21 years ago today, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine in the Persian Gulf. What followed was a story worth telling and one that Bradley Peniston captured in his book, No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf.
What inspired you to write No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf?
Most naval buffs have heard of the Roberts — if only as a one-line cautionary tale about the underappreciated danger of mines. But like most tales, the story of the Roberts gets better when you know the whole thing: how a superb crew was forged aboard an underrated vessel, how they journeyed into war, and how they faced their mortal test.
In 2002, the Naval Institute Press arranged for me to have dinner with the ship’s recently retired commander, Capt. Paul Rinn. That turned into a three-hour conversation, which launched a fullblown effort to interview other crew members, dig up records at various naval archives and libraries, and write the book.
How close did the ship come to sinking?
I’ve been told that when engineers at the Navy’s David Taylor Model Basin tried to simulate the damage to the Roberts, they couldn’t do it without sending their model to the bottom of the tank. (I couldn’t confirm that; Navy officials declared the tests classified.) But the ship was surely in peril.
The Roberts is part of the Perry class of guided missile frigates, which were designed in the early 1970s with just 50 tons of growth margin for new gear. By the time the Roberts was launched in 1986, Perrys were carrying several hundred tons more than their design weight. The ship’s first Damage Control Assistant calculated that the Roberts might not survive a hit that flooded three of the ship’s 11 watertight compartments.
When the mine detonated around dusk on 14 April 1988, it put a truck-sized hole in the frigate’s hull below the waterline. Seawater rushed in, nearly filling the main engine room and an aft machinery room. The blast also perforated the engine room’s forward bulkhead, allowing jets of water to begin flooding a forward machinery room. Within seconds, a ship that was already beyond its original safety margin became several hundred tons heavier still.
Moreover, the explosion’s fireball had traveled up the exhaust stack, igniting blazes on four decks. So the crew began fighting the fires — which meant pumping even more water aboard. In fairly short order, the ship was riding so low that the flight deck was just an arm’s length above sea level. At that point, Capt. Rinn took a gamble: he ordered his sailors to stop pouring water on the flames until the flooding could be brought under control.
Even after the ship was reasonably safe from sinking or even capsizing, it remained in danger of breaking up. The mine blast had broken the keel, leaving the entire ship to flex around the main deck, like a Coke can bent back and forth until it tears.
How did the mine explosion that nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts send ripples through the Gulf?
The day after the explosion, Navy divers pulled from the water several mines whose serial numbers matched up with weapons seized several months earlier aboard an Iranian minelayer. President Reagan ordered limited retaliation, and the result was Operation Praying Mantis, a one-day battle that was, among other things, the U.S. surface fleet’s biggest firefight since World War II. On 18 April 1988, U.S. forces sank two Iranian ships, burned another to the waterline, damaged at least one Iranian F-4 jet, and destroyed several armed powerboats.
Two months later, a U.S. warship that had been rushed to the Gulf to cover the extraction of the damaged Roberts — the cruiser Vincennes — accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner.
These two violent events helped convince Ayatollah Khomeini that the United States would not permit Iran to prevail in its eight-year war against Iraq, and Iran shortly accepted a ceasefire that ended the world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein used the break to withdraw his forces from the Iranian border, rebuild them, and two years later, send them southeast to capture Kuwait.
What lessons can be learned from your book for commanding officers and crewmembers alike?
Almost everyone I talked to had good lessons that they wanted to share. Among the many interesting aspects of Rinn’s leadership style was his insistence that his crew learn about the name on the ship’s stern. Samuel B. Roberts won a Navy Cross helping Marines at Guadalcanal, and the first ship named for him helped turn away the Japanese Center Force at Leyte Gulf.
The mine strike also demonstrated the damage that crude weapons can do to sophisticated and expensive ones — a lesson tragically relearned through roadside bombs in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What projects are you working on now?
My day job — managing editor of Defense News — keeps me pretty busy. We publish a weekly newspaper, update our Web site (http://defensenews.com) constantly, and just last year debuted a Sunday television show that interviews defense-related newsmakers (This Week in Defense News, http://www.defensenewstv.com/).
I did recently help launch Philly Pecha Kucha (http://phillypechakucha.com), a sort of rapidfire creative show-and-tell series in Philadelphia.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
You can see photos of the ship and read the book’s foreword (by the late JCS chairman, Adm. William Crowe) and its first chapter at http://nohigherhonor.com. Many thanks for having me on the blog.
