BOok Review | No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf
Reviewed by Darlene Iskra, museum volunteer
Comments of the author are hers and do not represent the policy or position of the U.S. Navy.
This is the story of the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58), the third ship of the line to be so named, and what happened to her before, during and after her calamitous experience in the Persian Gulf in 1988 during Operation Enduring Freedom. She hit a mine, was grievously damaged, and did not sink due to the extraordinary efforts and training of the crew.
Commissioned in 1986, it spent its first two years undergoing training and tests the Navy developed to ensure it was ready to go to sea. Throughout this training period, the ship excelled under the leadership of its Commanding Officer, Commander Paul Rinn. But those are the minimum requirements. The Commanding Officer can and does, if prudent, train the crew for every possible contingency. Commander Rinn thought that if anything were to happen to the ship, the crew must be trained in saving their ship to the best of their ability. That takes a trained and knowledgeable crew that is fluent in damage control. Unfortunately, no one is a psychic, and cannot predict the worst-case scenario. But training, training, training, goes a long way towards a successful outcome.
The Commanding Officer of a newly commissioned vessel has much leeway when it comes to the crew and their assignments. When Eric Sorenson reported aboard, he was hoping for an engineering assignment to round out his career as a surface warfare officer and his training for eventual command. But Commander Rinn had a different idea…he wanted the senior Lieutenant to plan and execute a damage control program on the ship that would ensure the sailors knew the ship inside and out and knew how to save it in an emergency. It is too late when you are in the middle of a disaster to think about “coulda, shoulda, woulda”. Although not pleased, LT Sorenson rose to the task, created an enviable training program, and documented every aspect of the ship’s systems and how to save the ship in an extremis situation[i]. Thank goodness he did!
A mine is a very low-tech weapon. The Navy did not consider the mine threat a problem, and there was no urgency to make this a priority, in the training of commanding officers or their crew, even when doing convoy duty in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war, when mines were laid in several areas. Many of these mine fields were discovered and neutralized by minesweepers and EOD teams. But a naval mine, especially a contact mine, is very difficult to find and see on radar or sonar, unless it is floating on the surface. If you find yourself in a mine field, there is little recourse to remove yourself from that situation. This is what faced Commander Rinn while travelling to intersect a refueling ship while in the Gulf. He unknowingly entered a minefield, and, surrounded by mines, his only recourse was to attempt to exit the minefield by backing down over his entrance path. In preparation for this maneuver, the ship went to General Quarters, closing all watertight compartments. The captain also evacuated unnecessary personnel from below decks. This saved lives, but the ship was still severely damaged when it did hit the mine.
One of the most fascinating and horrifying passages in the book is the description of what a mine does to a ship once the mine explodes. A contact mine is round, with five triggering devices called “Hertz Horns”; you can see one on display in the museum’s torpedo room. To keep it simple, when the horns are crushed against a ship’s hull, the blinding speed of the resulting combustion is what does the damage. “When TNT detonates underwater, it disassociates within milliseconds into a bubble of gas. This bubble displaces water, sending a shockwave racing away at supersonic speed. The bubble, heated to thousands of degrees and pressurized to thousands of atmospheres, expands just behind the shockwave, driving water before it like a battering ram. This one-two punch-shockwave followed by bubble-alone can cripple a ship” (pg.124). But there are other factors that also come into play, in a shallow sea like the Persian Gulf, the shock wave can bounce off the bottom, causing another shockwave, which can break the keel. Also, if the hull is breached, the gas bubble can vent into the ship; the superhot vapors can burst through the opening “like a burst steam pipe letting loose with the fires of hell itself” (pg. 124). Both these events happened to the Roberts.
Although a lookout saw that the ship had entered a minefield, because a few mines were floating at the surface, no one saw the mine that the ship hit. It was tethered in 250 feet of seawater and positioned just above the Robert’s 16-foot draft, hitting two-thirds of the way down the ship, on the port side. “In a heartbeat, a single low-tech weapon had roughly halved the structural strength of a U.S. Navy warship” (pg. 127). The damage control efforts were phenomenal, which included firefighting, shoring, flood control, electrical bypassing to get gear back online, especially the fire pumps! All the training paid off, but the hellish conditions took their toll on the crew. The book took a full chapter to describe the damage from the mine, and another three chapters to describe the damage control efforts required to save the ship. It was later determined that the minefield had been laid by the Iran Ajar.
The Roberts was repaired and served for several more years until it was decommissioned in 2015. The legacy of the damage control efforts is vast. The damage control book that LT Sorenson developed was shared with other ships in the class. The conflagration that the ship went through was documented and it changed the way training was conducted on all ships during “Refresher Training”, and the Navy modified its ships, equipment and procedures. Politically, it changed America’s resolve against Iraq and the security of the Gulf, resulting in a “new philosophy about the role the US would play in the world (pg 217)”.
“No Higher Honor” was the motto of the ship. The Captain and crew took this to heart, and many lived to tell its story. It is a well-written history of the ship and crew, using archival documents and oral histories to tell the story. It is definitely worth the read.
[i] Sorenson, Lt. Eric. USS Samuel B. Roberts damage control Booklet, [unpublished]. Bath, Mn, 1985.