Just as the sun was setting on a balmy August Saturday evening in Baltimore, Sailors at the stern of the guided-missile destroyer Sterett (DDG-104) raised the American flag to signify her status as a newly commissioned ship of the U.S. Navy. The ceremony evoked the Maryland city's past contributions to naval history. Moored just ahead of the new gleaming gray warship was the Constellation, a wooden-hulled sailing ship from the 19th century. For decades she has been a centerpiece of the city's tribute to the American naval past.
As speaker after speaker pointed out that evening, the new ship was named for Lieutenant Andrew Sterett, a Baltimore native who served in the fledging U.S. Navy at the beginning of the 19th century. He served in a previous Constellation, one that bequeathed her name to the ship that bore witness to this new event. Then, in 1801, Sterett sailed from Baltimore in command of the schooner Enterprise and took her into successful battle against the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean.
More than a century after the lieutenant's deeds, the Navy honored him by attaching his name to one of its earliest destroyers. The first Sterett, commissioned in 1910, was destroyer number 27, for she came in a period before the Navy began assigning the familiar DD-type hull numbers in 1920. She displaced a mere 742 tons, compared with more than 8,000 tons for the new ship. She was active in World War I as a convoy escort.
In 1939, with the first Sterett having been scrapped a few years earlier, the Navy commissioned a new one, DD-407, a 1,500-tonner. One of her plank owners when she joined the Fleet was Ensign C. Raymond "Cal" Calhoun. He was then the most junior officer in the ship and initially served as assistant engineer. By the time he left in 1943 he had worked his way through a succession of billets including that of executive officer.
Fortunately for the benefit of history, Calhoun, who eventually retired as a captain, wrote a marvelous book about his ship, Tin Can Sailor: Life Aboard the USS Sterett, 1939-1945 (Naval Institute Press, 2000). In addition to describing his own experiences, he collected the memories of other crew members and carried the narrative forward to the end of the ship's service. The result is a story with I-was-there immediacy.
In mid-November 1942, when Japanese heavy combatant ships sought to unleash a nighttime bombardment on the island of Guadalcanal, a force of U.S. cruisers and destroyers stopped them. In the midst of a furious surface action at close range, the Sterett peppered a Japanese battleship with torpedoes and 5-inch projectiles. In April 1945, while on picket duty off Okinawa, the plucky destroyer was struck at dusk by a kamikaze that smashed into her side just below the bridge. Remarkably, not a single crew member was killed. By war's end, that Sterett was obsolete, for hundreds of more modern destroyers had joined the Fleet during wartime, and Calhoun's old ship was shuffled off to be decommissioned and scrapped.
Yet another link in the heritage honoring the lieutenant from Baltimore came with the 1967 commissioning of the third Sterett (DLG-31), an 8,000-ton guided-missile frigate, later redesignated a cruiser, CG-31. She and her sisters of the Belknap class were sleek and beautiful, with lines far classier than those of her two stubby predecessors. With her impressive electronics suite and missile armament she was soon put to work on the air-warfare coordination station off the coast of North Vietnam. Twenty years later, when I had the pleasure of visiting that Sterett in the Middle East, her antiair capability was on call in monitoring traffic during the prolonged Iran-Iraq War, which preceded the first Gulf War. She served on until her decommissioning in 1994.
And now we have yet another Sterett, similar in size to the third one, and this time equipped with the Aegis air-defense system. On her quarterdeck during the commissioning was Rear Admiral Wayne Meyer, the long-time Aegis program manager and a former destroyerman himself. As he surveyed the thousands in attendance for the ceremony, he saw many other old tin can Sailors. They were distinguished by their shirts and ball caps and by the obvious enthusiasm that brought them to celebrate the event and to link up with a new generation.
The links are more than symbolic; there are family ties. One of the veterans in the audience was Mike Bak, who served as a quartermaster on board the destroyer Franks (DD-554) in World War II. One of his shipmates then was Lieutenant John O'Neill, the gunnery officer. The gunnery officer of the new Sterett is his grandson, Ensign Daniel O'Neill. One of the gunner's mates in the Franks was Leonard Eckerle. His son, Commander Brian Eckerle, is the commanding officer of the new Sterett and spoke with considerable emotion at the commissioning because of the bonds he had already formed with his new crew.
Each member of the fourth Sterett's crew received an autographed copy of Captain Calhoun's memoir, a description of the past events that have helped shape the present. And there was still another link in the generational chain. When Commander Ecklerle directed the setting of the watch, 94-year-old Cal Calhoun was on the quarterdeck with him. The first officer of the deck received his symbol of authority, a gold-plated telescope, directly from Calhoun's hands.