No Higher Honor by Bradley Peniston Page A

rotated a switch and spoke into the 2JV, a sound-powered communications circuit. The 2JV carried his voice to the sailors in the engine room and machinery spaces. “Why don’t you all come up from the lower levels,” he said. 11 Those few words would save lives.
    Walker rechecked his panels, then picked up a phone and told CIC that the frigate’s engineering plant was ready for battle. Okay, we all know something bad’s out there, and we’re all here in this nice little steel room , Walker thought. 12 The minutes ticked by.
    ELSEWHERE IN THE main spaces, the rest of the engineers had taken their stations. Directly below Bent in AMR 3, Engineman 1st Class Mark Dejno had watched his own control panels as the chief electrician brought diesel generator number four to life. Three spaces forward, a trio of men had assembled in AMR 1. One was Gas Turbine Technician 2nd Class Randy Tatum, who had recently written to the Nebraska newspaper. Another was Mike Tilley, the wisecracking junior engineman from Missouri, and the third was Fireman Joe Baker, who had just pulled on shorts and T-shirt for a bit of weightlifting when the GQ call came. As Baker skinned back into dungarees, a familiar ball of fear had gathered in his gut. He’d felt it back in Newport, that first day aboard ship, when he’d learned that the Roberts was destined for the Gulf.
    On Walker’s order to evacuate the lower levels, the three men climbed up a ladder to the refrigeration deck. The sailors perched on steel cans, keeping up a stream of chatter to hide their nerves. “Our ship doesn’t hit mines; that’s what happens to other ships,” someone said. The smell of frost and cold cardboard drifted from a walk-in refrigerator. Baker remembers a moment of calm after the banter ran out—“still, like the moment the sun peeks over the horizon on a cool spring morning,” he wrote. 13
    Down in the main engine room, Gas Turbine Systems Technician 3rd Class Dave Burbine had answered the call to general quarters by snaking his way down a ladder and squeezing between the gas turbine modules.The twenty-three-year-old from Westerly, Rhode Island, settled onto a tiny platform and donned sound-powered phones. Wedged under the upper-level grate, below the waterline, and between two hot and humming steel boxes, Burbine’s seat was about as claustrophobic a duty station as the Roberts offered. Adding insult to inconvenience, the job was redundancy personified. He manned a small joystick that could control the pitch of the ship’s sixteen-foot propeller, but he’d be called upon only if both the bridge and Central Control lost their ability to do it.
    When Walker passed the word to move up a level, Burbine was only too happy to comply—not because of any particular foreboding, but rather because hours of drills had rendered him thoroughly sick of perching on the small square of metal. He set down his headphones and clambered to the upper grate, where he met fellow gas turbine tech Fireman Wayne Smith. Amid the roaring blast of a cool-air vent, the engineers leaned against compressed-air reservoirs and watched the massive reduction gear turn slowly beneath their feet. 14
    Chief Alex Perez stood at the engine room’s local control panel, about twenty feet farther into the compartment. An expert in the care and feeding of the frigate’s big turbines, the thirty-eight-year-old from Los Angeles led Burbine, Smith, and a few other junior engineers with ready knowledge and a firm touch. 15 Perez checked on his guys, making sure they were up on the grate, and surveyed his panel, which indicated a fully functional propulsion plant.
    All preparations made, Perez had a moment to think of his wife, Mary. A month earlier he had waved to Kevin Ford’s camera, offering a hand-lettered sign—“Hi, Mary!”—and a fleshy smile under a bushy mustache. Now she was starting her day back in Rhode