No Higher Honor (32 page)

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.

W
hen a U.S. Navy ship approaches a foreign port, its crew customarily dons dress uniforms and arrays itself along the lifelines, a ceremonial fillip that speaks of martial discipline and diplomatic niceties and the difference between a warship and a mercantile craft hauling shopkeepers' cargo. For Rinn, the regrettable fact that the
Roberts
was approaching Dubai under tow was no excuse for making a sloppy impression. It would be, after all, the ship's first visit to the United Arab Emirates. All hands, he ordered, would report as usual in white summer uniforms.

That touched off a mad frenzy belowdecks. Plenty of sailors' whites had been lost or hopelessly soiled in the previous days' chaos; many more had been in the laundry when the ship hit the mine, and quite naturally, were still there. Eventually, enough Dixie-cup hats, rolled neckerchiefs, and white-works jumpers were found to outfit the entire crew. Everyone shaved and took a saltwater shower, and by the time the
Hunter
and the
Roberts
drew to within ten miles of the port, the sailors were out on deck.

Sparing no effort, the ship's signalmen raised the nautical pennants signifying “We are okay.” Then they broke out their biggest American flag, the twenty-by-forty-foot monster they called “the Chevy-dealer model.” Flying from the frigate's mast, it could be seen from horizon to hazy horizon.

The ship was headed to Dubai, an ancient port that had boomed in recent decades. The specific destination was Dubai Drydocks, the Persian Gulf's largest ship-repair facility. Oil wealth had built the facility as a hedge against fluctuating petroleum prices, and it had seen plenty of profit in patching up the maritime victims of the Iran-Iraq war.
¹

Eckelberry had visited the bustling port once before, and had found the racket almost deafening: cranes toting containers, repair crews stripping ships with pneumatic hammers, all the noises a commercial and industrial harbor can generate. But as
Hunter
towed the
Roberts
into the harbor around 3:00
PM
, it dawned on him that something very strange was happening. The great port had fallen silent. Every worker on the waterfront had heard about the mining, it seemed, and had apparently put down their tools for a look at the diminutive warship that had survived the explosion. To the casual eye, the frigate looked to be in pretty good shape. The discerning viewer could see that the ship was down three feet at the stern.

Three harbor tugs nudged the warship past an Iranian tanker and up to a pier. At 4:25
PM
on Saturday, 16 April, the
Roberts
came to rest. It was two days, almost to the hour, since the mine blast.
²

DOWN IN THE WARDROOM
, the officers, still in their dress whites, worried vaguely about the stability of their wired-up ship and wondered what to do next. In strode Bob Firehammer, dressed in civilian clothing. “Anyone want to hit the beach and grab a beer?” Firehammer asked. That broke the ice, and the officers scattered to change into civvies. Less than an hour later, most had their hands wrapped firmly around cold drinks at the bar at the Dubai Hilton.

The luxury hotel seemed to be one of the few places serving alcohol in the Muslim city, which had just begun to celebrate the annual Ramadan holiday. Within a few hours, the enlisted sailors had found the Hilton as well. Gary Gawor led a gang of engineers, hull technicians, and other shipmates to the hotel, rented a room, and started ordering room-service Heineken beer at an eye-popping seventy-two dollars per case. “It was the best money I ever spent, that night in the Hilton,” Ted Johnson recalled fondly. “I think we even emptied the honor bar. Gawor's credit card must have melted!”
³

But for many of their married shipmates, the arrival in Dubai had precipitated a mad dash to the pier, where a lone phone booth beckoned like a lifeline to home. About two dozen sailors' wives gathered at Perez's house in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, two towns up from Newport. They picked at brown-bag lunches and waited. At 2:00
PM
, the phone
rang. It was the
Roberts
sailors, who announced that they were queued up at the phone, the line stretching down the pier. Hastily, the wives arranged themselves in the same order as their husbands, forming a line along the hall to the Perez bedroom.

One by one, the sailors and their wives squeezed in a few minutes of stories and relief and love. Everyone had done their duty, the men said, but they singled out as heroes Cowan and Bent, who had pulled Perez from the oily black water. The phone call lasted two and a half hours before the last husband and wife said good-bye and hung up. Everyone in the house except Mary Perez had talked to their husbands. “The wives were so happy they were here and got to talk to them,” she said. “I was happy for them.”
⁴

At 7:45
PM
Mary finally got a call through to Alex, who had been medevaced to the Bahraini hospital. His spirits were high, she told a local reporter. “He just told me he loves me and to hang in there,” she said. “The first thing [he said] was he wants to go back to the ship” and that “there is no higher honor than serving on the
Roberts.”

Cynthia Thomas talked with her husband, Randy Lee, who had been helicoptered off the ship after injuring his back moving 76-mm ammunition. “It was all so fast,” he told her.
⁵

For some anxious wives, children, parents, and other loved ones, the phone call from the pier was the first official word they'd gotten. Lester Chaffin's mother in West Virginia saw the damaged
Roberts
on Thursday's evening news and had worried for two days until Chaffin reached them by phone to let them know he was unhurt.
⁶
Other sailors had gotten word through phone trees or with telegrams. Gunner's Mate 1st Class Lawrence Lorusso had sent one such to his parents in Syracuse, New York. The delivery boy knocked on their door at 6:30
AM
on Friday. The missive began,
Mom, I'm OK
.
⁷

Pamela Rinn had received the news on Thursday at the family home in Charleston. She had just returned from dropping her income tax return in the mail when she heard the phone ringing through the front door. Wrestling with her dry cleaning, she managed to get the door unlocked and picked up the handset. It was someone calling from Aquilino's squadron.

Pamela spent much of the next twenty-four hours on the phone with navy officials and
Roberts
wives. They decided, among other things, that
the Halfway Dinner should go on as scheduled—if no one died. The next day, she flew north from Charleston as if in a dream, walking past airport newsstands with photos of her husband's ship plastered across the front page.
⁸

On Friday night Pamela Rinn joined the Newport families and gathered as planned for the dinner, a catered affair at the Officers' Club, and it had gone off as scheduled, if not exactly as anticipated. The occasion proved a good chance to get together and swap what bits of information the navy and the grapevine could provide.

Rinn finally got in touch with his wife in Newport on Saturday. Mostly, he talked of the sailors who had saved his ship. “It was close, really close,” Paul told Pam. “The crew did exactly what they were supposed to do.”
⁹

Commodore Aquilino told Rinn that morale was holding on the home front and sent word of his medevaced sailors. Three of them, their burned faces masked with white salve and their limbs wrapped in medicated bandages, had been helicoptered to Bahrain, then flown by air force C-141 airlifters to the U.S. Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Welch and Smith had turned out to be less badly burned than originally feared, although Smith's right hand would require considerable rehabilitation. Burbine, with burns over 40 percent of his body, would need plenty of treatment as well, but the sutures were holding around his eye and he was in good spirits. All three were headed to Brooks Army Hospital in Texas, one of the U.S. military's best burn-care wards.

Perez, who had suffered the crew's most grievous injuries, was still in Bahrain's Salmaniya Hospital. His upper torso was still immobilized in a body cast. A CAT scan had found fractures in his back, but had also indicated that the broken bones had stabilized.
¹⁰

Rinn received an unexpected phone call of his own that day. His phone rang, and a voice said, “Hold for the president.”
President of what?
Rinn wondered. But the voice that came on the line was instantly recognizable. “This will not go unpunished,” Ronald Reagan told the
Roberts
's captain. “I'll get back to you.” And with that, the president hung up. The call had lasted not more than twenty seconds, and it left Rinn just a bit stunned.
¹¹

But the captain's thoughts were soon back on his ship. He had a meeting scheduled on Sunday with the repair engineers at Dubai Drydocks.
He had dozens of questions, but they all boiled down to a single one: can we fix the ship here? Rinn fervently hoped so. He knew that the
Stark
had sailed home under its own power. If the
Roberts
could be patched up to do the same—or even to complete her deployment—the message to the world would be unmistakable: it's tough to knock a United States warship out of the fight. It would also prove that U.S. warships could be repaired in Gulf ports. And it might also keep Rinn in command a few weeks longer. Surely, he told himself, the navy wouldn't call him away after a moment of such triumph. When the Dubai shipwrights assured him that they could fix his ship, Rinn's spirits soared.
¹²

Shortly after noon the next day, the captain laid out his case in a message addressed to Admiral Less, the Middle East Force commander, with copies sent to most of the navy's major commands. The ship had been badly damaged, Rinn began. The blast had put a twenty-foot hole in the hull. It had bent the keel into an S-shaped beam. The main engine room was still flooded to the upper catwalk; AMR 3 was inundated to its overhead I-beams. “The oil distribution box and sump, normally in lower level,” he wrote, “are now lodged in overhead between gas turbines.” Electrical power was shaky, and potable water was being pumped in from a hookup on the pier.

But the crew had reacted and rebounded beautifully, and had already restored many auxiliary systems. Air conditioning was keeping the computers and living spaces cool. Ford's galley gang was once again feeding the crew hot meals. The heads flushed. The showers ran cold water only, but they worked.

Now, Rinn went on, the ship needed two LM-2500 gas turbines, a new reduction gear, some auxiliary equipment, and lots of work. The Dubai engineers believed they could do the job if provided with a new propeller shaft and a few sections of HY-80 hull plate, which was not available locally. Rinn described the dry dock's chief executive as being well attuned to the “political reasons” for repairing the
Roberts
in theater.

Rinn believed the ship would be safe enough during the repairs. Besides Dubai's own port security, the
Roberts
had installed its own twenty-four-hour deck patrols. One sailor walked the deckhouse roof with an M-14 rifle, another hefted a shotgun on the main deck. The .50-caliber guns were unlimbered, loaded, and hidden discreetly under canvas.

Bottom line, Rinn declared: he wanted to restore the
Roberts
to fighting trim. “Ship is cleaned up, morale higher than ever, ship's force work underway,” he wrote. “We saved her, we'll fix her and fight her again. Request max support to restore MER [main engine room]/AMR 3 ASAP . . . No higher honor!”

The decision would eventually be made back in Washington, but for now Tony Less had other things on his mind. From the White House itself, orders had filtered down to the commander of the Middle East Force, telling him to plan, not for repairs, but for revenge.

Within hours of
Roberts
's plodding withdrawal from the minefield, wooden-hulled minesweepers and navy helicopters had begun moving in cautiously, like wary detectives arriving at the scene of a bloody shootout. They had a few clues already. The mines had been spotted in a group, which ruled out the possibility that they might have drifted far—say, down from the Farsi Island minefield, two hundred miles to the northwest, where the tanker
Bridgeton
was damaged the previous July. Floating mines that had slipped their moorings were almost always found alone. That meant someone had deliberately sowed them in the central Gulf's main shipping channel. And they had done it recently, for the mines would not long have remained undetected, or undetonated, in the busy waterway.

A helicopter pilot spotted the first mine and hovered low so that a photographer could lean out the door and snap a photo. The fat horned sphere floated on the surface, its gleaming black paint, free of marine growth, easily visible in a sea beaten white by the helicopter's rotor wash.

The EOD divers came next, blowing up a few of the mines, disarming two others. When they hauled the inert spheres aboard one of the minesweepers, they found the smoking gun they were looking for. The serial numbers matched those of the M-08s found aboard the
Iran Ajr
, the Iranian minelayer that had been caught and scuttled the previous September.