No Higher Honor (31 page)

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:

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