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Book excerpt: Mine strike in the gulf

In 1988, the guided-missile frigate Samuel B. Roberts headed to the Persian Gulf at the height of the Tanker War between Iran and Iraq. Its crew had a dangerous mission for their maiden deployment: escorting reflagged Kuwaiti tankers through the chaos of a war zone.

On April 14, the frigate found itself amid Iranian mines in the central gulf’s main shipping channel. It hit one while backing out, touching off an explosion that broke the ship’s keel, blew a 25-foot hole in the hull and set fires on four decks. With seawater rising around their boots, the Roberts’ sailors fought flames and flooding into the night.

Four days after the mine strike, U.S. forces retaliated, sinking two Iranian warships in Operation Praying Mantis, the largest surface-warfare battle since World War II. The incident helped end the Iran-Iraq War and set the stage for conflicts to come.

Adapted from “No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf” (Naval Institute Press, 2006) by Bradley Peniston.

No one saw the mine that got the USS Samuel B. Roberts. That weapon had been laid with more skill, or perhaps luck, than the three still visible off the starboard bow. The mine’s buoyant warhead floated just below the Persian Gulf’s opaque surface, restrained by a steel tether that stretched down 250 feet to the anchor on the silty floor.

The Roberts, which had shuddered to a halt after a warning from the forward lookout, was now creeping backward at 3 knots, retracing the fading white wake that pointed back to Kuwait. This was no mean feat. The frigate’s commander, Cmdr. Paul X. Rinn, was a fine ship handler, but backing a Perry-class frigate was hydrodynamically akin to throwing a paper airplane backwards.

Throughout the vessel, two hundred sailors stood at their general-quarters stations, each one decked out in battle gear. Conversations dwindled and died as the moments ticked by.

On the bridge wing, Rinn gripped the rail and looked aft.

We’re going to get out, he told himself.

The dark shadow of the Roberts’ fantail passed over the hidden black sphere, followed by the ship’s rudder, single screw and skeg. The mine may have been pushed off by the stern’s “bow wave”; it may even have bumped the ship a few times without effect.

But about 4:50 p.m., the Roberts’ luck ran out. One of the mine’s lead-foil horns crumpled against a half-inch hull plate. Chemicals mixed, generating an electrical charge. An eighth-ton of TNT transformed with unfathomable violence into heat and vapor and soot.

The shock wave hit the ship at frame 276 — two-thirds of the way down the hull, and just four feet off the keel.

For a moment, the frigate flexed around the point of impact. The main deck acquired a slight convexity, like a far-off hilltop or the curve of the earth. Then the ship snapped back. Bow and stern came up. The motion cracked the aluminum deckhouse in three places. Six feet of hangar came loose from its welded foundation.

The frigate, which had ridden unbowed through a Mediterranean gale and a Gulf shamal, could not cope with the lightning-fast loads imposed by the mine blast. Directly above the impact point, the main deck bent, leaving a one-degree angle fore and aft. Sixteen feet below the waterline, the keel snapped; a 12-foot beam of HY-80 steel curled away like a pipe cleaner.

The shock shook the ship from stem to stern. It cracked antenna mounts, dumped cooling water onto radar gear, broke the ship’s photocopier and shattered the sneeze guard on the mess deck’s salad bar.

And yet the mine had just begun to wreak its damage on the ship.

The TNT explosion created a gas bubble heated to thousands of degrees and pressurized to thousands of atmospheres. It expanded just behind the shock wave, driving water before it like a battering ram. It is unclear whether it was the shock wave or the bubble that first pierced the ship’s hullplates, but it was the gases that enlarged the hole to the size of a delivery truck.

A fireball filled the ship’s main engine room, converting millions of dollars of precision-engineered machinery into flaming junk. The gas turbines came off their mounts, flooding their enclosures with fuel. The blast tore open a pair of 10,000-gallon fuel tanks and a trio of oil sumps. Atomized diesel and other petroleum distillates sprayed about, bursting into flame as they touched down on red-hot steel.

Still expanding, the fireball opened seams and punched basketball-sized holes in the forward bulkhead. To the rear, it blew out the rubber gasket that surrounded the 18-inch propeller shaft. Scorching gases rushed aft through the ring-shaped gap, filling Auxiliary Machinery Room 3 with a wall of flame.

But the rest of the hull plates held tight, containing the force of the explosion inside the engine room. The pressure continued to grow as the superheated gas bubble sought release.

A second later, it found an escape route. A rent opened in the starboard exhaust plenum, a 5-foot duct that carried the waste products of turbine combustion up four decks and into the atmosphere. The bubble forced its way into the duct. Scorching-hot gases vented up through the ship, setting fires along the way, and burst from the exhaust stack in a hundred-foot geyser of flame.

Far below, the engine room was open to the sea. Water rushed through the 25-foot hole, flooding the ship’s largest space in seconds. The water flowed aft through the shredded shaft gasket, filling AMR 3 almost to the overhead. Then it sluiced forward through the riddled bulkhead and began to flood Auxiliary Machinery Room 2. Within minutes, some 1,800 tons of seawater sloshed in the ship’s belly.

This put a dangerous new load on the main deck. The ship was built like a box girder, with main deck and keel connected by bulkheads and stringers to give the ship the longitudinal stiffness of a seagoing I-beam. With the keel gone, the ship was being held together by the main deck, which now flexed with every passing wave like a soda can bent and rebent. Eventually, the deck might come apart, and if that happened, the ship would break up and sink.

In a heartbeat, a single low-tech weapon had roughly halved the structural strength of a U.S. Navy warship. Many hours would pass before the crew of the Roberts realized just how fragile their vessel had become.

•••••

Within a minute of the explosion, a shaken Rick Raymond and his shipmates in Repair Locker 2 gathered in the starboard passageway.

To Raymond, an operations specialist 2nd class, the half-inch hull plates had never seemed so thin. Is there another mine out there, ready to explode?

A nearby phone buzzed: a report of flooding in AMR 2. That space belonged to Repair Locker 5, but most of those sailors were already up on the deckhouse fighting the stack fire. Others were rescuing a badly burned chief trapped in the engine room; a few more had been injured in the blast.

So five Locker 2 sailors scooped up gear — mallets, wooden plugs, wedges — and headed out. They were Raymond, Mess Specialist 1st Class Scott Frank, Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Dick Fridley, Radioman 2nd Class Gary Jackson, and the team’s leader, Chief Mess Specialist Kevin Ford. They trooped into the messroom, swung open a soundproofed door and descended the ladder within.

Thirty feet long, AMR 2 was one of the bigger spaces on the ship, a two-deck compartment only slightly smaller than the main engine room. Much of the space was taken up by the soundproofed enclosures that held diesel generators Nos. 2 and 3. Other equipment cluttered the area: chilled-water circulators, fuel filters, and most crucially, two of the ship’s firepumps.

The upper deck looked OK to Ford and his team, so they headed down a second ladder, expecting to alight above ochre-painted bilge stringers. Instead, there was only black water, six inches under their boots.

The sight of flooded bilges, alarming though it was, did not compare to the shock of seeing water pouring from holes in the aft bulkhead. The steel plates that separated AMR 2 from the flooded engine room had buckled inwards. Oil-fouled seawater was spurting from a half-dozen cracks and punctures.

This 45-foot stretch of battered steel, obstructed by pipes, equipment and the two generator enclosures, would become the front line in the battle to save the Roberts.

Raymond stepped past the pumps and panels that protruded like islands from the flooded bilges. He took aim at a two-inch split seam, wrestled a wooden wedge into the gushing water, and began pounding it into place with a mallet.

This was standard DC [damage control] technique; Raymond had done this dozens of times in the [damage control trainer] Buttercup. But the steel bulkhead responded in a way he’d never seen in the Norfolk simulator. It split again, opening a new gusher about a foot above the original hole. The words of an instructor came back to him: “It only splits like that when there’s a ton of water behind the bulkhead.”

Just how bad is it in here? Raymond wondered.

Next to him, Kevin Ford was wrestling with another hole. The awkward, cramped space made his job far tougher than anything the simulator had ever thrown at him. The punctures and splits were obscured, hidden behind water lines, fuel valves, electrical junction boxes.

The sailors hammered away, but the wooden plugs weren’t working. Meanwhile, there was more bad news from one of the generator enclosures: Water was spraying onto the 16-cylinder engine, threatening to shut it down.

In desperation, the sailors looked around for other materials, softer ones that would be less likely to cause new holes. In other ships, they might have found rags floating up from the bilges, but the Roberts was kept too clean for that. So they began to tear off their clothes — chambray shirts, white hats, even their coveralls — and stuffed those in the holes. The water spit some of them right out, but others stuck.

It was several minutes before anyone outside AMR 2 knew how bad things were getting, but soon a steady stream of shipmates began arriving to help. At first, they joined Ford’s team at the bulkhead, trying to help plug the leaks. But the chief cook found that the extra hands were more trouble than they were worth; everyone kept tripping over each other.

So Ford sent the new arrivals on other tasks, hollering to make himself heard over the twin diesels. Some he dispatched with reports for DC Central, others he asked to fetch equipment: wooden and metal shoring beams to buttress the damaged bulkhead.

Still others he set to rigging gas-powered pumps and drainage hoses. It was time to start getting some of the rising seawater out of the bilge.

Within minutes, several sailors had readied a pair of eductors, the two-foot pipelike devices that use pressurized water to generate suction. But the eductors required water pressure to work — and at that moment, none of the ship’s fire pumps was operating. Two of five were underwater; the others had shut down with the electrical brownout. The sailors waited anxiously for the Central Control engineers to restabilize the electrical grid.

They did not wait long. One fire pump, then the other, hummed to life. The eductors burped, and began to suck dark liquid from the bilges. Fifteen minutes after water had begun to flood the engineering spaces, the Roberts crew was starting to pump it off board.

But all the eductors on the ship wouldn’t keep the water from rising if the DC teams couldn’t slow the flooding. Ford realized that none of the hard patches they had been struggling with were going to work, yet shirts and coveralls were too small to stanch the flow. He needed something bigger. What, on a ship, was big and soft?

Then it came to him. Ford picked a couple of the extra guys and told them to go get pillows and mattresses. And he added a kicker, intended to take the edge off the rising tension: Ford told them to go get the bedding off their chiefs’ racks.

The sailors returned several minutes later with broad smiles and several blue foam mattresses. Raymond emerged from a generator enclosure, folded one of the six-foot cushions in half and carried it back inside. He pushed the three-foot foam square at a corner leak and used a 4x4 beam to wedge it into place. It wasn’t pretty and it didn’t fully stop the leak, but it kept the water from splashing on the diesel, and that was progress.

But seawater was still coming in faster than they were pumping it out.

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