F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Scott Longman
Even though the minesweepers had already recently been through, the protocol used by the U.S. Navy was to maintain at least one set of Mk 1 Mod 0 eyeballs standing watch. Through the binos, Seaman Bobby Gibson scanned, stopped, and went back.
There.
His initial thought was that there’s no need to get fired up just yet, because the Gulf was and is full of random flotsam, like trash bags and dead sheep. But then the Gibson got clearer resolution. No doubt about it: it was a mine, and freshly laid, based on the bright finish and lack of barnacles. Command immediately threw the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) full astern until stopped. Then, the ship’s superlative skipper, Capt. Paul X. Rinn, took stock.
There were at least two more mines visible in front of them. That meant that there was a good chance that they’d already gone past other mines, either moored submerged or not visible in the chop. Capt. Rinn reasoned—as it turns out, correctly—that they were well into a minefield.
Looking astern, he could still see the wake that they’d left coming in, and he formulated the plan to back out along it, just like stepping backwards through footprints in a terrestrial minefield. The difficulty was that the Roberts was a single-screw ship, and they are notoriously difficult to steer going backward. He ordered deployment of two Auxiliary Propulsion Units, usually reserved for close maneuvering in harbor, to help with the finer work. He also ordered the lower decks cleared—getting the sailors deepest in the ship up and away from the hull.
They gingerly began backtracking. Despite all the care they exercised, the ship drifted slightly out of its inbound path and contacted an Iranian SADAF-02 mine.
It produced a cataclysm.
The 253 pounds of explosives blew the stern 20 feet vertically in the air, punched a cavern, 15 by 20 feet into the ship, and ignited a conflagration. And it shattered the keel, which is almost always a ship’s death sentence. It was a grand slam disaster.
Capt. Rinn immediately deployed damage control. Thanks to his leadership, the crew had been especially well prepared for it. When the Roberts was being built, a labor strike at the shipyard had delayed the Roberts’ building by several months, and Capt. Rinn took advantage of the time he would not have otherwise had to have his crew enter the partially finished ship to learn in detail about its layout and systems. Then, his damage control officers began relentless drills, for every crew member. Further, Capt. Rinn saw to it that the ship had more than standard levels of damage control equipment. Then, as the ship was en route to the Persian Gulf, an additional Navy damage control training team joined them, and ran the crew through some extremely difficult simulations, all under great pressure. So everyone knew what to do. And they were good at it.
Their ship’s namesake had established a first-class basis for acting under stress. Coxswain Samuel B. Roberts, Jr., was a sailor who’d fought in WWII. Instead of remaining aboard ship, he volunteered to go ashore at the meat grinder of Guadalcanal, ferrying supplies and troops. Then, when word came of badly wounded Marines further along the shore in need of evacuation, he volunteered to take a Higgins boat, along with others, to get them, despite heavy fire. When the incoming was so intense that the mission was about to be scrubbed, he, of his own initiative, ran his boat at the shore for the purpose of drawing fire and giving the others a window to get in. It worked: the other boats rescued the wounded Marines, but Coxswain Roberts died a hero.
The crew took his towering spirit to these threats. To review: there was a fire deep in the ship’s guts, to include blasting a tower of flames out through the stack, there was bulkhead instability that might blow a third compartment which would sink the ship and kill the shoring party trying to hold it, there was the whole main deck now carrying the load that the keel used to flexing, buckling and starting to crack. And there were wounded. It was a collect-the-whole-set of disaster.
But Capt. Rinn proved superlative.
First, ever the warrior, even while issuing orders to address those problems, he kept the main thing the main thing, which was the Iranians and a potential further attack. An enemy P3 aircraft and an enemy ship were closing. He got on the comms and explained to them in no uncertain terms what awaited them should they continue on their current paths. His ship was wounded, but it still had severe teeth. Both threats broke away. As he would later note: had they not left “we would have given them a terrible surprise.”
As a superlative leader, he of course evaluated all options, including abandoning ship. Among his thoughts were that the Navy had lost no ship in combat since Korea, that he knew he had the best damage control crew in the Navy, and that abandoning ship itself was likely to lose lives: if the circumstances weren’t already grave enough, the waters around the ship had visible sharks and, just to really add to it, many hundreds of sea snakes. Most sea snakes are highly venomous. New fear unlocked.
There are many marks of a superlative leader. One is enormously caring about those under your command. Another is having immersive knowledge about the matters at hand. A third is being willing to take risks in making command decisions.
Rinn had all three. As to the last one, he did something wildly counterintuitive. He ordered his crew to stop fighting the raging fire.
Your warship is on fire, and you stop fighting it? Yes. Because he surmised—correctly—that a significant percentage of the water that the ship was taking on was the result of firefighting efforts, and that, at the current rate, the pumps couldn’t keep up. His first focus was simply on staying in the sunshine. That masterstroke saved the ship.
To continue, the next most immediate issue was having a shoring party beef up a critical bulkhead: two major compartments had already flooded, and the wall to a third one was failing. Had it given way, it would have sunk the ship. Up to their thighs in water and with more blasting in their faces, the party used timbers and cloth and rope and sheer sack. They all knew that had that bulkhead given way, it would’ve meant officers knocking on their families’ front doors. But they stayed. And they succeeded.
The fire continued. But even though they weren’t hosing water on it anymore, they were still trying to figure out exactly where it was. To the uninitiated, finding a fire might not seem difficult, but in the labyrinth and steel compartmentation of a huge warship, now with the added and unknown complexity of breaches from the blast, they might as well have been looking for Amelia Earhart. But one extremely squared away sailor figured it out. The problem with his plan to fix it was that it carried enormous risk.
To access where he believed the fire to be required the removal of an immense hatch, and that would give the conflagration more oxygen. But he reasoned that it was the only way get to it. At first, Capt. Rinn was reluctant, but then he accepted the risk. They went for it.
At first, there was a brutal flashover, but right after that, the sailors hosed foam and managed to finally put the fire out.
The remaining, enormous problem was that that the ship had no keel, and the rest of the structure, to include particularly the main deck, had been doing its best to keep the whole thing together, but that was a losing fight. The deck had developed buckling and cracks. Further, the ship’s upper superstructure was also cracking in half from side to side. As the hull flexed in the waves, it was getting worse, just like bending a paper clip enough times. There was a real chance of the ship simply breaking in two.
Enter the Navy Chiefs. Many people who have served in the Navy will tell you that Chiefs make things happen at the operational level, and they sometimes do it in unconventional ways. One of them had the idea to simply take a huge length of steel cable, wrap it around the entire superstructure, then cinch it tight, sort of the ultimate zip tie. They did it, and while they cranked the whole thing together, welders went to work putting plates over the cracks, further tying everything back together. It was totally improvised on the fly, and it was totally effective.
This whole time, no other ship could get near to help them, for fear of entering the minefield. But once they’d made it out under their own power, they were taken under tow, and, eventually, a massive heavy lift ship took them back to a Maine shipyard for a total repair.
Thanks to Capt. Rinn’s leadership and the courage and professionalism of the crew, every single sailor and the ship itself survived.
Coxswain Roberts would have approved.
The post Iranian Mines and Epic Damage Control appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
Even though the minesweepers had already recently been through, the protocol used by the U.S. Navy was to maintain at least one set of Mk 1 Mod 0 eyeballs standing watch. Through the binos, Seaman Bobby Gibson scanned, stopped, and went back.
There.
His initial thought was that there’s no need to get fired up just yet, because the Gulf was and is full of random flotsam, like trash bags and dead sheep. But then the Gibson got clearer resolution. No doubt about it: it was a mine, and freshly laid, based on the bright finish and lack of barnacles. Command immediately threw the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) full astern until stopped. Then, the ship’s superlative skipper, Capt. Paul X. Rinn, took stock.
There were at least two more mines visible in front of them. That meant that there was a good chance that they’d already gone past other mines, either moored submerged or not visible in the chop. Capt. Rinn reasoned—as it turns out, correctly—that they were well into a minefield.
Looking astern, he could still see the wake that they’d left coming in, and he formulated the plan to back out along it, just like stepping backwards through footprints in a terrestrial minefield. The difficulty was that the Roberts was a single-screw ship, and they are notoriously difficult to steer going backward. He ordered deployment of two Auxiliary Propulsion Units, usually reserved for close maneuvering in harbor, to help with the finer work. He also ordered the lower decks cleared—getting the sailors deepest in the ship up and away from the hull.
They gingerly began backtracking. Despite all the care they exercised, the ship drifted slightly out of its inbound path and contacted an Iranian SADAF-02 mine.
It produced a cataclysm.
Punched in the Mouth
The 253 pounds of explosives blew the stern 20 feet vertically in the air, punched a cavern, 15 by 20 feet into the ship, and ignited a conflagration. And it shattered the keel, which is almost always a ship’s death sentence. It was a grand slam disaster.
Capt. Rinn immediately deployed damage control. Thanks to his leadership, the crew had been especially well prepared for it. When the Roberts was being built, a labor strike at the shipyard had delayed the Roberts’ building by several months, and Capt. Rinn took advantage of the time he would not have otherwise had to have his crew enter the partially finished ship to learn in detail about its layout and systems. Then, his damage control officers began relentless drills, for every crew member. Further, Capt. Rinn saw to it that the ship had more than standard levels of damage control equipment. Then, as the ship was en route to the Persian Gulf, an additional Navy damage control training team joined them, and ran the crew through some extremely difficult simulations, all under great pressure. So everyone knew what to do. And they were good at it.
Their ship’s namesake had established a first-class basis for acting under stress. Coxswain Samuel B. Roberts, Jr., was a sailor who’d fought in WWII. Instead of remaining aboard ship, he volunteered to go ashore at the meat grinder of Guadalcanal, ferrying supplies and troops. Then, when word came of badly wounded Marines further along the shore in need of evacuation, he volunteered to take a Higgins boat, along with others, to get them, despite heavy fire. When the incoming was so intense that the mission was about to be scrubbed, he, of his own initiative, ran his boat at the shore for the purpose of drawing fire and giving the others a window to get in. It worked: the other boats rescued the wounded Marines, but Coxswain Roberts died a hero.
The crew took his towering spirit to these threats. To review: there was a fire deep in the ship’s guts, to include blasting a tower of flames out through the stack, there was bulkhead instability that might blow a third compartment which would sink the ship and kill the shoring party trying to hold it, there was the whole main deck now carrying the load that the keel used to flexing, buckling and starting to crack. And there were wounded. It was a collect-the-whole-set of disaster.
But Capt. Rinn proved superlative.
Command And Control
First, ever the warrior, even while issuing orders to address those problems, he kept the main thing the main thing, which was the Iranians and a potential further attack. An enemy P3 aircraft and an enemy ship were closing. He got on the comms and explained to them in no uncertain terms what awaited them should they continue on their current paths. His ship was wounded, but it still had severe teeth. Both threats broke away. As he would later note: had they not left “we would have given them a terrible surprise.”
As a superlative leader, he of course evaluated all options, including abandoning ship. Among his thoughts were that the Navy had lost no ship in combat since Korea, that he knew he had the best damage control crew in the Navy, and that abandoning ship itself was likely to lose lives: if the circumstances weren’t already grave enough, the waters around the ship had visible sharks and, just to really add to it, many hundreds of sea snakes. Most sea snakes are highly venomous. New fear unlocked.
There are many marks of a superlative leader. One is enormously caring about those under your command. Another is having immersive knowledge about the matters at hand. A third is being willing to take risks in making command decisions.
Rinn had all three. As to the last one, he did something wildly counterintuitive. He ordered his crew to stop fighting the raging fire.
Your warship is on fire, and you stop fighting it? Yes. Because he surmised—correctly—that a significant percentage of the water that the ship was taking on was the result of firefighting efforts, and that, at the current rate, the pumps couldn’t keep up. His first focus was simply on staying in the sunshine. That masterstroke saved the ship.
To continue, the next most immediate issue was having a shoring party beef up a critical bulkhead: two major compartments had already flooded, and the wall to a third one was failing. Had it given way, it would have sunk the ship. Up to their thighs in water and with more blasting in their faces, the party used timbers and cloth and rope and sheer sack. They all knew that had that bulkhead given way, it would’ve meant officers knocking on their families’ front doors. But they stayed. And they succeeded.
The fire continued. But even though they weren’t hosing water on it anymore, they were still trying to figure out exactly where it was. To the uninitiated, finding a fire might not seem difficult, but in the labyrinth and steel compartmentation of a huge warship, now with the added and unknown complexity of breaches from the blast, they might as well have been looking for Amelia Earhart. But one extremely squared away sailor figured it out. The problem with his plan to fix it was that it carried enormous risk.
Hitting on Hail Marys
To access where he believed the fire to be required the removal of an immense hatch, and that would give the conflagration more oxygen. But he reasoned that it was the only way get to it. At first, Capt. Rinn was reluctant, but then he accepted the risk. They went for it.
At first, there was a brutal flashover, but right after that, the sailors hosed foam and managed to finally put the fire out.
The remaining, enormous problem was that that the ship had no keel, and the rest of the structure, to include particularly the main deck, had been doing its best to keep the whole thing together, but that was a losing fight. The deck had developed buckling and cracks. Further, the ship’s upper superstructure was also cracking in half from side to side. As the hull flexed in the waves, it was getting worse, just like bending a paper clip enough times. There was a real chance of the ship simply breaking in two.
Enter the Navy Chiefs. Many people who have served in the Navy will tell you that Chiefs make things happen at the operational level, and they sometimes do it in unconventional ways. One of them had the idea to simply take a huge length of steel cable, wrap it around the entire superstructure, then cinch it tight, sort of the ultimate zip tie. They did it, and while they cranked the whole thing together, welders went to work putting plates over the cracks, further tying everything back together. It was totally improvised on the fly, and it was totally effective.
This whole time, no other ship could get near to help them, for fear of entering the minefield. But once they’d made it out under their own power, they were taken under tow, and, eventually, a massive heavy lift ship took them back to a Maine shipyard for a total repair.
Thanks to Capt. Rinn’s leadership and the courage and professionalism of the crew, every single sailor and the ship itself survived.
Coxswain Roberts would have approved.
The post Iranian Mines and Epic Damage Control appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
