they looked typical of the seafarers in the region: young, fit, and accustomed to hard work in an incredibly harsh environment. We gave them food, water, life preservers, and medical aid (one of them had a gash on his foot) while our assistance detail started de-watering. Using a pump, we were able to remove about two hundred gallons per minute. We anticipated remaining on the scene for several hours pumping, patching the leak, and fixing the engine. From the pilothouse, I had our ship continue a lazy circle around the dhow.
After about two hours, an Iranian tugboat, which had been called many hours prior by the dhow to help, finally arrived. The rescue and assistance team had lowered the water level in the dhow significantly, and it was in no immediate danger of sinking. Our captain, Cdr. Bob Barwis, was more than happy to give responsibility to the tugboat, pull our team off station, and move on to the next day’s scheduled multinational exercise. The dhow’s crew couldn’t stop thanking our team as they made their way back to Bulkeley.
We set off and prepared to land the helicopter, but we were less than ten minutes from the dhow when the quietness in the pilothouse was shattered by a piercing scream in a language I’d never heard. I still don’t know if there were words in the transmission, but I know the sound of terror. Any mariner who has traveled in the Middle East can tell you the radio is rarely quiet, and often chaotic—with yelling, calls to prayer, and music at all hours—but everyone on the bridge knew this was different. The transmission was clear and strong, which meant it was close. I directed the Combat Information Center to slew an infrared camera back to the dhow and the tugboat.
The tugboat came into view first. The camera continued on, well past where the dhow had just been. The camera swept back and forth, searching for another boat that couldn’t be found. Within the few seconds it took to slew the camera, the dhow had slipped beneath the murky surface of the Gulf. What about the crew—the same men we’d just helped with food, water, and medical assistance?
The crew of a warship at sea is a team of teams, capable of drawing upon great resources of people, equipment, and ideas. Officers and crew from each division and every department of the ship sprang to action, relying on their training and knowledge of their shipmates’ skills and abilities. There was no specific procedure or checklist to follow in this scenario, but we were prepared. We had conducted countless man-overboard drills and practiced noncompliant boardings and boat operations. We had exercised our topside communications for numerous events, from antiterrorism and force protection to rendering honors for visiting dignitaries. Drawing from this menu of capabilities, we responded quickly.
As Bulkeley changed direction, the bridge team was a study in organized chaos. The boatswain’s mate of the watch relayed orders via the ship’s announcing circuit and took reports from the lookouts as they manned their stations. The conning officer, thankfully, was Ens. Steve Philabaum, an outstanding mariner who required little oversight. The quartermaster of the watch plotted the dhow’s last position on the chart while his assistant attempted to keep the deck log current with the constant stream of orders and reports.
The most important report we were seeking was from the boat deck. Having been at flight quarters, the boat-deck detail and boat crew were nearby and sprang into action immediately. During the brief wait for the first boat to be launched, the gruesome reality struck home: we saw the body of a man, face down, floating in the inky darkness off the port bow. I faced a decision with which I had never been confronted: Do I order the rescue swimmer over the side of the ship to save a man who might already be dead or do I wait for the boat to be launched and send the swimmer to aid three men, very much alive, who were now coming into view under the piercing glare of the helicopter’s spotlight? Ensign Philabaum could maneuver the ship for a recovery using the davit, a steel structure used to lower people and equipment over the edge of the ship, but it would take several minutes to ready, and the boatswain’s mates were already engaged in launching the boats. It felt like time was slipping away too quickly.
Somewhere in the middle of this thought process, I had a flashback to an ethics class I’d taken back at the Naval Academy. In the third deck of Luce Hall, we had studied Jeremy Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism—the greatest good for the greatest number. I pointed out the body to the captain a few seconds later and told him what I thought we should do; he concurred. The rescue swimmer would go with the boat, and we would continue toward the site of the sinking. A petty officer with a powerful spotlight was sent to the aft missile deck, atop the helicopter hangars, to try to keep the body in view.
The helicopter pilots steered their aircraft to the area of the tugboat and hovered less than fifty feet from the ocean’s surface, their spotlight casting a stark beam of light into the growing darkness. They quickly located the site where the dhow had sunk. In the spotlight, we saw three crewmen clinging to a decrepit refrigerator, one of the few remaining pieces of their ship capable of supporting a man’s weight. Bulkeley arrived faster than the pilots anticipated, so we had to sound the ship’s whistle to alert them that we were there.
As the helicopter cleared, the three men and their makeshift life raft came closer still; we slowed as the first of our small boats sped away. Standing on the bridge wing, we could clearly hear their terrified screams over the cacophony of the helicopter and our own gas turbine engines. The diesel fumes were so thick they were felt as much as they were smelled; we used the relative strength of these fumes to judge our proximity to the wreckage for the rest of the night. Within seconds, the rescue swimmer was in the oily water, bringing the men to the safety of the boat one at a time.
Convinced that the boat crew had the situation in hand, the captain and I discussed our next moves. The body that had floated down the port side of the ship was no longer in view, and no other crewmen were in sight. With much difficulty, our interpreter established that the Iranian tugboat had picked up only one crewman; we had three. Where were the other seven of the eleven we had counted earlier?
Five minutes after the first boat launched, the second boat set off. Manned with a corpsman and a second rescue swimmer, it was dispatched to recover the first man we had seen and passed by. They found him within minutes, and performed CPR while returning to the ship, but it was too late. After about half an hour, the three surviving crewmen were transferred to the Iranian tugboat, but the tugboat’s captain refused to take the body of the fourth crewman.
We landed the helicopter for a refueling and then relaunched it to aid the search. We stayed with the debris field for the next several hours, making pass after pass, searching with night vision goggles and spotlights. I stationed the boats about 250 yards on either side of the ship. A few times our hopes were lifted by what we thought we had seen; each time we were disappointed. The boat crews began picking up the life jackets we found strewn over the site. Our final count: eleven life jackets. Not one of the crewmen had put on the life jackets we had provided. I couldn’t decide whether to be saddened by the tragedy or angered by their stupidity.
At midnight we made one last pass through what was left of the debris, landed the helicopter, and headed west. The next day we flew the body we’d recovered to a nearby U.S. warship, which then delivered it to the deceased’s home city of Basra. To our knowledge, the bodies of the remaining crewmen were never recovered. For many of us that night, normal watch relief times came and went without notice. Most of my team was on watch for nearly ten hours, almost double the regular shift. When I look back on that operation, I’m struck by how quickly events can turn. In one moment, the men on board the dhow were yelling their grateful thanks, and in the next, they were gone. The professionalism displayed at all levels by our team confirmed what I already knew to be true: Bulkeley’s officers and crew were ready, willing, and able to perform whatever was required.