No Higher Honor (6 page)

In May 1971 the planners presented their work to Zumwalt, who approved it with delight, named it the PF 109 class, and launched a competition among shipyards to finish the design.
²²

GOODRICH AND HAGGETT
leaped to bid on the job, and it didn't take long for coastal Maine's newspapers to pick up the near-forgotten scent of victory. In February 1972 Bath Iron Works won the contract to lay out preliminary blueprints for the PF 109; the following year, the yard received a $92.4 million contract to build the lead ship.
²³
Bath Iron Works, once dismissed by the chief of navy shipbuilding, was back.

The yard's architects and engineers began to lay out the innumerable details of a modern warship. They strove to keep things simple for the sake of cost and structural strength. They drew and redrew blueprints until the ironworkers could shape most of the ship's thousands of steel plates with no more than two cuts, and the welders could put them in place with no more than two welds. BIW officials persuaded the navy to allow stock L-shaped metal braces instead of the customary T-beams produced by cutting I-beams in half—an astonishingly labor-intensive process.
²⁴
Defying convention, Bath's designers placed the engine room aft of the ship's center. This allowed the berthing and dining spaces to be clumped together, pushed noisy machinery away from the bow sonar, and vented corrosive exhaust leeward of radar antennae. For all of this, the future crew of the
Roberts
would one day be grateful.

Construction began in March 1975 on the first ship, which was redesignated FFG 7 and named
Oliver Hazard Perry
after the hero of the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie. One by one, the ship's thirty-six modules were assembled, lifted onto the ways, and welded into place.
Perry
was launched in September 1976 and put to sea a year later for formal acceptance trials. These proceeded under the exacting eye of Vice Adm. Joseph D. Bulkeley, president of the navy's Board of Inspection and Survey. As a young man, Bulkeley had received the Medal of Honor for spiriting Gen. Douglas MacArthur from Japanese clutches in his plywood
PT boat. Forty-five years later he was a living legend and a crusty, demanding inspector.

Haggett permitted himself a moment of pride as he watched the
Perry
pull away from the pier and head down the Kennebec to the Gulf of Maine. The ship's graceful hull began at the raked shark's-nose bow and sloped in a long curve to the flight deck aft. The superstructure was a long and boxy dog bone: beam-wide at the bridge, narrow amidships, and flared aft to accommodate twin helicopter hangars. But would the ship pass inspection?

A few days later, Haggett held his breath as the frigate hove into view around a bend of the Kennebec. The ship was two days early. Through the crisp fall air, the onlookers spied a broom tied to the mast, the traditional symbol of a clean sweep of its tests—and then a second broom appeared as well. The trials had gone all but flawlessly, and Bulkeley had cut the trials short. “A magnificent ship,”
²⁵
the old sea dog declared. “The best ship in 20 years.”
²⁶

Over the next decade, the Maine yard built twenty-one more
Perry
frigates, and the program blossomed into a model for naval shipbuilders. “Destroyer Built On Time, Under Budget,” the
Washington Post
marveled in late 1978: “Here on the banks of the Kennebec River, a strange thing is happening in this era of Navy ships being delivered years late and way over the original price tag. The venerable Bath Iron Works, which started building ships for the Navy in 1890, is building a new breed of destroyer on time and under the agreed-upon price.”
²⁷
The yard was rigorous about applying lessons from one ship to the next, and almost every vessel was delivered earlier and cheaper than its predecessors. It took 2.5 million man-hours to build the
Perry
, but just 1.4 million to deliver Bath's twelfth frigate, the USS
Aubrey Fitch
(FFG 34).
²⁸

By the time work began on the third
Samuel B. Roberts
in October 1983, the yard's workers could practically build one of the ships in their sleep. Like its predecessor
Perrys
, FFG 58 began life in a fabrication plant in the nearby town of Hardings. Trains bore raw steel onto the sidings of a blue prefab building, where metalworkers cut the beams, trimmed the plates, and stacked them on flatcars for the seven-mile trip up to Bath. There, welders and shipfitters began to assemble the plates into modules. The following spring, a candy-striped crane removed the
first gray chunk of ship from the long assembly building and lifted it into place on the ways. A month later, the gas turbines were lowered into the main engine room. Work continued through the summer, and as autumn tinted the nearby forests, the frigate's slender hull began to take form.
²⁹

PAUL RINN ARRIVED
in Maine a few chilly weeks after Labor Day of 1984. He had left his family behind in Charleston, South Carolina; he and his wife, Pamela, had decided not to uproot their three children, and after surviving three of Paul's deployments in four years, Pamela was more than capable of running the household. Rinn took up residence in a small cliff-top house on Bailey Island, one of the bits of piney land that crowd Casco Bay. The summer folk had long gone, and most of the remaining inhabitants were watermen, taciturn old salts who stacked their lobster traps like cordwood along the roads.

On most mornings, Rinn went to grab coffee and a doughnut at the local general store, where regulars in woolly sweaters warmed themselves around a potbellied stove. But the naval officer's early attempts to scratch up some conversation were met with silence. After three weeks of this, he began to wonder whether he would eat breakfast alone for the next two years. Driving home one night, Rinn stopped his Volvo to give a shivering teenager a lift. The next evening, he found a lobster and a six-pack of beer in a shopping bag on his doorstep—a thank-you from the kid's mother. The day after that, he stopped to pick up his coffee. “Mornin', Cap'n,” someone said.

In Bath, Rinn found a half-built ship surrounded by scaffolding like an eight-story stand of bamboo. He buried himself in thick books of specifications, studying his nascent frigate's structure and equipment. He spent hours among half-built hull forms, picking his way among the power cables, chatting and joking with welders and electricians. He showed up early and left late.

The navy had brought Rinn to town a full year before the ship's scheduled delivery, to help oversee its construction. The job officially belonged to the local deputies of the Supervisor of Ships (SupShip), who worked out of a white building across the street from the yard. The SupShip officers measured BIW's progress against a contract the size
of a phone book. But a ship's prospective commanding officer brought a gimlet eye to the process. The captain would one day take the ship to sea, trusting his life and his sailors to the builders' workmanship.

The skipper's job required a certain diplomatic touch. He had no formal power and could not order so much as the repainting of a passageway. Almost every request was supposed to come from the SupShip's office and every alteration cleared through Washington. But a captain learned to do deck plate business over coffee with BIW supervisors. An amicable relationship with the managers and shipyard leaders could help solve problems without an inch of red tape.

William Haggett, who had been recently appointed the shipyard's top executive, found Rinn exacting but easy to work with, professional but warm—in fact, one of the savviest skippers to come down the pike. “He was doing all the things that a wise commanding officer does to get the very best ship: working closely and cooperatively with the shipyard, and the workers in the shipyard on the deck plates,” Haggett said. “And the first-line supervisors, getting to know them by first name. And getting to know the CEO of the shipyard.”

When Rinn started asking for changes, he sought ways to make things turn out well for everyone. “Let's turn this vacant space forward into an extra potable-water tank,” he might say, “and I'll let you skip the decorative tiling somewhere else.”

Haggett soon told his employees to work with the commander on anything that didn't cost extra or bend the rules too far. “Rinn was—I was going to say demanding, but he wasn't demanding,” the shipyard executive said. “He was a politician more than a guy who would stand up there and yell and scream. He wouldn't do any of that. He just worked with our people, and he was smart enough to come in [on] weekends.”
³⁰

FOR ALL OF
Admiral Bulkeley's praise, the
Perry
frigates had not enjoyed a universally warm welcome in the fleet. The FFGs' small fuel tanks, limited communications suite, and twenty-eight-knot top speed had not endeared them to U.S. commodores. Critics evinced little hope that the ships' slender hulls could accommodate much-needed improvements. The disdain had increased with the introduction of the USS
Ticonderoga
guided missile cruisers and their Aegis combat system, a high-tech
marvel of advanced radar and weapons that could make a frigate sailor feel like a second-class citizen. One lieutenant commander wrote that the guided missile frigate was in peril of becoming “the Navy's square peg of the 1980s.”
³¹

But others, mostly veterans of
Perry
ships, leaped to their defense. One former skipper noted that his FFG had beaten most rivals at spotting and shooting aerial targets, and predicted that the arrival of the improved LAMPS-3 helicopter and the towed sonar array would transform the frigate into a perfectly competent sub hunter.
³²
An Australian exchange officer aboard USS
Flatley
(FFG 21) cited all manner of missions accomplished: patrolling the Persian Gulf, shadowing Soviet ships in the Caribbean, protecting an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. “FFG 7s are fast becoming the utility ship of the Navy,” he wrote.

And in May 1984 the debate drew a letter from the future commanding officer of the
Roberts
. “When operated aggressively, the FFG 7 is a superb antisubmarine warfare pouncer inside the outer screen,” Paul Rinn wrote to the editors of
Proceedings
, the naval professionals' journal. He argued that the ship was well suited to hunt down subs that managed to get past the first ring of escorts that surrounded a carrier. But he warned, “The ability of an individual platform to integrate into the carrier battle group and perform in different mission areas simultaneously depends largely on the proficiency of her crew and the aggressiveness of the ship's on-board leadership.”
³³

Here was a thought that had yet to be advanced in thousands of printed words, and it was pure Rinn: give me a frigate and a good crew, and, come game time, we're gonna knock it out of the park.

THREE U.S. WARSHIPS
slid from their concrete wombs on 8 December 1984. One was USS
Pittsburgh
(SSN 720), a nuclear-powered attack submarine in Groton, Connecticut. Another was the salvage ship USS
Grapple
(ARS 53) in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. The third was the
Samuel B. Roberts
. Although no one could have known it at the time—the 600-Ship Navy was still a dream alive—the service would never again launch three ships in a single day.
³⁴

In Maine the BIW launch crew rose before dawn to complete the preparations. The checklist was long but familiar, burnished over a century
that had sent 393 ships into the Kennebec River. Workers swaddled the prow of the
Roberts
in bunting and replaced the concrete keel blocks with a sliding wooden cradle. Signal flags flapped merrily on long catenaries. The newly complete hull, with its smooth coats of gray and ochre paint, belied the work that remained. Bits of scaffolding surrounded the unpainted superstructure, and a wooden plug occupied the missile launcher's place on the forecastle. But the tall web of steel and wood that had surrounded the ship was gone, and the slender hull perched naked and precarious atop its launch cradle. Towering over the snow-dappled building ways, the
Roberts
looked ill at ease, as if itching to move on.

By noon, thousands of workers and other well-wishers had folded themselves into metal chairs on the concrete. On the forecastle high above, sailors peeped over the lifelines. Paul Rinn escorted his wife onto a whitewashed lumber dais under the looming prow, where they joined a cluster of dignitaries, including two congressmen. There was even a survivor of DE 413: Jack Roberts, brother of the ship's namesake.
³⁵

Bath's city band played the national anthem, the politicians spoke, a chaplain delivered an invocation. Jack's wife, Ivonette, broke a beribboned champagne bottle against a small plate welded to the bow and jumped back as the wine foamed over.
³⁶
Bath's launchers pulled the trigger, and the
Roberts
moved smartly down the ways. One BIW engineer pulled a pencil from a battered notebook wrapped with a rubber band. In precise letters, Erik Hansen noted the time, date, and speed as the ship moved down the ways. His book held the same data for each of the yard's twenty previous frigates.

The
Roberts
plunged into the river, and tugboats shepherded it to a nearby pier. But more than a year of work still lay ahead for the workers of Bath—and for the frigate's crew, whose members were starting to trickle into town.

T
he man who built the
Roberts
's damage control team hadn't wanted the job. At thirty-one, Lt. Eric Sorensen was a bit older than his peers, thanks to his enlisted service in the U.S. Coast Guard and a couple of years as a charter boat captain. But he was no less determined to make a career of the navy, and had worked hard to get his commissioned service off to a fast start.