Action. You're in the helicopter it's loud you got your fins on your wetsuit
mask snorkel ready to go and then you jump.
Danger. You can hear the ice hissing and cracking all around you. Adventure. When you cross the
equator you have to ask king Neptune's permission to become a shellback. You're listening to Sea Story.
Episode 52, "Operation Praying Mantis."
My name is vice-admiral Ron Boxall I'm from Holland Patton, New York and this is my Sea Story.
When I was a young lieutenant as a gunnery officer aboard the USS Merrell, a destroyer
stationed in San Diego. We were out in the Persian Gulf in Operation Praying Mantis on April 18, 1988.
We were asked to perform surface action against the Iranian navy.
At the time Iran and Iraq were at war and we were there because we were concerned
not just for the United States but the stability of shipping was driving oil prices up around the
world and it wasn't really the pricing that was the worry, the worry was that somebody else
was affecting the international free flow of commerce. Four days earlier
the USS Samuel B Roberts was mined in international waters which is an act of war.
I remember it like it was yesterday it gives me chills.
We were about 50 miles away obviously that sent shock waves literally and figuratively through our ship.
It really made us all start to wonder holy cow this is really serious what's going on here?
We were worried for the ship, our comrades many miles away, and we're also worried about
ourselves if they were mined we could be mined too. Immediately, we went into damage control
mode and we made a beeline at top speed. We have four gas turbine jet engines and we maxed out
30 plus knots headed in the direction of them and then someone said "wait a minute if they're
in a minefield, we got to be careful how fast we're going to speed up towards a minefield!"
Through heroic efforts by the commanding officer captain Paul Rynn and his ship
they were able to not only save that ship but they returned her to fighting condition.
It was pretty amazing to hear that ship fight to save itself. Little did we know a few days later
there was a major operation that was going to be planned against the Iranian Navy.
At the time, I was the gunnery officer and this marine helicopter landed
aboard with a bunch of planters that came in and
told us we were going to go do a very important operation that was going to get national attention.
The next day on the morning of 18th April we were part of a three-ship surface action
group, the USS Trenton, which is an amphibious ship that had marines onboard, the USS Merrell,
and the third ship was the USS Line McCormick which was another destroyer. At eight o'clock
we decided we were going to shoot one of the gas oil separating platforms that was really a command
and control station where they're launching mines from but before we did that we wanted to make sure
we didn't indiscriminately harm civilians, we just wanted to make a statement that we knew who did it.
We were part of a larger operation that was a second sag that was going to take out another
gas and oil separating platform and a third one that was assigned to attack one of their ships.
We warned them ahead of time that we were going to shoot the oil platform and
any people on the platform needed to leave as soon as possible, which had two effects.
One we expected that they would actually leave and number two
that gave them time to know that they had to start shooting at us before we started shooting at them.
We didn't really expect them to shoot at us, the intelligence said that they didn't have
an ability to shoot anything back at our ship so we were pretty surprised. When eight o'clock rolled
around we shot our first few rounds at the gas oil separation platform after the people had left
and they started shooting back at us. Now, things got really hairy
we were used to hearing our own machine guns in our practice but it was very different hearing
rounds going off around your own hall people, screaming getting a little scared, people yelling
"hit the deck," and meantime as I said I was the gunnery officer, we were watching this from the
combat information center and i was in charge of our two five-inch gun mounts that were supposed to
originally put fire on the platforms but of course at some time when someone starts shooting at you
our number one priority mission quickly becomes a counter-battery mission to take out the guns
that are shooting at you. We shot back and the gun stopped once we were satisfied that there
was no threat to us we had a marine detachment on board the USS Trenton that was to go in and rig
the gas-oil separation platform with explosives and drop into the water. Shooting a gas-oil separation
platform was difficult for us because if you've ever seen an oil platform they're kind of light
and airy there's a lot of air and there's a lot of space so we chose to go with a mechanical time
point detonating round. It's a round that you shoot you set a fuse on it automatically and
after 13 seconds it would detonate which was about three or four seconds before it would explode.
So it flew into a bunch of pellets that would really turn the area into swiss
cheese we wanted to destroy the area and make sure there weren't any booby traps
or anything on there that could affect our personnel going aboard to blow it up.
A few hours later we sat back in the bridge wing as we did the countdown to blowing up the platform.
We just saw this big explosion we were only maybe a few miles away
but it was like a big mushroom cloud took off and just blew everything to smithereens because we're
a couple miles away it took a few seconds for the actual sound wave to get to us. If you've ever been
down at Cape Canaveral and you've seen them take off one of those big space shuttles same type of
thing, you see the flame it's all quiet and then all of a sudden it kind of rumbles through you.
There really was nothing else left it was just pretty much a big hole and there was one flame
that just kept burning for a little while longer and we saw that burn into the night.
Now at the same time, a lot of other things were happening they started indiscriminately shooting
at U.S flagged merchant tankers so we were hearing distress calls from other ships. They weren't
going to come after us because they knew we could take them out. They were going after these
unarmed merchant ship captains and tugboats that were doing missions
in the gulf that had American flags on them which caused us to go now looking
for all Iranian ships because at that point we were kind of in a one-day war.
The USS Simpson shot four missiles into one of the Iranian patrol boats and sunk it.
One of our aircraft carriers launched a bunch of airstrikes on another ship that was with them
and by the end of the day we had a pretty much a full shooting war going on right up until sunset
when we declared a ceasefire. We didn't see any more threats to us figured we made our point.
After that incident, we never had another occurrence of this type of mining by Iran in that
whole period. We in the navy and in the military make a difference day to day, that day and that
deployment really had a huge impact on me because what i was doing was much bigger than myself.
To hear more stories like mine subscribe to Sea Story today.
Coming next, it's pitch black no illumination whatsoever and then by chance one of the lookouts
say they see smoke. Sea Stories brought to you by America's Navy. Learn more at Navy.com.
[ dramatic music playing ]