The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  To avoid the Crystal, Coppock decided to order a hard turn to the right, the standard action for an evasive maneuver under international navigation rules.

  She shouted the command to Womack to pass on to the helmsman. But Womack did not immediately understand her order. After Womack hesitated, Coppock decided that she was not going to clear the Crystal by going toward the right. Such a turn would put her on a possible collision with the Wan Hai 266.

  “Oh shit, I’m so fucked! I’m so fucked!” she screamed.

  Coppock could have ordered the Fitzgerald into reverse; there was still time to stop. Arleigh Burke destroyers can come to a complete halt from 20 knots within 500 feet or so.

  Instead, Coppock ordered a move that disregarded the very basics of her training. She commanded the helmsman to gun the destroyer’s powerful engines to full speed and duck in front of the Crystal by heading left. “All ahead flank,” she ordered. “Hard left rudder.”

  Helmsman-in-training Simona Nelson had taken the wheel of a destroyer at sea for the first time in her life twenty-five minutes earlier. Nelson froze, unsure of how to respond.

  Petty Officer First Class Samuel Williams noticed Nelson struggling. He took control of the helm and did as Coppock ordered: he pushed the throttle to full and turned the rudder hard left. The ship’s engines revved to full power.

  The move put the Fitzgerald directly into the path of the oncoming Crystal.

  Coppock did not sound the collision alarm to warn sailors of the impending risk.

  “I just got so wrapped up in trying to do anything that I had to just drop the ball on everything else that I needed to do,” she said.

  Instead, she ran out to the starboard bridge wing. The Crystal’s blunt prow loomed above her, a wall of black steel angled sharply upward. To keep from pitching overboard, Coppock seized the alidade, a large metallic instrument used for taking bearings.

  “Grab onto something,” Womack shouted to his fellow sailors on the Fitzgerald bridge.

  * * *

  At 1:30:34 a.m. on June 17, 2017, at 34.52 degrees north latitude and 139.07 degrees east longitude, the ACX Crystal slammed into the USS Fitzgerald. The 30,000-ton Crystal was moving at 18 knots. The 8,261-ton Fitzgerald had accelerated to 22 knots.

  The Crystal’s prow and its protruding lower bow seized the Fitzgerald like a pincer. The top dug into Benson’s stateroom, 160 feet back from the Fitzgerald’s bow, shearing off the steel hull and crumpling his cabin. The bottom ripped across Berthing 2 and nearby compartments, leaving a hole thirteen feet by seventeen feet.

  The Crystal swung 125 degrees to the right in two minutes. The impact knocked the cargo ship onto a collision course with the giant Maersk Evora. The captain of the Crystal took evasive action that unfolded slowly as the big ships carefully maneuvered around each other in the crowded seas. It would take an hour for the Crystal to return to the scene to offer aid. None of the Crystal’s twenty-member crew was seriously injured, but structural damage was significant. It would take thirty-five tons of steel to repair.

  The Fitzgerald rolled sharply to port, snapping 20 degrees from right to left as it broke free of the Crystal. It settled out with a 7-degree list to starboard. Out of control, the destroyer spun 360 degrees through the water, completing the circle in five minutes.

  When it came to rest, the Fitzgerald had lost power and communications.

  The ship was dead in the water.

  Chapter 4: Berthing 2

  “Grandma’s Prayers Are Still Working”

  Petty Officer Second Class Rod Felderman had awakened in his top bunk at the moment of impact. He’d heard the shouts of water on deck. He pushed back his sleeping curtain. Dark, cold water was rising quickly around him. It had almost reached his rack.

  Felderman stuck his legs out to jump down but felt a sailor below him and recoiled. However, he realized he had to get going. He put his legs in the rising water and lowered himself down.

  He was instantly up to his neck. He fought his way to a ladder exiting the starboard side of the ship. He saw other men standing in line in front of him, their heads bobbing in the water. They were starting to panic.

  “Go! Go!” one sailor shouted. “It is blocked,” another sailor responded. Debris covered the door leading to the ladder and to safety.

  Felderman was going to be submerged in seconds. He took a breath and went under. A battle lantern lit the quarters underwater, but the light was poor, and there was no clear path to escape. And now he was desperate for air.

  He thrust himself upward. He burst out into a small pocket of air between two pipes. He found only inches of space between the water level and the top of the compartment.

  He smashed his head into the opening so hard that he bruised his face, split his skin, and began bleeding.

  “I was raving like a wild animal for air, pushing my face as high as I could,” he remembered.

  He sucked in what air he could and went under again.

  The sleeping quarters on a warship can be surprisingly serene. Lights are on in the berthing from six to ten a.m. and from six to ten p.m. Otherwise it’s dark, as sailors sleep in shifts.

  The coffin lockers provide modest refuge, with only a curtain for privacy. The tallest sailors often try to get the top bunk, where they can stretch out more. The bottom racks were the least desirable, especially the ones near the busy ladder exits at each end of the berthing. Seasoned sailors preferred the middle bunks—shoulder height, easy to roll into. For some men, bottom rack or top, the rocking of the waves or the low, constant hum of an underway ship resulted in the deepest possible sleep.

  Gabriel Cantu, a petty officer second class, had hit his rack at nine-thirty p.m. He had first watch the next day. Sonar Technician Kamari Eason had first watch, too, but didn’t get to bed until midnight. Petty Officer 3rd Class John Mead managed to grab a shower before he turned in at eleven-thirty. Matthew King, a sonar technician first class, had just finished his watch shift. He had lain in his bunk—Berthing 2, port side, Rack 44—and watched a movie before falling asleep. Seaman Dakota Rigsby, one of the youngest in the compartment, had sacked out on a bench in the lounge—it was quieter than his bunk.

  The Crystal’s lancing of the starboard wall of Berthing 2 shattered the calm.

  One weapons specialist heard a sound like a bomb going off. Another sailor said he could hear what sounded like a huge waterfall and felt what seemed like a cold breeze blowing through the quarters. Denis Medved, a young seaman whose bunk lay closest to the hole, was blasted out of his bed to the other side of the berthing.

  The sailors rescued one another. They grabbed shipmates from their beds. They hauled them through surging water, slipping, stumbling toward exits. They pushed one another to survive.

  It was Khalil Legier’s first night in Berthing 2, having moved earlier that day from another quarters. He rolled out of his bunk—bottom rack, port side, second row—and into the bottom rack across the aisle before standing up. Scott Childers was behind him but seemed frozen, unable to move. Legier grabbed Childers by the neck, and with his other hand grabbed the shirt of the sailor in front him. They started out for the exit as a threesome.

  Seaman Brayden Harden broke for the ship’s starboard side, straight into the maw of the flood. Someone grabbed him and hurled him toward the port side to the exit ladder there.

  In another setting, the sudden inundation might have drowned everyone alive. But the sailors had been trained since their first days on the Fitzgerald to escape by putting on blindfolds and feeling their way to the exits.

  What’s more, the Fitzgerald sailors in Berthing 2 were close. They had spent four months at sea. They woke together. Showered together. Worked, ate, and relaxed together. And then returned at night to sleep in the same compartment together. Two men might spend twenty-four hours never more than three feet apart. They knew each other better than many brothers.

  The trust explained the orderly line they formed at the ladder. As they clambered up
, water in the compartment rose and forced air out of the berthing. Men flew out the small opening at the top like office messages through a pneumatic tube.

  Twenty-seven men escaped up the port ladder in about ninety seconds.

  * * *

  The average temperature of the ocean off the coast of Japan in June is around seventy degrees. That temperature might be fine for a warm summer day. But it’s dangerously cold for water.

  Many people involuntarily open their mouths when they hit cold water, a reaction to the shock. If you manage to take a breath, you probably can’t hold it long—panic makes the heart beat faster and the body use more oxygen than normal.

  As water fills your mouth, it can flood the windpipe and the esophagus. Your body temperature drops. Your muscles weaken. Your lungs introduce water into your circulatory system, thinning your blood and causing abnormal chemical reactions.

  Death usually comes from a heart attack or a reduced blood supply to the brain. Depending on psychological and physiological factors like your height and fitness, it can take seconds or several minutes.

  The handful of men remaining in Berthing 2 were running out of time.

  Mead, a burly weapons specialist from Scottsdale, Arizona, had been the last person to reach the line of men waiting to exit the port ladder. The water had reached his waist.

  He looked to his right and saw water pouring into the compartment through a hole in the starboard side that reached from floor to ceiling. The weight of the incoming water threw the Fitzgerald off kilter.

  Mead slipped on the tilting floor and felt something pull him backward. The floodwaters had forced open the door of the common bathroom, creating a vacuum that sucked in Mead and another man, Gary Rehm Jr., a weapons specialist from Virginia.

  Mead fought his way out, but a pair of lockers blocked his path. As he struggled to get past, Mead felt a push and saw Rehm behind him.

  As Mead half-walked, half-swam toward the open scuttle, he had to battle his way through debris.

  Mead got wedged between a floating locker and the ceiling. The water was closing around him. He tried to take a final, deep breath but instead swallowed the salty, chemical-filled water. In his last seconds of consciousness, he grabbed an overhead pipe and propelled himself toward the escape hatch.

  * * *

  Tapia and Vaughan looked down into the scuttle one more time and noticed a ghostly shape moving through the water. The men reached down and hauled out Mead, the second, and last, sailor rescued by the two petty officers from Texas.

  Tapia and Vaughan, joined by other sailors, tried to close the scuttle. But they’d waited too long. Water was flowing through. The men were now battling the force of the ocean. There was nothing they could do. They turned to Mead.

  He was in bad shape. His eyes were bloodshot. He was coughing up water. Tapia and Vaughan grabbed Mead and headed to the mess room, the ship’s main cafeteria and one of the biggest spaces on the Fitzgerald.

  One sailor there asked a chief petty officer, “Are we abandoning ship, or are we fighting?”

  “I don’t know,” answered the chief.

  The mess room became a command post for the wounded—only a handful of sailors had suffered serious injuries, but many more appeared to be in shellshock, unable to function.

  Vaughan took out a grease pencil and started writing on a table. Without electricity, he was trying to do a head count by memory.

  After some confusion, it became clear that most of the sailors had escaped from Berthing 2.

  But seven were missing.

  Felderman found himself alone on the starboard side of the Fitzgerald. He was swimming through a dark swirl that didn’t make any sense to him, even though he had trained blindfolded to be able to exit in the dark.

  As he thrashed in the murk, his lungs and stomach hurt. He couldn’t decide if he was dead or alive. “It felt like I could almost breathe underwater,” he said. “Maybe I should just wait because this seems very unreal.” He thought about his wife, Liz, and their soon-to-be-born daughter, Alice. Visions of them attending his memorial service played in his head.

  “I tumbled like the mad swimming dog I was then toward a light,” he remembered.

  As he neared the starboard side escape hatch, he brushed against another sailor, floating near a water fountain. His head was above water, and Felderman thought he could hear him gasping for air.

  Felderman began to lose energy. Somehow, he drifted up through the opening on the starboard side. He looked up and saw the door for Berthing 1—located one deck above Berthing 2.

  “Grandma’s prayers are still working,” he thought.

  A sailor found him outside the door. He walked Felderman to the personnel office for treatment. Felderman’s face was bleeding, bruised, and swollen. Friends hurried to check on him. Felderman was a popular sailor. He loved Star Wars and could make a whistle that sounded like a sonar signal. He told them he was relieved to be alive.

  But as he lay there, Felderman began to go into shock, shaking from the cold. He was having difficulty breathing and could only draw in short, shallow breaths. He was given an inhaler to help. Hospital corpsmen tried to start an IV and piled warm blankets over him. One sailor stayed with him, holding his head while he continued vomiting and helping him to urinate into a trash bag.

  Felderman mistook the care for safety.

  “We must not be sinking anymore,” he recalled thinking.

  * * *

  The fate of the seven men in Berthing 2 turned into a test of command.

  As dawn approached, Perez stormed up to Babbitt. He demanded permission to dive into the flooded compartment to rescue the men—or retrieve their bodies. They were his sailors and he was not giving up on them.

  Babbitt refused. Such a rescue mission risked the lives of the rest of the crew and the ship by breaking flooding boundaries. Perez continued to argue. The heated exchange didn’t end until the ship’s highest-ranking enlisted man pulled Perez away to cool him down.

  Perez did not give up. Ogilvie and Vaughan volunteered to make an attempt with him. The three petty officers went to a locker and retrieved diving fins and a mask. They made their way to the hatch leading to the starboard side of Berthing 1, which had not flooded to the top.

  Peering down, the trio of sailors realized they were actually seeing down into Berthing 2. The 221-square-foot hole had exposed the Fitzgerald to open sea, allowing light from the sun rising at dawn to penetrate the hold.

  “I think I see a shoe down there,” Perez told Ogilvie, shining a flashlight.

  “Okay, let’s do it, man, let’s go get this guy,” Ogilvie said.

  The two men played rock, paper, scissors. Perez won. He put on a diving mask, and Ogilvie and Vaughan lowered him into the water to retrieve the sailor. He returned empty-handed.

  “I thought it was somebody,” Perez told Ogilvie.

  The men resigned themselves. The sailors were dead.

  To prepare for possible retrieval of the bodies, several crewmen gathered in the chiefs’ dining area. As a group, they decided: Whether the men appeared dead or alive, each would receive emergency treatment. The group would first strip them naked, dry them off, and then use the ship’s automated external defibrillators. Then, they would do CPR by hand. If that didn’t work, they would provide mouth-to-mouth.

  It was desperate, even morbid. But the crew wanted to try something, anything, to relieve its helplessness and grief.

  “Sitting and waiting for the bodies wasn’t so bad at first, but the doc warned the group that some people would freak out and that the dead would spurt water when we did chest compressions,” Alex Helbig, an ensign, later wrote. “I brought out a bucket for people to vomit in.”

  The plan was canceled when it was clear that nobody at that moment was going to retrieve the bodies.

  Chapter 5. Fight the Ship

  “I Realized That the Miracle Was You Guys, the Crew”

  Lt. j.g. Stephany Breau had deftly handled the
Fitzgerald during the near miss outside of Sasebo. Now she was called into action again. She was the ship’s damage control assistant.

  It was her job to fix the Fitzgerald.

  Breau ran from her cabin through the darkness and in two minutes reached Damage Control Central—a special section in an engineering room designed to act as an emergency operations post.

  She picked up a microphone for the shipwide intercom: “I assume all duties and responsibilities for damage control onboard USS Fitzgerald,” she announced. She sounded the alarm for general quarters, directing sailors to preassigned stations designated for emergencies.

  Arleigh Burke–class destroyers are designed to be the most survivable ships in the navy. The Fitzgerald could defend against torpedoes, cruise missiles, and strafing. It had multiple backups for critical systems—three radar systems, four kinds of compasses, reinforced hulls, and stations throughout the ship that could be activated for navigation.

  Now, that survivability was put to the test.

  Fitzgerald crew members were missing. Five sailors were trapped in sonar compartments in the front of the ship. The seven from Berthing 2 could not be located.

  The ship was flooding. By 2:45 a.m., the ship’s forward compartments had flooded with some 85 tons of water. That figure would grow to 514 tons as the night progressed.

  Its communications systems were collapsing. Breau’s announcement was the last of the night from the ship’s main intercom.

  Without electricity, critical systems were on battery backups. Sailors used flashlights and cellphones to guide their way through the darkened ship. The space below decks grew sweltering without air conditioning.

  The destroyer’s propulsion system was damaged. A pump lubricating the starboard shaft failed, forcing its shutdown. The Fitzgerald was left with one propeller for power. It also could move no faster than about 5 knots, the speed of a person jogging. Any faster, and the amount of seawater rushing in would increase.