America’s sea lines of communication, or SLOC. After budgetary cutbacks
in other shipbuilding programs, however, they’d found an uncomfortable
niche as replacement destroyers, providing ASW and anti-air protection
for convoys, task forces, amphibious forces, and carrier battle groups.
Lightly armed, lightly armored, and with only a single shaft driven by
two gas turbines, Perry FFGs had struggled valiantly to fill their new
budget-conscious roles. Four were currently assigned to CBG-14.
Detecting the cruise missiles coming in from the southeast on his
vessel’s SPS-49 air-search array, Dickinson’s skipper, Commander
Randolph Conde, had ordered flank speed, sending the frigate lunging
ahead some 1,200 yards off Jefferson’s starboard side. By putting
Dickinson between the missiles and the Jefferson, by “standing into
harm’s way” in the grandest tradition of the U.S. Navy, Conde hoped
both to shield his vastly larger consort from sea-skimming missiles and
to add his anti-air assets to the carrier’s defense against any pop-up
targets.
Dickinson had already begun loosing her Standard RIM-66C missiles at any
targets within their range of about ninety miles and had scored several
kills.
When the nearest oncoming cruise missile was within twelve miles,
Dickinson’s single Mark 75 gun, mounted amidships on the ship’s
superstructure, began banging away, hurling 76mm rounds at the rapidly
approaching target at the rate of eighty-five per minute. Her single
Phalanx CIWS, mounted aft atop her helicopter hangar, was set on standby
and was ready to fire if a missile penetrated to within one mile.
As Dickinson passed less than eight tenths of a mile off Jefferson’s
starboard beam, Pellet, in the carrier’s CIC, accidentally switched his
CIWS from standby to auto. Under computer control, the six-barreled
Gatling gun slewed sharply, tracking the frigate … then classified it
as a friendly surface vessel.
An instant later, as three more missiles penetrated the CBG’s ten-mile
inner defense zone, Dickinson’s skipper gave the order to fire the
frigate’s super-RBOC launchers.
Rapid-blooming off-board chaff, fired from tubes mounted on the
superstructure just aft of the bridge, was packed into cylindrical
cartridges.
Each was four feet long and designed to arc high into the air before
exploding for maximum dispersal of their radar-confusing payloads.
Dickinson’s port-side launcher fired three chaff canisters toward the
Jefferson. The carrier’s number-one CIWS, mounted to starboard on the
flight deck, outboard of the island and just below and abaft of the
bridge, detected the chaff containers and reacted with superhuman speed
… exactly as it had been designed to react.
The Phalanx’s six barrels, spinning with a high-pitched whine, slewed to
the right, then fired, the burst sounding more like the scream of a
chain saw than the firing of a gun. The first few rounds missed, but
the gun, still tracking cartridge and bullets, corrected the aim in a
fraction of a second, tearing the chaff container in two. The CIWS then
slewed left, tracking a second cylinder as it approached the Jefferson,
firing once … then again.
At that moment, the mistake had been detected in Jefferson’s CIC, and
the selector switch hastily set back to standby mode. The Phalanx
abruptly fell silent with a dwindling moan … but the damage had
already been done.
Dickinson had been squarely in the line of fire.
A similar incident had occurred during the Gulf War, when the FFG Jarret
accidentally fired into the battleship Missouri. That time, there’d
been no casualties and minimal damage. This time, however, the frigate
was on the receiving end of the friendly fire. Each CIWS round was a
depleted-uranium penetrator two and a half times denser than steel,
shrouded in a discarding nylon sabot that imparted a stabilizing spin to
the projectile. Fifty of those rounds, the salvo fired by Jefferson’s
Phalanx in just one second, smashed into Dickinson’s port side, slashing
through her superstructure like bullets through paper.
The frigate’s vital spaces were protected by anti-fragmentation
armor–six millimeters of steel over her engineering compartments,
nineteen millimeters of aluminum over her magazines, and nineteen
millimeters of Kevlar over her command and electronics spaces–but much
of the ship was virtually unarmored. Four sailors were cut down in her
galley by hurtling splinters of aluminum and uranium, and another was
killed in a crew’s quarters’ head. Six rounds penetrated the helicopter