No Higher Honor Read Free

monarchy forced the White House’s hand in late 1986 by extracting a promise to protect its tankers.
    In mid-1987 the U.S. Navy launched Operation Earnest Will—its first convoy operation since World War II—and began to dispatch dozens of U.S. warships to the region. One of them was Gibson’s: USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58), a guided missile frigate on its maiden deployment. The 445-foot Roberts was small for a contemporary American surfacecombatant; it belonged to the inexpensive and oft-dismissed Oliver Hazard Perry class. But the ship was a stout craft, built by Maine’s venerable Bath Iron Works, powered by modified aircraft engines, and better armed than it first appeared.
    And its crew was second to none in the Atlantic Fleet. Cdr. Paul X. Rinn had pushed his sailors to be the best—to be the New York Yankees, as the Bronx-born combat veteran put it. Captain and crew had spent most of the previous two years at sea, mastering the myriad skills of naval warfare. Their commodore had recently named Roberts the best Perry -class frigate in his squadron, and fleet instructors declared it the best ship they’d seen in years. Two months in the Persian Gulf had put those skills to the test. Since arriving in February 1988, the crew had handled convoys, patrols, and a rescue at sea. They had chased away Iranian warships and warded off Iraqi fighters. They had guarded the secret mobile operating bases in the northern Gulf and launched black army helicopters on shadowy missions.
    Danger was omnipresent. Less than a year had passed since an Iraqi jet had fired two missiles into the USS Stark (FFG 31), killing thirty-seven U.S. sailors. Baghdad called it a tragic accident, but the Roberts crew took it as a bloody warning. They had redoubled their training efforts and since arriving in the Gulf had remained constantly vigilant. On deck, the lookouts kept their eyes peeled; down in the darkened combat information center, radar operators peered at cathode-ray screens around the clock. They sorted the seething mass of green specks into tankers and warships, dhows and armed speedboats, airliners and fighter jets. Every dot concealed a different way to die—collision, accident, or deliberate attack.
    But many captains—the Roberts ’s Rinn among them—worried even more about a threat that didn’t show up on radarscopes: the naval mine. Since World War II, mines had damaged more U.S. warships than missiles, guns, and bombs combined. A floating Iranian weapon had clobbered a tanker on the very first Earnest Will convoy. Its three escorting warships completed the journey in the tanker’s wake, huddling behind the wounded giant. And yet the navy still afforded its surface combatants no mine-detection gear more sophisticated than a pair of binoculars and a sharp-eyed lookout.
    ON THE FORECASTLE , Gibson raised his binoculars again. This time, there was something out there. A half-mile off the starboard bow, three objects bobbed some distance apart. They were black, like the ubiquitous floating trash bags. But these had protrusions and rounded carapaces—maybe they were dead sheep? Gibson had seen plenty of those bloated forms, the cast-off dead of Australian livestock carriers. These objects were different, shinier. That’s a mine! he thought. He squeezed the round microphone under his chin, and a carbon-filled cell transformed the sound of his voice into electrical impulses. “Bridge, forecastle,” he said, calling the pilothouse.
    On the bridge, Lt. Robert Firehammer raised his own binoculars. A quick look told the officer of the deck what he needed to know. “All engines stop,” Firehammer told the helmsman. The ship began to slow, but he decided to stamp on the brakes. “All engines back one-third,” he said. The bronze blades on the Roberts ’s seventeen-foot screw swiveled on their hubs, biting backward into the sea. The ship shuddered. Fire-hammer