Sending ‘Dirty D’ to a Watery Grave

The ship that was once known as the Decatur left Wednesday on its last big voyage, a ghost of the destroyer it had been.

Not a soul was aboard. Its great engines were silent and the oil had been drained from it like blood from a corpse. Its 4,000-ton body was tethered by a half-mile-long chain to a powerful tug called the Sioux, which will tow it from Port Hueneme to Hawaii at a glacial speed of 6.4 knots -- or about 7.3 miles -- per hour. The old ship, known in Navy parlance as the ex-Decatur, is to be attacked and sunk this summer in military drills off Kauai.

With peeling gray paint and rusting hull, the ex-Decatur slowly vanished into the morning fog. Launched in 1955, it is now older by far than most of its sailors were when they served on the ship in the blockade of Cuba, off the coast of Vietnam, and in spots tranquil and turbulent throughout the world. They spent a year or two on board, and, however eager they may have been to be freed from the tedium of life at sea, many were saddened this week by the news of the Decatur’s impending loss.

“It’s like a chunk being torn from your heart,” said Philip H. Red Eagle, an artist and poet in Tacoma, Wash., who was a machinist’s mate aboard the Decatur in the early 1970s. Red Eagle steamed on the Decatur to Haiphong Harbor, where the Navy was retrieving U.S. mines. At 59, he remembers having the first of his life’s many night-sweats on the ship, the residue of terror from a year and a half in the jungles. He doesn’t want to see the Decatur disappear.

“A ship becomes an integral part of you,” he said. “It doesn’t operate without you and you don’t operate without it. When that ship goes, a piece of you goes.”

Based at Naval Base Ventura County for the last 10 years, the ex-Decatur has gone by the ungainly military designation of SDTS, or Self-Defense Test Ship. Its job has been to tow decoy barges a mere 200 feet astern as Navy scientists and engineers target them with newer and better missiles. Meanwhile, newer and better remote-controlled weapons systems aboard the Decatur would attempt to knock those missiles out of the sky.

“We did pretty well,” said Mike Wolfe, a civilian Navy employee who supervised the Decatur’s operations. In only one test out of 25 did a missile penetrate the Decatur’s defenses and destroy its target, Wolfe said.

“The debris put a hole in the ship that took six weeks to repair,” he said. “But the only other way to find out what we found out would have been for a commissioned warship to get hit in combat.”

As a test ship, the Decatur plied the waters of the Pacific Missile Test Range off San Nicolas Island. It carried as many as 50 people -- a Navy crew plus assorted technical types who would calibrate millions of dollars worth of high-tech anti-missile systems with names such as Sea Whiz and Sea Sparrow and Evolved Sea Sparrow.

At a given signal, helicopters would pick everyone up. At Point Mugu about 70 miles away, technicians would tap orders into a computer keyboard. Missiles would be fired, either from shore or from the air, and the Decatur’s anti-missile missiles would respond. Months of software redesign and equipment-rejiggering would culminate in 2 1/2 minutes.

But the Decatur was old from the outset. Last year, it was stripped of its weapons and replaced by a comparatively spry, 28-year-old destroyer that once was known as the Paul F. Foster.

“She’s just worn out,” said Wolfe, who kept a tally of the 490 nights he spent aboard the Decatur during its testing runs. “She’s running out of steel molecules.”

In two or three weeks, depending on the weather, the ship will be moored at Pearl Harbor. Then in July, it will be struck from the air or hit from the sea in a joint effort involving military units from the United States, Australia, Canada, Chile, England, Japan and South Korea.

In previous sinking exercises -- SinkEx, in Navy lingo -- at least half a dozen other old ships have gone down in an area northwest of Kauai.

The Decatur steeped its crew in history.

Donnie Andrews was just 17 when he was toiling in its engine room. He couldn’t wait to leave the Navy, but four decades later, he had the image of his two old ships -- the Decatur and the John Paul Jones -- tattooed across his back.

“What can I say?” he asked. “It’s just a part of you.”

From his home in Colonial Heights, Va., he recalled the high points of his life on the Decatur. The ship was shot at as it maneuvered through the Suez Canal. In high seas off Virginia, it collided with the aircraft carrier Lake Champlain, smashing its bridge, sweeping away its two masts and shearing off its smokestacks.

“It was what I figured an earthquake must be like,” Andrews said. “It was like a giant can-opener.”

During the 1962 blockade of Cuba, the Decatur was one of the ships that was positioned to keep Russian vessels from approaching the island.

Only the other night, as Andrews and his wife watched a TV documentary, did he learn how close the world was then to nuclear war.

“It was amazing,” he said. “I never really realized how close I was to all that, and then I see ‘the Dirty D’ coming at me right across the screen!”

Toward the end of its years on active duty, the Decatur was known throughout the fleet by names more pungent than the Dirty D.

“She was always breaking down and spending time in port,” Wolfe said. “That meant sailors on other ships wouldn’t get to take the shore leave they had coming up.”

Wolfe climbed aboard Wednesday for a last look around the bridge. A broken-down old chair stood before a console stripped of instruments. Some remnants from the Decatur’s early days -- old crank-up phones known as “growlers” -- were embedded in the wall.

This summer, they will go down with the ship in seas about 12,000 feet deep.

So will the graffiti dotting its walls, tributes such as this one from Andrew Harvey, captain of a tug that helped the Decatur from Hueneme Harbor:

“You’ve earned a decent burial,” it said. “Rest in peace.”