No Higher Honor (35 page)

For his part, Rinn sent praise to his squadronmates. “Just like the team player on the injured reserve list, SBR listened, prayed, and cheered for our teammates who were doing the job 18 Apr,” he wrote. “From all angles, your performance was superb. Thanks for a great surface Navy day.”
⁴⁹

The nationally syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick wrote in May about some high-level attention being given the ship. “President Reagan watched a movie the other night,” wrote Kilpatrick, whose son was a senior chief petty officer on
Roberts
's sister ship
Nicholas
.

For Rinn, the apogee came when a phone call from the White House was patched into the
Roberts
's communications circuits. A voice came over the wire, immediately familiar from televised speeches. It was Ronald Reagan, calling with praise for captain and crew. The president also offered a hearty “Bravo Zulu,” although the old army veteran confessed that he wasn't entirely sure what that meant. (It was navy-speak
for “good job.”) Rinn rode the high for days.
⁵¹
A month later, Reagan praised the
Roberts
in his national radio address for Armed Forces Day.
⁵²

TWO WEEKS AFTER
the battle, Admiral Crowe arrived to spend five days in high-level meetings with Admiral Less, General Crist, and political and military leaders in Bahrain and the UAE. Crowe also intended to visit the fleet, hand out awards for Operations Earnest Will and Praying Mantis, and chat with the officers and crew about life in the Gulf.

Crowe paid his visit to the
Roberts
, by then perched high and dry in Dubai's number two repair facility, on the afternoon of 3 May. Barely a week had passed since Rinn had signed off on several dozen award recommendations, but a chain of navy yeomen from Bahrain to Washington had hustled the paperwork along.

The crew turned out in dress whites for the medal ceremony on the dry-dock wall. Under canvas canopies, the sailors sweated in their summer uniforms: short-sleeved shirts and creased pants for the chiefs and officers; long-sleeved sweaters, Dixie-cup hats, and rolled black neckerchiefs for the enlisted men.

Crowe made a few remarks, and then the citations were read. First came Rinn, who received the Legion of Merit with Combat V. A five-armed star with white enameling, it was the navy's seventh-highest decoration. The citation read, in part: “By his superb leadership and untiring efforts, he extricated his ship from the mine field, led his crew in extinguishing the fires, and kept the severely damaged ship from breaking apart and sinking.”
⁵³
“I wish I could have broken it up and given a piece to every member of my crew,” Rinn later wrote.

The trio who rescued Alex Perez received the Bronze Star with Combat V: Bent, Cowen, and Copeland. Seven others received the same award for their leadership in the damage control effort: Eckelberry, Frost, Rassler, Valliere, Van Hook, and Walker.

For their damage control efforts the Navy Commendation Medal was awarded to Dumas, Firehammer, Ford, Frank, Fridley, Gawor, Gutcher, Kingery, Lewellyn, Nicholson, Hull Technician 2nd Class Timothy Regan, Sobnosky, and Whitley. Lambert, the corpsman, also received the Commendation Medal for his work.

Two shipmates received Purple Hearts from Crowe: Dejno and Gibson. In Texas later that day, Atlantic Surface Fleet commander Vice Adm. Joseph Donnell pinned the same on Burbine, Perez, Smith, and Welch.

Every sailor aboard
Roberts
received the Combat Action Ribbon, which recognizes satisfactory performance while under enemy fire. It was the first time in twenty years that an entire ship had been granted the decoration.
⁵⁴
The crew was also awarded the Navy Unit Commendation, whose citation read, in part: “By their heroic efforts, the crew restored electrical power and firemain pressure, controlled the flooding, extinguished the fires, and effected temporary repairs which saved their severely damaged ship. By their conspicuous display of professionalism, determination, teamwork, and loyal devotion to duty, the officers and enlisted personnel of USS
SAMUEL B. ROBERTS
(FFG 58) reflected great credit upon themselves and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”
⁵⁵

Finally, Crowe hauled out a Battle E flag and handed it to Rinn.

All told, thirty-one
Roberts
sailors received medals that day, and another dozen or so would eventually get various individual decorations. Mike Tilley and Rick Raymond received the Commendation Medal with Combat V, for example, while Lester Chaffin received the Navy Achievement Medal.
⁵⁶
But others who received only the Combat Action Ribbon and Navy Unit Commendation felt slighted; it rankled some for years.

Afterward, Crowe asked to see the ship—from the outside. So Rinn called for boots and coveralls, and the pair descended to the dry dock floor, moving slowly to accommodate the admiral's limp. The gash in the ship's side shook Crowe, a former submariner.

“Son, you were really close,” the admiral told Rinn. “I don't think anybody in the States knows how close this was. You really did a great job. What would you like to do in the navy?”

Rinn picked that moment to make a joke. “This is a pretty darn risky business,” he replied. “I thought I'd go back to the States and buy a Burger King and live happily ever after.”

Crowe didn't smile.

Many years later, Rinn was still shaking his head. “Here's a guy who's offering me the world. You know, literally: ‘I' d like to be the CNO's EA
[executive assistant]'—done. I'm sure that anything I said at that moment, he would have made happen.”
⁵⁷

But there was little time for might-have-beens. Rinn had just a few weeks left in his command, and he would spend them tending to his wounded ship.

T
wo days after the explosion, a few members of the navy's damage inspection team touched down at Dubai International Airport—those who had been granted funds for a commercial airline ticket. The rest straggled into town a week later aboard a military transport. They had flown halfway around the world to figure out just how badly the
Roberts
was damaged. Their recommendations would help determine whether Rinn would get his wish.
¹

The group included three engineers from Naval Sea Systems Command, a handful of experts from the Atlantic Surface Fleet, an officer from the Navy Safety Center, and one man who knew FFG-58 as well as anyone: Lt. Eric Sorensen. The former damage control assistant had rotated off the ship as scheduled in late 1987, but he hadn't gone far. The navy had assigned him to the Naval Training Center in Newport, less than a mile away from the
Roberts
's home pier. Sorensen ran the school's pocket fleet of yard patrol craft, the hundred-foot vessels that gave many junior officers their first taste of shiphandling.

When word of the mining swept across campus, Sorenson ran to Surface Group Four headquarters, where he found a pack of officers glued to CNN. As images of the
Roberts
flashed on the television, Sorensen knew he had to go see his ship. The lieutenant rang up a captain he knew at NAVSEA and begged for a spot on the inspection team. The senior officer was noncommittal. Sorensen called back two days later, gripping a message that had arrived unexpectedly on 17 April. “We saved our ship after hitting a mine in no small part because of your relentless training and insistence on SBR's damage control readiness,” Paul Rinn had written to Sorensen. “Your shipmates thank you for giving us the edge in the battle between life and death.” The NAVSEA captain relented, but extracted
a promise that Sorensen would teach a lessons-learned course at the Newport school. It was a bargain swiftly struck.

A week later, Sorensen walked into the Dubai shipyard. He found the
Roberts
at pierside and strode up the brow. The ship was still in the water, and at first glance, it didn't look too bad. But when a chief petty officer rushed up and threw his arms around him, the surprised lieutenant began to grasp the enormity of the experience. The chief thanked the former damage control assistant, told him how glad he was to be alive, and thanked him again. Sorensen blinked back tears. He had never been prouder.
²

A week after the battle,
Roberts
was towed into Dubai Drydocks's number two, a gargantuan repair facility built to hold the world's largest supertankers. Just five years old, its concrete holding tank stretched one-third of a mile into the harbor. The great sea gate that sealed its end was wider than the length of a football field.

The dockworkers had drained the giant basin, built a double row of concrete blocks to cradle the frigate's hull, and flooded it again to allow the warship to enter. The blocks were stacked to meet the curves of the ship's hull plates and capped with soft wood to ease the transformation from buoyant hull to earthbound deadweight. Their construction had been guided by Rassler, the damage control assistant, and Johnson, the hull technician, who had unearthed a basic dry-docking plan from the ship's technical library and modified it to fit the battered hull. The men had attempted to calculate the stern sag by subtracting the current waterline from the nominal one, but guesses only went so far. The frigate's stern was coddled in flotation bladders, but floats and wooden cushions notwithstanding, there was going to be some damage when the ship's forty-one-hundred-ton weight came to rest.

The
Roberts
crew watched from its walls as the sea gate sealed out the harbor. Pumps began to hum. With more than one hundred million gallons of saltwater to drain, there was plenty of time to worry about what would happen when the ship touched down. Finally, the hull settled with a groan onto the blocks. The water receded, and gradually the hole appeared, looking like a punched-in mouth filled with broken teeth. Through the maw, the sailors could see a twisted, broken mass of pipes
and grates and conduits and machinery, all covered with scorched and blasted lagging.

Ted Johnson found the sight comical; in the confines of the huge dock the
Roberts
looked like a toy boat marooned in a bathtub. Others, like Eckelberry, found reassurance in the ship's escape from saltwater; it meant they were finally safe. But the sight wrenched Reinert and others looking on from the starboard side. For the first time, they could see the huge hole in the hull.
How close the ship had come to splitting right in two
, the chief thought.
³

Puddles of seawater still dampened the dry-dock floor as Sorensen and the rest of the inspectors began to take measurements. First, they noted that the
Roberts
seemed to have endured the docking with only minor injury. Two small sections of hull had buckled: the keel near the bow's sonar dome, and the skeg—the plates that surrounded the propeller shaft. Next, they cataloged the damage done by the explosion. They found that the main deck was bent one degree around frames 270 to 280.

But they were heartened to find that the hull had not twisted as well. Repairs were hardly going to be simple, but deformation in three dimensions would have complicated things immensely.
⁴
Everyone expressed their admiration for the ship's sturdiness, especially the welds. Rinn thought back to those long Maine nights he had spent talking to the Bath welders.

Within a few days, Sorensen and the team transmitted a draft report back to the United States. To Rinn's delight, the report concluded that the Dubai facility could fix the ship well enough to sail back to Newport.
⁵

In Washington a constellation of flag officers gathered to weigh the options. There were several concerns: it would be a nightmare to ship certain parts, like the engine shaft, to Dubai, and then there was the issue of doing such an expensive repair in a foreign port. “It was done by committee,” said Capt. Charles A. Vinroot, one of the NAVSEA officers who would oversee the repair effort. “I was in a room with half a dozen admirals, and all I know is, I had a decision when I went out, but I'm not sure who made it.”
⁶

Their decision put Rinn's hopes to death. “It appears impractical to make interim repairs that would be necessary to steam the ship home under her own power,” navy officials told reporters in Washington on 29 April.
⁷
And yet, the
Roberts
would not wallow back to North America
at the end of a towline. It may have been thin consolation for Rinn, but his ship would make the trip aboard one of the world's most unusual vessels, borne home like a wounded champion.

Navy officials had already picked a U.S. shipyard to repair the
Roberts
. Bill Haggett had scarcely given them a choice. The Bath Iron Works president had phoned NAVSEA within hours of the explosion, vowing to do whatever it took to restore the frigate to fighting trim. In any case, BIW was the logical choice, given the yard's intimate familiarity with the frigate, its reputation for repair and refit jobs, and its proximity to the sailors' Rhode Island homes. Navy officials awarded the job to BIW without competition, price to be negotiated later.
⁸