USS Missouri Answers Call to Duty

She’s a battlewagon from World War II still carrying shells made in 1937. Most of her men were a decade too young for Vietnam.

Yet that’s the chosen team: the modernized and still Mighty Mo and an untapped but tuned crew--recently ordered to the Gulf of Oman near the neck of the Persian Gulf.

There has been no formal announcement of the Missouri’s move to volatile seas where 37 Americans were killed aboard the USS Stark in May as the frigate monitored a Middle East war between others.

But . . . last month in Washington, defense officials who asked not to be named, said the Missouri, plus escorts, would leave its home port of Long Beach later this month to increase the U.S. commitment of ships and firepower protecting Kuwaiti oil tankers running the Iran-Iraq cross fire.

Before last week’s training cruise from the Long Beach Naval Shipyards to San Francisco for that city’s July 4th celebration, the 1,600 officers and men of the Missouri were ordered not to discuss the ship’s classified deployment schedule with newsmen on board.

But . . . the order (published in the ship’s daily activities bulletin and broadcast on closed-circuit television by Capt. Al Carney, skipper of the Missouri) could not hide signs of deployment nor stop talk among the crew.

Before sailing, a lieutenant brought his wife and teen-age daughters on board. He showed them the construction of the battleship, from the main belt of the hull with its 13 1/2 inches of armored steel, to the 9 inches surrounding the gun turrets, to the 17 inches protecting the helmsman’s conning tower. He said it would have stopped the Exocet missiles that crippled the Stark.

“It made my wife happier,” he said.

For some, the notice of deployment has produced painful, inconclusive conversations with parents, who thought the end of the Vietnam War meant there would be no more threats to whole families. For others, it has created the sadness of 19-year-olds writing wills and assigning benefits to wives of marriages too new even for children.

At sick call, a hospitalman reported, there has been an increase in the number of “strange ailments, various and assorted knee problems, back problems, that might pull them off (ship) . . . ailments that under normal circumstances probably wouldn’t have brought ‘em in.”

The senior chaplain, Cmdr. Victor Smith, has seen a change in ship’s counseling. There has been no increase in the number of callers, he explained, but topics have changed. Now his sailors are more apprehensive, expressing fears for personal safety--and searching for answers to comfort their families.

On a lighter note, at least two members of the crew have purchased patio chairs “because it’s 110 degrees out there (Gulf of Oman), and you need something for ‘Steel Beach’ picnics on the fantail.”

Back on the more serious side was the Missouri’s journey to San Francisco.

The ship was kept at Condition Three, a status just below the full alert of General Quarters. That translates to manning portions of the battleship’s combat systems and keeping several of her massive 16-inch and smaller 5-inch guns ready to fire at all times.

Daily Testing

More men on watch--and around the clock. Internal drills. Daily testing of the automatic mode of the Phalanx CIWS (Close-In Weapons System), four beam-mounted, six-barreled Gatling guns that would be the ship’s final defense against incoming missiles and aircraft.

At night there were “crash backs,” running the battleship at a speed of 30 knots before throwing everything in reverse. The Missouri, all 58,000 tons, can pull up in five lengths--but at a length of 887 feet, that’s just short of one mile.

Then “crash ahead” gulping fuel oil by one engineer’s estimate at “eight gallons per yard” . . . then full rudder turns . . . then communications and over-horizon targeting exercises with a destroyer (the USS Chandler) playing patsy.

Routine training, Carney said, to sustain the Missouri’s 100% combat readiness.

Somewhat unusual, countered one petty officer, and certainly no Love Boat cruise to Acapulco.

The mood of the Missouri, however, is firm.

‘Excited About Going’

“We’re all excited about going,” said Machinist’s Mate Jerry Nearhoof, 23, of Altoona, Pa., a one-time public-administration student now halfway through his six-year enlistment. “The married guys are a little apprehensive, and their wives are real scared. And no one likes to hear about the Stark and 37 guys killed.

“But it’s no problem with me. It’s our job. As a matter of fact, I’d like to go over and see what’s going on. It will be a real experience.”

Machinist’s mate Pat Ambrose, 23, of Sacramento, joined the navy to learn, to travel. Now a war has caught up with him and wife Colette. But that, he says, is the Navy.

“No one really likes to fight,” he said. “But we’re going over there for a purpose, and if that purpose is to stop the (Iran-Iraq) fighting, then let’s do it.”

His parents, Ambrose said, are concerned and praying for President Reagan or Congress to cancel the deployment.

“Grandmother is terrified,” he said. “You just try and comfort them as much as possible and tell ‘em not to worry.”

Hospitalman Dennis Warren, 33, of Santa Cruz, a specialist in preventive medicine, had been anticipating deployment. First, the simmering, 6 1/2-year war between Iran and Iraq. Then proposed escort service and the U.S. decision to fly the American flag on Kuwaiti tankers. Then the USS Stark, death, inquiry, and new rules of engagement . . . .

‘I Wasn’t Real Thrilled’

“After the Stark got it, we pretty much knew this was going to happen,” he explained. “I wasn’t real thrilled because this is an old ship. And I don’t know if I want to be on board if this takes a missile.”

Warren, married with a 7-year-old daughter, acknowledges being “a little scared.” He has thought about his own role should the Missouri encounter a mass casualty situation, such as that faced by corpsmen on the Stark.

“I don’t want to do it,” he said, “but I think I’m up to it. Afterwards, I’ll be a wreck, but I’ll be fine at the time, because that (the job) is why I’m here.”

Warren wouldn’t have been there for the Vietnam War. His brother, an aviation mechanic was. For two tours.

“I disagreed with Vietnam for purely personal reasons . . . basically because my brother was there and I didn’t want to see him get snuffed.”

Is America’s involvement in the Middle East any different from the preliminary American intervention in Vietnam?

“Right now it’s about people shooting at American ships and tankers getting through. I’m sure there are dollars back of it and people are taking it in the wallet. But that’s something behind every war we’ve been in, the manifest destiny as it were.”

There’s also a tremendous pride within the Missouri’s call to duty. Especially among her lifers.

Master Chief John Davidson, 57, served as a seaman aboard the Missouri just a few months after her decks were the 1945 platform for Japan’s formal surrender. That’s when men came aboard with hammocks and the ship carried a catapult for its Kingfisher seaplane.

Chief Enlisted Man

Now naval warfare is nuclear-tipped weapons and satellite means of seeing and identifying targets several hundred miles away, and Davidson, as the Missouri’s chief enlisted man, keeps ship’s records on a floppy disc.

Davidson--with his 13 tattoos and 40 years of service and three wars and more than 27 years at sea--is too canny to be sucked into any discussion of classified material.

But if the Missouri is deployed, if it goes to the Persian Gulf . . . well, what a wonderful way for an old sea dog and war horse to retire. Which he will do 12 months from now.

‘Completing a Life’s Cycle’

“In your entire life you can never go back to where you began,” he said. “But I can, and I have, and being on the Missouri is like completing a life’s cycle. I can’t think of any other place I’d rather be.”

And if his Missouri, the dreadnought he identifies as a “national treasure,” should see action?

“Most of our sailors on here will realize that this is what their job is, that this is what the President says they must do, so they’ll go out and do the best they can.

“They’re ready to go. And the ship is ready to go and to do what she’s told and do it good.”

Stark has become the buzzword of the Missouri, the caveat and threatened consequence of any operational inefficiency. As in the Stark reality of sailing for the Persian Gulf. Or being left Stark - naked by botching a combat detail. With re-enlistment in this man’s Navy and volunteering for sea duty as the classic example of Stark -raving madness.

In truth, there is no chance that an Exocet missile could do to the Missouri what it did to the Stark. For the Stark is a new, fast, high-tech frigate with a maximum hull thickness of one-half inch. The Missouri, its hull, its turrets, its helm tower and propeller shaft housings are armored to withstand direct hits from armament such as its own--16-inch guns throwing a one-ton projectile at close to three times the speed of sound.

“And one of those is a helluva lot more impressive than any Exocet missile,” the captain explained. He noted a Washington study of missiles versus dreadnought. “Apparently, if an Exocet came in and hit at an angle of 90 degrees it probably would put a crack in the outer surface of the shell of the citadel (tower for the helm and engine telegraph).”

Off Okinawa and Iwo Jima during World War II, Carney continued, the Missouri was struck by two Japanese kamikaze aircraft.

“Neither did any damage beyond stack damage and a gasoline fire . . . and a kamikaze is bigger and carries more fuel than any Exocet missile.”

Carney, from Hot Springs, Ark., has commanded the Missouri since she was recommissioned at Long Beach in 1986 after 30 years in mothballs at Bremerton, Wash.

He respects its place in history alongside the New Jersey, the Iowa and the Wisconsin, her sister vessels and the only battleships still in Navy service. He admires the design, the combat survivability and offensive capability of a vessel that, after all, is only eight years younger than her equally historic Long Beach neighbor--the Queen Mary.

As the result of its $457-million modernization (the replacement cost of a battleship such as the Missouri has been estimated at $2.5 billion), the ship now is armed with a full complement of surface-to-surface Harpoon and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Ergo, said Carney, the venerable Missouri remains “as awesome in 1987 as it was in 1945” and “uniquely suited” to today’s theaters where there is “nothing terribly exotic on any of the world’s hostile waters.

And uniquely suited, it may be presumed, for the hostile waters of the Persian Gulf?

“I’m on my way to San Francisco, staying there to the 7th and then three days in Monterey and then off the California coast for some operational training. Beyond that, I can’t comment . . . .”