No Higher Honor (8 page)

For fuel fires, the seawater could be mixed with a detergent-like chemical called aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF). A solution of one part AFFF and nineteen parts water would spread over a burning surface, trapping the flammable vapors from diesel oil, jet fuel, or paint thinner. The ship had eight stations that dispensed premixed “A-triple-F”; it could also be drawn from five-gallon drums and mixed in fire hoses on the fly.

It was vital to keep track of the water drawn aboard. “One of the hazards of fighting a fire aboard a ship is that it is possible to sink the ship while putting out the fire,” Sorensen wrote. During World War II, New York City fireboats doused a blaze aboard the French luxury liner SS
Normandie
, which proceeded to capsize under the extra weight.
¹⁰
A 2 1/2-inch hose could put a ton of seawater inside the hull every minute, and what you poured onto the flames, you had to get rid of, preferably sooner rather than later.
¹¹

To avoid the
Normandiet
's fate, the
Roberts
was built with six-inch drainage pipes in the bilges and stocked with eight gas-powered portable pumps. There were also four eductors, simple and ingenious devices that harnessed water pressure to create suction. An eductor resembled a two-foot pipe with an extra intake near one end. You attached a pressurized fire hose to one end and a drainage hose to the other and then
turned on the water. The high-pressure stream created a low-pressure zone inside the eductor, sucking water through the intake and sending it down the drainage tube.

Thou shalt protect thyself so that thou can protect our ship
. This started with clothing. When the alarm sent sailors to general quarters, they tucked pants into socks, rolled down sleeves, and buttoned up collars to the neck. Hats were replaced with flash hoods that resembled thin brown cotton ski masks. On deck, sailors donned helmets and life-jackets; firefighters inside the ship added fire-resistant outfits and Nomex gloves.

A sailor trapped by flame or smoke could grab an emergency-egress breathing device, EEBD for short. When its transparent bag was fitted over the head, a soda-can-sized canister of chemicals generated enough oxygen for fifteen minutes of escape time. Firefighters used a sturdier contraption called the OBA, for oxygen breathing apparatus. A sailor donned a scuba-type mask and a chest harness, screwed on a canister—they looked like oversized green whiskey flasks—and pulled a lanyard. That set off a chemical reaction inside the flask that produced enough oxygen to keep a person going for an hour, or so the manufacturer claimed. The wise sailor, however, worked for no more than a half hour before swapping for another green flask. Sorensen suspected that he had not yet seen just how fast a truly scared sailor could burn through an OBA canister. “Figure twelve to fourteen minutes in a really tough situation,” the lieutenant told his crew.
¹²

Thou shalt report any damage to the nearest damage control station
. A ship's DC effort began at its repair lockers, the cramped storehouses that held the tools of the damage controlman's trade: helmets, flashlights, crowbars, and so forth. A
Perry
-class frigate had three of them. Repair Locker 2 handled emergencies forward, Repair 3 took care of the ship's after spaces, and Repair 5 dealt with the main engine room. The lockers served as muster points, as conference rooms, and as emergency workshops. When a locker team attacked a fire, it generally did so in five-person groups. A scene leader directed the effort, while an investigator looked for hot spots amid the smoke and steam. Two hosemen hugged the pressurized tube, keeping it in place, while the nozzleman directed water at the blaze. And hose skills were just the beginning. There were
thirty-five distinct damage control roles, each with its own set of tasks: leak plugger, stretcher bearer, and so on. A repair locker needed at least one sailor who was qualified to handle each role.
¹³

In a major crisis, the frigate's DC effort would be directed from Damage Control Central, an eight-by-ten-foot nook in the engineering control room. One wall contained a panel whose lights indicated temperature and fireplug status around the ship. DC Central was dominated by a plotting table, where the DCA and several enlisted assistants scribbled grease-pencil hieroglyphics on laminated deck charts. In the ship's steel honeycomb, losing track of fire or flooding could be fatal.

Thou shalt take every possible step to save our ship (and thyself) as long as a bit of hope remains
. This meant, among other things, stanching the rush of seawater from a pipe or through a ragged hole in the hull. The modern U.S. Navy taught several ways to attack a leak; some of the techniques would have been familiar to Admiral Lord Nelson's English tars. A mallet could be used to pound wedges of yellow pine or Douglas fir into the gap. Smaller holes might be plugged with natural fibers that would swell when wet: rags, cloth, the oily hemp strands called oakum. To be sure, technology had updated some equipment. There was fiberglass cloth to wrap around split pipes, and steel plates to be welded over bulkhead punctures.

Structural damage called for shoring, the craft of using wood or metal beams to brace weakened hull plates and bulkheads. Telescoping steel supports were quick to set up; the blue-painted beams were easily wedged into position. But serious problems often required complicated patterns of wooden beams: T-bracing, I-bracing, K-bracing, all named for the letters they resembled. The ship carried about fifty yards of four-by-four-foot beams and handsaws to cut them to size.

Thou shalt keep cool; thou shalt not give up our ship
. Every sailor was expected to know the basics of damage control. But repair teams needed a firm grasp on all firefighting and shoring methods—and a degree of innovation and improvisation as well; combat damage, after all, rarely occurred the same way twice.

Sorensen condensed all this, and more, into an eighty-six-page reference guide that would fit in a hip pocket. Rinn wrote a foreword for the pale-blue volume. “War-damage reports have shown that if a damaged
vessel survives the first 10 minutes, it will probably live to fight again,” the captain wrote. “This indicates that initial corrective action is vitally important. What YOU do when a casualty occurs may determine our survival. This booklet will provide you with the basics. Read it, reread it, and know it. Learn damage control procedures as if your life depended on them—it very well may.”
¹⁴

Armed with his new textbook, Sorensen became relentless in drilling the crew. Old hands agreed that no one else taught the subject with Eric Sorensen's quiet intensity. “Damage control on the
Sammy B
was different than anywhere else I had been,” recalled chief gunner and damage control training team member Reinert, who had served on aircraft carriers and destroyers. “At most commands, you had to be damagecontrol qualified and know how to fight fires. On the
Sammy B
, everyone probably felt like they were part of a hose team because of the way we did training.”
¹⁵

As new sailors arrived in Bath, Sorensen would spread out a deck diagram and hit them with an introductory lecture he called “the micro-to-macro-to-micro approach for the farm boys from Iowa.” A
Perry
-class frigate was a “three-space ship,” he began. “It's divided into 11 watertight compartments. Any three of these compartments can flood completely, and the ship will settle into the water a certain amount, but it'll still float.

“But if that fourth compartment begins to flood, the ship is going to capsize, and it's going to sink. That's why it's so important that you know how to plug that hole in the bulkhead, or use that pipe-patching kit, because you don't want that fourth compartment to flood, do you? No, you don't.”

Once a sailor realized that his life depended on knowing this stuff, his education had begun. Studying the handbook was just a starting point. The crew of the
Roberts
learned to patch and shore, and to handle each position on a hose team. They memorized the layout of vital equipment in the engine room and machinery spaces.

When someone needed help, Sorensen would stay with him for a quarter hour, two hours, whatever it took. “The guy eats damage control for breakfast,” the crew said. Nor was Sorensen alone in his efforts. As the enlisted crew began to show up at Bath, Sorensen had wheedled
and arm-twisted Reinert and about twenty senior sailors into joining the ship's DC training team. Most were first-class and chief petty officers, but Sorensen chose a few second-classes who showed enthusiasm for the extra duty. Together, they pushed the ship into a routine: every four hours, a new watch, a new team on duty, and a new damage control drill.

PRIVATELY, SORENSEN HAD
reached a disturbing conclusion about the frigate. Damage control school had taught him to do back-of-the-envelope calculations concerning the hydrodynamic stability of a floating hull, and he wasn't convinced
Roberts
actually was a three-space ship. Each new class of warship was generally designed with extra space and buoyancy to accommodate the new guns and gear that might be invented and installed during its two-decade lifespan. Many classes began with hundreds of tons of reserve buoyancy, but the
Perry
frigates, whose design had been squeezed for every penny, had been built with only a fifty-ton margin. Yet in the nine years that separated the launch of
Oliver Hazard Perry
from that of
Roberts
, the navy had added four feet of length and several hundred tons to the basic FFG design.

The additional weight reduced the ability of
Roberts
to right itself when rolling in heavy weather; it recovered more slowly than its predecessor
Perrys
, and, in extremis, would capsize sooner. More ominously, the extra tons also eliminated some of the stability that allowed the frigate to absorb combat damage and keep fighting. Sorensen wasn't convinced
Roberts
could lose three spaces and survive.

A
s spring 1985 turned to summer in Norfolk, the members of the
Roberts
's precommissioning detachment wrapped up their individual studies and began to depart for the collective training that would meld them into a fighting crew. The combat systems team headed out to learn the art of modern naval warfare at a ridge-top facility overlooking San Diego Harbor. Among them was John Preston, a fire controlman third class. Sailors came from all over, but Preston's story was fairly typical of the
Roberts
's junior personnel; he had been drawn to the navy, somewhat reluctantly, as an escape from a humdrum existence.

Preston had grown up in Craig, Colorado, population eight thousand, and developed a nineteen-year-old's dread of growing old there. Finished with high school, and with no money for college, Preston was working a dead-end job at the local auto dealership.
Right now, I'm just a nice Christian boy who works for four bucks an hour and has no life
, he told himself.
But I am not going to allow myself to dry up and blow away in this little hick town in the middle of nowhere
.

A church acquaintance steered him toward the navy, but it wasn't a quick sell. Still fresh in Preston's mind was a recent
Saturday Night Live
spoof of the service's recruiting commercials. Over footage of sailors cleaning toilets, a voice intoned, “It's not just an adventure, it's a job.” There was also the recruiter himself, a cigarette-stained chief petty officer who quarreled loudly with his wife while Preston took a military aptitude test in their kitchen. And there was Shelley, a young friend from church who pleaded with him to stay.

Despite it all, Preston signed up. In November 1983 he forced back tears, boarded a Trailways bus, and headed off to San Diego. At boot camp he was morbidly cheered by the presence of some older fellows.
These guys must be real losers
, he thought.
At least I only wasted one year of my post–high school life doing nothing. Some of these guys are almost thirty!

In less than two years—having endured recruit training, a lonely graduation, plenty of midnight watches, and lots of toilet-cleaning duty—Fire Controlman 3rd Class Preston graduated near the top of his class in Mk 92 missile launcher school. His skill earned him a choice of assignments, and he picked a brand-new frigate that was under construction in Maine.

Preston joined the
Roberts
in August 1985, driving across the country in his Toyota pickup to meet up with the rest of the frigate's combat systems team in San Diego. The day before he checked in at the Point Loma training center, he chose the wrong second to glance at a map. His truck veered from the road and plowed into a parked car. Another sailor happened along and took the bruised and bloodied Preston to a naval hospital, where a corpsman diagnosed a separated right shoulder and put a dozen stitches in his head.

“I got some extra here,” the corpsman said.

“Extra what?” Preston asked.

“Extra skin,” the corpsman replied. “Do you want it?”

Preston gritted his teeth and went to class.
¹

The Point Loma ridge offered spectacular views of the harbor, the Coronado Peninsula, and the Pacific Ocean—provided, that is, you were not inside a classroom or one of the shipboard simulators. That, of course, was where Preston joined Lt. Cmdr. Glenn Palmer and thirty-nine other sailors.

The combat information center (CIC) had long replaced the bridge as the fighting heart of a modern warship. In the darkened space just below and behind the pilothouse, the
Roberts
sailors would huddle over green screens, reaching out with electronic eyes to find their enemies. In battle, the captain would be in the CIC, making the decisions to fire. The center's enlisted personnel included radar operators, who used the frigate's three kinds of radar to find objects afloat or aloft; sonar operators, who used computers and headphones to track the invisible craft below the waves; operations specialists, who identified ships, aircraft, and missiles by their electronic emissions; and fire controlmen, who used the
data from their shipmates to guide their own ship's guns and missiles. Together, they ran the
Roberts
's electronic and mechanical eyes, ears, and fists.