The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran

by David Crist

  On the afternoon of April 14, Captain Rinn was down in his cabin and, in a good-natured way, berating his cook, Chief Petty Officer Kevin Ford, for having too much spinach on the menu. Ford was planning a steak and lobster dinner the next night, complete with a side dish of spinach. This vegetable choice had become a matter of some debate on the ship, and Rinn had been reading the numerous complaints dropped in the ship’s suggestion box about an overabundance of spinach. “No more spinach, Ford!” Rinn exclaimed.

  Suddenly, a pronounced shudder ran through the ship. The Roberts slowed down precipitously. Immediately the phone rang in his cabin. It was the officer of the day, Lieutenant Robert Firehammer, Jr.: “Sir, I think we’re coming into a minefield.”

  The forward lookout was a young boatswain’s mate named Bobby Gibson. He had been on the bow watch for about an hour, sitting in the bolted metal chair watching dolphins repeatedly dive before the Roberts’s wake, anticipating a beautiful sunset on a warm afternoon with a calm sea and light breeze. At 4:39 p.m., he saw what at first he thought were three dolphins—only these “weren’t going back under water.” Grabbing his binoculars, he could clearly see spikes sticking out from the black cylindrical objects, the sun glinting off their freshly painted metal skins. He immediately sounded the alarm.11

  Rinn remained skeptical. The Roberts, as every other ship in the Gulf, had had its run-ins with a host of minelike objects: garbage bags, empty oil drums, dead sheep. This, he thought, would be one more piece of Persian Gulf trash. But as it warranted his presence on the bridge and was clearly a higher priority than spinach, he replied, “Okay, I’ll be right up.”

  As Rinn arrived on the bridge, Firehammer explained that the forward lookout had spotted mines. Rinn grabbed some binoculars and took a look for himself, immediately spotting three dark objects floating on the surface, two directly in front of the ship and one only three hundred to four hundred yards off the starboard side of the ship. “Shit!” he exclaimed. “Those are mines!”

  Rather than proceed, Rinn thought, perhaps the ship could simply retrace her steps, so to speak, and reverse engines and back out along the ship’s wake, which remained clearly visible off to the horizon in the blue Gulf waters. “Having just sailed along that track,” Rinn thought, “it should be free of mines.” The captain got on the ship’s intercom and said, “We’ve got mines in front of us. We are going to general quarters, but be quiet; I don’t want all the noise. Check to see that condition zebra is set and then I want everyone who can be spared up above the main deck.” This would ensure that all the doors and hatches below were secure, and if they did hit a mine, he wanted no unnecessary crewmen below deck. He then ordered the Roberts’s Lamps helicopter to get airborne immediately to serve as a spotter. With his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander John Eckelberry, looking on from the port bridge wing, Rinn posted lookouts on the four corners of the ship.

  The Roberts slowly began retracing its path in a straight line, with Captain Rinn on the starboard bridge wing carefully monitoring the proceedings.12 Ten, then fifteen minutes passed. “So far so good,” Rinn thought to himself. But maneuvering a 4,000-ton, 450-foot-long ship backward along a straight line is easier said than done. She veered just slightly off her wake.

  Suddenly the air was ripped by the loudest explosion Rinn or anyone else aboard had ever heard. The force of the explosion lifted the entire aft end of the ship out of the water some ten feet, forcing the bow nearly underwater. As the bow jerked back up, it catapulted Bobby Gibson, who did a complete somersault, landing in a sitting position all the way back at the missile launcher. The force of the blast sent Rinn and most of the crew sprawling on the deck, breaking Rinn’s foot from the impact.

  A mine had detonated on the ship’s aft end, just between the 76-mm gun magazine and the torpedo magazine, blowing a twenty-two-foot hole into the port side and immediately sending two thousand tons of water pouring into the Roberts.13 The force of the blast knocked the ship’s two gas turbine engines from their mountings and hurled machinery upward with crushing force into the deck above. Two ten-thousand-gallon fuel oil tanks ruptured, sending fuel into one of the engines, which immediately ignited, shooting a huge fireball up through the smokestack, mushrooming some 150 feet in the air. The main engine room flooded immediately, and in minutes so did the space just aft.14 Within minutes enough water to fill a tennis court some sixteen feet high had poured into the ship. Power began to fail as smoke and fire spread rapidly.15

  As debris rained down from the explosion, the crewmen immediately responded and ran to their damage-control stations to deal with the crisis. The forward lookout, Bobby Gibson, leaped up and ran to his assigned station. He hooked up the fire hose before he started complaining that his back was hurting him—a natural feeling for someone with three broken vertebrae.

  At this point Eckelberry walked up to Rinn and said, “Sir, you remember your last promotion?” “What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Rinn responded, with irritation in his voice. “Well,” Eckelberry replied, “it looks like it will be just that!” Rinn could only chuckle at the attempt to maintain levity in the most dire of circumstances.

  Heroes abounded on board the Roberts that day, including one unlikely seaman named Michael Tilley. Born in Missouri, he’d enlisted in the navy in 1984 and was assigned to the Samuel B. Roberts upon her commissioning. Petty Officer Tilley worked hard, but trouble seemed to follow him. Shortly after joining the crew, he was caught for underage drinking using a fake ID card. This led to his first captain’s mast, involving a loss of pay and being placed on restriction. When the Roberts made a port visit in the Caribbean during her predeployment workup, Tilley and others went out to some of the local bars. Rather than wait in a long line for the bathroom, he decided to relieve himself behind a bush, which unfortunately stood in front of a large bay window of a posh local restaurant. Once again Tilley met Captain Rinn.

  But Tilley appealed to Rinn’s sense of humor. As Tilley worked down in the engineer spaces during the night shift, he dropped a note in the ship’s suggestion box: “I never see the light of day. Can’t you put a porthole in engineer spaces so I can see the sunlight?”

  Rinn’s executive officer and senior enlisted chief petty officer recommended getting rid of Tilley. When he appeared before Rinn for his third captain’s mast, Tilley just threw himself at Rinn’s mercy. “Sir, please don’t throw me out,” he pleaded. “The navy’s all I got.”16 For a captain not known to tolerate discipline infractions, Rinn decided to let him stay, over the objections of his senior leadership. “After that,” Rinn remarked, “Tilley busted his butt and kept his space near the engineering room immaculate.”

  When Captain Rinn had passed the word for the crew to come above decks and the Roberts proceeded to back out of the mine danger area, Tilley had stayed below in his work space. As he said to Rinn later, “You had given me so many breaks. I thought you needed me to stay down there.” It was a decision that proved critical.

  When the mine exploded, the resulting flooding and fire destroyed three of the Roberts’s four diesel engines required to keep power for the ship’s pumps. The fourth had a cracked governor, and that knocked it off-line. As the crew fought to save the stricken ship, the lights began to flicker on and off as the power began to fail, finally going black as power ceased throughout the ship. Rinn knew that without power, he would lose his ship.

  Trapped below deck, Tilley realized the predicament. He and two other sailors went down to check the diesel generators. One was damaged beyond repair, but the other seemed to be in good shape. With no power, the electric start button was useless. The only alternative was to execute what sailors refer to as a “suicide start.” This is a manual start of the engine whereby high-pressure air is released straight into a start engine. Then, with the push of a button, the air is forced into the governor, somewhat akin to jump-starting a car by popping the clutch while the vehicle is rolling. It’s earned its nickname because if it does not work, t
he engine will fly apart, showering the area with metal fragments. Tilley agreed to try the suicide start, and lowered himself into the confined room housing the generator. Complicating his work, the governor turned out to be cracked, forcing Tilley to climb onto the engine and manipulate it with a screwdriver. With a blast of air rushing by his face, the engine came to life. Amazingly, the jury-rigged process worked and the engine settled into its normal rhythm. With power, the crew had a fighting chance.17 Suddenly, the lights came back on and desperately needed electricity surged throughout the ship. How or why, no one knew, but Rinn was thankful for this miracle.

  In the main engine room, Chief Petty Officer Alex Perez had been climbing up a ladder from the keel area when the explosion hit, blowing the ladder off its frame and trapping him beneath deck plates just above the two engines in a rapidly flooding compartment. When a firefighting team arrived, they found him clinging to the grates, with water up to his chest. They immediately passed him a wrench to try to loosen the bolts that held the plates on. They were located underneath the plate itself, but despite his efforts, they would not budge. Finally one of the sailors climbed over some debris and lowered a battle lantern into the water.

  “Can you see the light?” he asked Perez. “Yes.” “Well, you got to swim to it or you’re going to drown.” Perez swam some twelve feet to where the battle lantern dangled in the water, and several sailors immediately grabbed him by both his hair and his shirt and pulled him to safety. Perez walked out and then collapsed with serious injuries. He was taken along with the other seriously injured to a makeshift aid station in the helicopter hangar.

  At five thirty p.m.—some forty-five minutes after striking the mine—Rinn talked to Less with his second update: “Admiral, the ship is sinking at the rate of one foot every fifteen minutes. I’ve got five seriously wounded, perhaps more, progressive flooding, and uncontrolled fires.” But, he reported, his 76-mm gun was back online and the ship could still fight.18

  Less asked the tough question: “Considering your situation, what do you think about remaining with the ship? Have you considered abandoning ship?”

  “I haven’t thought about that at all,” Rinn replied over the radio. “I have no desire to leave the ship. We’ll stay with the ship and fight it. Right now, I think we can win this thing!” Privately, he thought, “We have no other choice. In a nutshell, we’re in trouble.” But the thought of his crew leaping into shark-infested waters seemed an even worse option.

  “Roger,” Less responded. “Do you have anything else to pass?”

  “Roger,” Rinn came back in a resolute tone. “No higher honor!”19

  It was an amazing moment few listening in on the radio would forget. Anger mixed with pride as news of Rinn and his actions reached Admiral Trost.

  Below deck, the crew fought to save the ship. The forward bulkhead of the main engine room adjoined another compartment, which began to buckle as water cascaded in, threatening to short out the fire pumps. Sailors worked feverishly to shore up the collapsing bulkhead, using their clothes to plug holes and stop the flooding. Six men, including the cook, a radio operator, and regular deckhands, worked to stave off the flooding, shedding most of their clothing to stuff in the cracks in the aluminum wall. Rinn came down to assess the problem and immediately realized the gravity of the situation. If these men failed, the ship would be lost.

  He gathered the men together, now clothed only in their underwear, and said, “Let me tell you—you have got to save this space. We’ve got two main spaces flooded, and the ship can’t afford to lose a third. You have got to save that bulkhead, and if you don’t, you’re going to die right here.”20

  They all understood. “No problem, sir,” Kevin Ford, the cook, answered. Someone then brought out a boom box and popped in a tape of the group Journey, and the men again set to work shoring up the bulkhead with wood support and patching holes with anything they could get their hands on. Rinn went back up topside. In his mind, Rinn had his doubts; he left the space privately believing that he would never see those men alive again.

  As darkness fell at six thirty p.m., the first outside help arrived for the stricken frigate. A U.S. Marine CH-46 Sea Knight arrived from the Trenton to evacuate the wounded, including four who had to be rushed to Salmaniya Hospital in Bahrain. One, Petty Officer David Burbine, had burns over 70 percent of his body. Additional fire hoses and much-needed water arrived for the parched crewmen (the damage had knocked out the Roberts’s ability to make freshwater).21 The helicopter returned, bringing in equipment and welders to help seal the cracks that had essentially split the ship in half. Her keel had been broken, and only the main deck held the Samuel B. Roberts together.22

  By seven p.m. the fire had been extinguished in the main engineering spaces, but it raged in a space just above. As a precaution, Rinn ordered half the 76-mm ammunition and the missiles in the associated magazine emptied and thrown overboard. Unfortunately, one bright young sailor decided to throw a magnesium flare over the side right into the ammunition bobbing in the water next to the ship. Astounded and very much annoyed, Rinn asked him, “Why did you do that?”

  The sailor answered innocently, “I wanted to mark where the ammunition was in the water. I thought you would want to know where it was.”

  Rinn just shook his head and mumbled, “This is not my day.”

  Below deck, the men rose to the challenge. Amazingly, through their Herculean efforts plugging holes, they kept the bulkhead shored up, staving off the loss of the space and their own certain deaths.

  While the crew managed to stop the flooding, water continued to rise at an alarming rate. Standing on the flight deck, one could literally reach over and touch the water as the Roberts continued sinking. With water running over his shoes, Rinn concluded that the massive amount of water being pumped to fight the fire was the cause. The firefighting efforts were actually sinking the ship. “We are doing this to ourselves,” he said. “We are sinking ourselves.”

  Captain Rinn walked up to the bridge and said, “Quartermaster, make an entry into the log. At 19:05, the captain orders the cessation of fighting all fires.”23

  His executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Eckelberry, went ballistic. He pulled Rinn out onto the bridge wing just in time to witness a large burst of flame shoot into the sky from the center of the ship. “Sir, have you gone crazy!”

  “No,” Rinn replied. “I’m not worried about the fire; it hasn’t spread, and with the ammo gone, I don’t think we are going to blow up. But I am worried about what is going on at the stern. We are sinking, and if it continues, we won’t be able to save the ship.”

  With that came a reluctant “Aye, aye, sir,” and the order was passed to stop putting water on the fire. Within thirty minutes the sinking stopped and the ship stabilized.

  With the flooding mitigated, the next step was to put out a stubborn fire that seemed to be sloshing around on top of the firefighting foam somewhere above the engine room. Lieutenant Gordon Van Hook, the chief engineer, and Petty Officer Eduardo Segovia had, at considerable risk, gone below trying to pinpoint the fire’s location. Van Hook suggested they remove the gas turbine engine ejection ports—huge metal plates weighing several tons each bolted onto the deck—as the fire seemed to be located underneath. Rinn reluctantly agreed. A team unscrewed the large bolts and, using crowbars, pried off the plate about three feet. Flames immediately shot out some twenty feet high like a torch. In a bit of grisly humor, Van Hook turned to Rinn and said, “Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea!”24

  Rinn cringed and said: “Now you tell me!”

  But Van Hook’s assessment had been right on. Fire hoses dumped foam into the hole and in about two minutes, with a puff of white smoke, the fire finally went out. The time was eleven fifty p.m., some six hours after the initial mine detonation.

  A week or so later, with the Roberts laid up at a dry dock at Dubai, Captain Rinn received another note in the crew suggestion box from Mike Tilley: “Captain, with regard to
the request for a porthole in the main engineering space, you’ve exceeded my wildest dreams.”25

  The day of the Roberts misfortune dawned unusually cold and blustery in Washington. Temperatures reached only to the high forties, with a strong breeze cutting through the morning commuters, who had been forced to break out their winter coats once again for this distinctly unspringlike day. That morning, the Middle East was not on the agenda for the country’s leadership. Reagan was focused on pending talks with Congress regarding an upcoming trade bill and on his recent poll numbers. Others, including Colin Powell, William Crowe, and George Shultz, were immersed in preparation for an upcoming visit by the secretary of state to the Soviet Union to discuss the START arms-control agreement in advance of a summit between the superpowers. Shortly after hearing news of the Roberts’s misfortune, Crowe received a call from the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar. “I’m sorry to hear about your frigate,” Bandar said in a consoling tone. He offered the use of Saudi facilities to repair the Roberts. The Saudi ambassador added, “Somebody should visit Farsi.”

  At the same time, some nine hundred miles south of Washington, General Crist met with his “board of directors” at his headquarters in Tampa to discuss possible retaliation against Iran. General Crist called Less to say that if he found the suspected Iranian ship, “I’ll ask permission to sink her.” But he was anticipating a call from the chairman or the secretary of defense, and he wanted to have several courses of action ready, from a single target to a large-scale retaliation. “The plan has to be flexible enough to respond to any Iranian escalation.” The most obvious choices, once again, were the platforms that sat astride the convoy routes. But Crist wanted something bigger. He had advocated taking the three-square-mile chunk of rock and sand named Abu Musa Island. Strategically situated within the Gulf on the approach to the Strait of Hormuz, it was fast becoming a major hub for Revolutionary Guard Boghammer and small-boat attacks, which threatened to seriously undermine the entire American effort.26