Remember the Stark

I will never forget the day the USS Stark (FFG-31) was attacked. It happened on 17 May 1987. My ship, the USS Meyerkord (FF-1058), was steaming for Pearl Harbor. We had left San Diego five days earlier and were hours from the Hawaiian Islands. Pearl Harbor was to be our first stop on our way to the Persian Gulf. Most of us had concerns about the challenges ahead, but everyone was looking forward to a few days of liberty in paradise.

I was a deck seaman getting my first taste of life at sea. Although I was scheduled to stand the midwatch that fateful night, I was too excited to sleep. It was a beautiful evening, and I decided to take in the view topside.

I went up to the flight deck and joined some of my shipmates who were passing the time penning letters home and listening to music. The sun nearly had disappeared when the commanding officer's voice came over the IMC. With our arrival at Pearl Harbor imminent, this did not strike me as a cause for alarm. Someone turned off the music as the announcement began.

In a voice that bespoke the seriousness of the circumstances, he informed us that a U.S. warship had been attacked by an Iraqi jet fighter in the Persian Gulf. Two missiles had struck the Stark, killing several sailors and seriously wounding many more. We learned she still was seaworthy and other vessels were assisting her, but that was all he could tell us.

The captain announced we had been upgraded to wartime cruising and we would be conducting generalquarters drills first thing the following morning. He told us he expected 100% preparedness and then signed off.

My shipmates and I looked at one another in stunned silence. We wondered if it was a joke or a drill—but it was neither. Some of my shipmates believed the attack was a declaration of war. Others, myself included, downplayed this notion. "They're just trying to scare us," I said, but the words sounded hollow and false, even to my own ears.

That night I went to my rack and wrote a letter to my mother, telling her not to worry, which, I am almost certain, had the opposite effect. My mother still has the letter, and she tells me it is different from any other I ever have written, which is a testament to how uneasy I was about my suddenly uncertain future. If, indeed, they were just trying to scare us, they had succeeded.

It was eerie to be pulling into Pearl Harbor, the site of the greatest naval massacre in our country's history, so soon after hearing the news about the Stark. We did not know it yet, but we had good news waiting for us at Pearl. The Navy had decided not to send any more frigates to the Gulf based on the premise that the Stark, a frigate equipped with a guided-missile air-defense system, had not been able to protect herself adequately. Our vessel's air-defense system, like all Knox (FF-1052)-class frigates, was a single Phalanx weapon system, which was little more than a Gatling gun with a guidance system.

We were given a fresh set of orders, and our new itinerary read like a pleasure cruise. From Pearl Harbor we were to steam to Subie Bay, Manila, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong before heading east again to Pearl and then back home to San Diego. That night my leading chief petty officer, with one foot propped on a lifeline and his right hand hooked around the handle of a coffee cup, announced, "You could do a 40-year stint in this man's Navy and not see all of those places."

I could not believe our good fortune. The shadow of war had hung over our ship for less than 24 hours, and it had given way to the promise of adventure. We accepted this as our destiny. We took taxis to Waikiki and hit the beach without a care in the world, while halfway across the globe the Stark, listing and pumping seawater, continued to burn.

What happened to the Stark never has sat well with me. I was several thousand miles away; the only danger my shipmates and I were exposed to was theoretical. In a way, I always have felt a kind of survivor's guilt. Thirty-seven sailors died during the attack and 20 more were seriously wounded. The question that never has been answered to my satisfaction is why those sailors had to die.

Here are the facts: Shortly before 2130 local time, an Exocet missile traveling approximately 600 miles per hour punctured the Stark's, hull on the port side ten feet above the waterline.¹ The missile split in two pieces that tore through various compartments. The airframe dumped 120 pounds of burning missile fuel and left a wake of superheated shrapnel and flaming debris. The damage would have been much worse, but the warhead failed to explode.

Thirty seconds later, a second missile struck. The warhead exploded and gashed a gaping hole in the hull eight feet forward of the first strike. Fires blazed in the berthing compartment, with temperatures exceeding 3,500°F.

Anything in the compartment that could burn—clothing, curtains, mattresses—ignited instantly. It was so hot, temperatures in compartments near the fire shot to 1,500°F, creating an oven effect whereby flammable materials combusted spontaneously. Water directed at the fire turned into steam, burning the firefighters.

Thick black smoke funneled through the passageways, making it impossible to see. The ship listed nearly 12°, and the slippery, canting decks were difficult to navigate. Firefighting crews had access to only one of the three damage-control lockers, and valuable resources had to be diverted from the firefighting effort to keep the Stark's missile magazines cool lest they explode.

The Navy panel that investigated the event called it an "inferno the likes of which had never been seen before."² The fire on board the Stark burned for 20 hours.

The crew, which had lost to death or injury 25% of its personnel, bravely fought the fire for nearly six hours, using all the oxygen-breathing equipment on board. Anyone who has swung a charged fire hose during a fire-control exercise can imagine how exhausted these men must have been.

Finally, relief came. A commercial salvage tug was first on the scene. Further relief efforts came from the destroyers Waddell (DDG-24) and Coyngham (DDG-17) and the command ship La Salle (AGF-3).³

Less than a week before the attack, the Stark's damage-control personnel had conducted a drill that required firefighters to navigate from the scene of the fire to damage-control stations blindfolded. The timeliness of this restricted-visibility simulation proved immensely beneficial. Without this very specific drill, the men of the Stark might not have had the know-how and wherewithal to combat such an unusually intense fire. Vice Admiral William H. Rowden, then chief of Naval Sea Systems Command, told the House Sea Powers Subcommittee, "I know of no ship that has received this kind of internal damage and survived."⁴

In May 1987, Iraq was our ally. The Ayatollah Khomeni still was in charge in Iran, and our memories of the U.S. hostage situation were vivid. Saddam Hussein had not yet emerged as a totalitarian menace on the world stage. A few years later, however, when the Gulf War splashed on our television screens each night, I wondered why "Remember the Stark" wasn't our rallying cry.

Perhaps it is not fair to ask why the men on board the Stark had to die that night. The question we should be asking is why the Stark has been erased from our nation's consciousness. This country is proud of its past. We honor again and again those who perished at Pearl Harbor, but we continue to ignore those who died on board the Stark. The affair was an embarrassment, a blemish on our claim of military superiority.

The Stark incident, however, was an example of how planning and preparation, those oft-repeated watchwords of damage control, save lives and rescue ships. It was a triumph of leadership. Those men did not anticipate the attack, but they were ready to fight it when it happened.

Perhaps "Remember the Stark" should be resurrected-not as a political slogan, but as a reminder to naval personnel that damage control is everyone's duty. Imbedded in the Stark's story is a lesson our ships can ill afford to forget: she was saved because her crew's preparedness was so thorough that it seems today, nearly 18 years after the fact, like foresight. The Stark, however, appears doomed to be forgotten, her place in history more tenuous than ever. Today, she sits in the naval yard at Philadelphia, waiting to be scrapped and to pass into memory.