Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  It’s time for the Operation Short Walk briefing for their daily game of chicken during which Coalition forces assert Iraqi sovereignty along a stretch of water close to the oil terminals that Iran and Iraq have been arguing over since the 1970s.

  “Breakfast Time” will be the password to commence the operation, “Miller Time” to end it, after which it will be lunchtime, meaning time to eat lunch. Rather than the usual armed helicopter support, a six-foot unmanned aerial vehicle, the Scan Eagle, will be flying over us today. It’s controlled from a trailer on KAOT. “This is a little abnormal,” Matt warns his crew. “It’ll just be us, us, and us out there.”

  They uncover the double .50s on the bridge wings as we leave the dhow box (where fishermen congregate) and begin running along the seven-and-a-half-mile line of dispute where the British marines were seized.

  “Breakfast Time,” Matt announces on the pipe. John shows me where we are on the radar with its graphic displays labeled DHOW BOX, THUNDER VALLEY, NEXTEL, and FENWAY. Iran and the outflow of the Tigris/Euphrates (the Shatt Al Arab River) is off our port side twelve miles. Twenty miles to our rear is the Iraqi deepwater port of Umm Qasr, where a Coast Guard team from San Diego has been training Iraqi sailors and marines. Marsh Arabs live in between and on either side of the border. I scan the hazy waters to our left looking for Iranian speedboats. At 12:30 they call “Miller Time.”

  “They didn’t come out to play today. Fifty percent of the time they show,” Matt explains apologetically. “It was probably because of the heavy fog this morning. Fog or anything above three-foot seas they don’t like.”

  “They’re fair-weather militants?”

  “None of the locals like any kind of rough water. So what we sometimes do with boats entering the security zone is run up to them and then stop and push them out of the way with our wake.”

  The Wrangell hasn’t yet fired its guns in anger, though it’s come close four times. “We’ve had big merchant tankers beelining for the terminals, and you worry about that kind of gross tonnage. You have to be ready to stop them pretty far out,” he explains.

  To keep sharp, they do lots of live-fire practice at high speed while executing tactical turns. “We’ve done twenty gun shoots in the last six months, and with that much gunfire things will happen,” Matt says, referring to Bosun’s Mate Second Class Frank Benetka, one of their shipmates, who was wounded in the thigh three months earlier by a fragment from a .50 round that misfired in the barrel. Frank’s now in Bahrain recovering.

  We pass a wooden dhow flying the Iranian flag. In late summer, the Wrangell’s cook and another EMT boarded an Iranian dhow to resuscitate a fisherman who’d collapsed from heatstroke on an otherwise typical 120-degree day.

  W

  e next brief for an HIPAT, or human interaction patrol, in which they board dhows and talk with local mariners to gather intelligence on terrorists, pirates, smugglers, the IRGCN, or any other potential threat to the platforms. One recent concern is car smuggling. They think older cars are being taken into Iraq to be used as improvised explosive devices. The XO, Gordon Hood, will be the boarding officer in charge. The crew assembles on the aft deck with black helmets, armored tactical vests, pistols, and M-4 rifles.

  We climb down a short ladder to the small boat, the six-man boarding team, the two boat drivers (one is John Harker), the interpreter, and myself.

  The Iraqi dhows have an elegant shape, but many are metal rust buckets up close. The first one we approach is wooden and about 80 feet long with a ragtag crew hand line-fishing off the back. A white-bearded elder in a red-and-white-checkered headdress smiles down at us.

  Gordon gets the master’s permission to come aboard through the interpreter. Their freeboard is about chest high from where we come alongside and stand on our boat’s pontoon. We muscle up from our elbows. Once on board, Gordon smiles and asks for permission to do a safety search before sitting down on the raised rear platform with the boat’s master, Ahmed, a slim, black-bearded man in his thirties wearing a faded T-shirt and baggy pants.

  Gordon asks questions off a list. Have they seen any international terrorist organizations operating in the area? How many days have they been here? How’s the fishing?

  The nine men on board, including two teenagers and the old man, have a small pile of snapper and undersized groupers in a red plastic laundry basket by the rail. One of Ahmed’s crew lands another small grouper and tosses it into the basket. Later they’ll put out their trawl net.

  Ahmed says he’s been fishing for seventeen years.

  “Have you had any encounters with the IRGCN? How about Ali Babas [thieves and pirates]?”

  “There was an Iranian attacked by Ali Babas yesterday. They only go for the Iranians,” he tells us, “because they have cash for buying fish.”

  Since the Kuwaitis won’t buy fish from Iraqis (whom they hate), the Iranians buy the Iraqis’ fish at sea and then resell it in Kuwait. Another reason the Iranians are attacked is that most of the Ali Babas are Iraqi.

  MK 3 Eugene Peters asks if I want to take a look below deck. We drop through a hatch into the dank, low-slung engine room where they live. There’s a sick man lying on a thin mat, carpet scraps that the others sleep on, buzzing flies, bags of clothing hanging on nails, and flat breads tied to the far wall. It could be a dhow from any of the last ten centuries except for the old diesel engine at the center of the room.

  The forward fishing hold has foam coolers full of small fish and some ice. There’s one larger grouper they caught that’s about thirty pounds.

  There are six thousand to ten thousand fishermen working these waters. Unable to get fuel at home, they buy it at sea from the Iranians. Before we leave, the Coasties hand out life jackets.

  “They call it psy-ops gear,” Gordon explains. “The Navy gives out candy bars and stuff. We want to get boating equipment to these people, life vests, flares, and the like.”

  The next boat requires a climb up a truck tire being used as a bumper. This crew is hand fishing for shrimp. They’ve been out for six days. Their master, Ali, compact, bearded, and in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and Western slacks, says he’s been fishing for twenty years.

  Gordon asks if he’s had any interaction with the IRGCN. He says last week the Iranians boarded his boat, “right here in Iraqi water.”

  “And they took our fish and shrimp,” a voluble middle-aged man with rough skin and a salt-and-pepper beard adds.

  Gordon asks if they’ve heard of any international terrorist threats to the terminal, which they haven’t. He asks about car smuggling.

  The loud guy goes off on how the Iraqi government does nothing and the Coalition forces support the government but if they weren’t here you wouldn’t have all this smuggling and killing going on. “The Coalition doesn’t do anything about the fuel problem. You only talk, nothing’s being done.”

  “We can’t get fuel back home,” Ali explains quietly.

  “How do the cars move through?” Gordon asks.

  “On big vessels.”

  “You understand we’re here to protect the terminal and train Iraqis, right?”

  “We know that if you leave, the Iraqi [navy] can’t protect anything,” Ali tells him. “If we see pirates and call the navy, they won’t come, and besides, the Ali Babas have better weapons than they do.”

  Through the interpreter I ask Ali if the fishing was better twenty years ago, expecting to hear about overfishing or the impact of oil spills.

  The fishing was better during the Saddam time, they all respond.

  “You could fish anywhere.”

  “It was all open water.”

  “During Saddam, we went to Kuwaiti waters to fish.”

  As Shiites from southern Iraq, you’d think they’d hate Saddam’s legacy, but they’re also fishermen, and more than anything fishermen universally hate being told where they can and can’t fish. They’re now trapped in a narrow band between the terminals and Kuwaiti and Iranian waters.

 
We cruise up to another rusted dhow, whose green cotton nets are being repaired by its crew. One of them says, “Sure, come on aboard.” Then the master walks over. “We can’t talk. We’re fixing nets. We have work to do.” The crewman looks disappointed as we motor on.

  The next boat, the Madeena, is a challenge to get aboard. We have to climb up onto a big truck tire, then stand on top of it, grab a chain, and stretch a leg around a post and netting to get on. Its master is named Muthana. He’s short with a trim black beard, soft brown eyes, and an easy smile. They left a fishing port yesterday, he tells us. They heard someone was attacked, but only from the radio.

  How long has he been fishing? “Since we were born we fish,” he says. “Last week the Iranian coast guard [not the Iranian Revolutionary Guard] was here in this line [of fishing boats]. The Coalition didn’t stop them. They came in two boats,” he complains.

  “We saw those boats,” Gordon says, surprised they came this far south of the line. “You see any international terrorists or threats to the oil installations?” he asks.

  No, Muthana says, before offering his opinion that the Iraqis can’t protect the terminal or the fishermen on their own. He thinks the Coalition warships need to stay.

  The Coasties give one of his crew some ointment for a blister and two life vests. Gordon asks if Muthana has seen any smuggling.

  “There’s camel smuggling from Iraqis to Iranians to Kuwaitis,” the fisherman reports.

  “Camel smuggling,” Gordon writes down in his small notebook. I wonder if camels get seasick.

  “There’s also car smuggling, but the Iraqi border people are paid off, so what can you do?” Muthana adds. “All the problems, the smuggling, the stealing, all came after Saddam.”

  The next boat has a clean new layer of brown paint and very high sides. They say no, we can’t board. I’m not sure we could have anyway without a boarding ladder. We move on.

  “That’s two noes today,” Gordon notes, surprised. “I guess down here [south of the terminal] they’re more independent.” As if to confirm this, a third fisherman tells us we can’t board his vessel either.

  John tells me that Navy guys would take these refusals as a challenge, but the Coast Guard is used to dealing with fishermen and mariners. “We get better intel than the Navy ’cause we’re friendly and joke with them and we interact better. This Navy guy says to me, ‘What can you tell us about boardings?’ ‘Well, I did six hundred at my last station [in New Hampshire],’ I say.”

  Our last boarding of the day is the Sayad Shuda. Its master is a man named Zuhar with a short black beard, stained white undershirt, and shorts. This dhow lacks the usual raised platform behind the pilothouse. In its absence Gordon sits cross-legged on the flaking yellow painted deck. Zuhar tells him they have been out two days and will stay out eight to ten. One of his motley crew brings out a couple of hand-sized jumbo shrimp. Rami, the interpreter, is interested. He says they’re selling them for two dollars a kilo. They plan to catch about five hundred kilos.

  “Your face is familiar,” Zuhar tells Rami. “You’ve boarded us before.”

  Zuhar is a member of a fishing co-op. His dad is its manager.

  What benefit do they get from the co-op? Gordon wonders. None, except it lets the authorities know they’re real fishermen. Oil smugglers are giving fishermen a bad name.

  There are bags of onions and potatoes hanging from the back of the boat and a water pipe by the wheelhouse.

  Gordon asks about the IRGCN. Zuhar says the problem is that if Iraqi fishermen go into Iranian waters they jail them. Kuwaitis don’t fine or jail Iraqi fishermen, they shoot and kill them. “They hate Iraqis because of the Saddam invasion. So why doesn’t the Coalition do something to stop the Kuwaitis?” he wonders.

  Has he seen any terrorist activity? Gordon asks, pretending he didn’t hear that last question.

  No, but Zuhar knows that hamor [grouper] hide under the rocks by the terminals, and there are big ones there, and if the Coalition let the fishermen in for just one day they’d leave them alone and stop trying to sneak into the zone after that.

  “We can’t,” Rami tells him. “You know what happened in 2004”—the killing of Nate Bruckenthal and the Navy sailors. He talks some more to them in Arabic. They laugh.

  “They feel happy you’re close,” he tells Gordon. “You protect them from the pirates.” They bring out a slab of white squid about the size of a paperback book that looks like it’s been sitting on the deck with the flies for a while.

  Gordon gets a look of restrained horror on his face like they’re about to chop it up and offer him a hunk. Luckily they don’t, only telling him how good it is for your virility.

  They give him the coordinates where the Iranians came by the fishing boats the other day. The Sayad Shuda’s wheelhouse has a threadbare sleeping carpet, a large wooden steering wheel, two small GPS units, and a child’s stuffed dog and bear. We climb back down onto our RIB and return to the Wrangell.

  A

  fter a break we transition from dhows to a supertanker, approaching the BW Noto, which is at anchorage waiting to fill up at the terminal. Every oil tanker approaching the terminals first has to go through a security boarding.

  The Noto’s hull is painted green and red. The red will drop beneath the waterline as it takes on oil. Fully loaded it’s 286,000 tons. Empty it stands seven stories high with its white superstructure rising another six stories above its deck. At 1,100 feet it’s more than three football fields in length. We sail around its massive bow. Bosun’s Mate Jason “Oz” Ozolins will be leading the first boarding team. I’ll be following in a second boat. I watch as the tanker lowers its accommodation ladder close to water level. The first boat races toward it like a sardine approaching a whale. The boarders jump onto the ladder platform on a rising wave and begin ascending like mountaineers. We head over and look up at the twenty-five crewmen and officers gathered far above us by the fantail railing. One crewman has been allowed to stay on the bridge and another in the engine room while the security and sweep teams do their work.

  We time our approach to the ladder platform, leap aboard, and begin the steep climb up its eighty metal steps. The rails are gritty with sea salt and tar. We reach the main deck and look back down. A roll on/roll off freighter is passing near the Wrangell as the sun drops low on the horizon, turning the sea’s surface a burnished copper and tin. We follow a yellow walkway painted on the green deck to the looming white apartment-sized superstructure. Below it the crew, in their orange and white coveralls, are waiting patiently by the stern rail.

  Bosun’s Mate Third Class Adam “Duck” Mallard, looking like a brick wall with the hard, flat face of a Spartan, stands guard with his M-4 held barrel down across his armored chest.

  The tanker crew is called forward one by one, frisked with their arms stretched out, and questioned as their passports are examined. “Mr. Lee . . . Mr. Negazi . . . James Sullivan?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your birthday?”

  “November 9.”

  I talk to the bald British captain, John Bardsley. He’s wearing a white uniform shirt, white shorts, and running shoes. He works three months on and three off, he tells me. His Filipino crew work nine months straight. He says the Panamanian-registered BW Noto is owned by a Singapore shipping company. Its next stop after loading up will be Korea.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why do we come here?” he replies archly. “You know. Because it’s where the oil is.” They’ll be loading two million barrels beginning tomorrow. That’s $200 million of product at the time, or eight Exxon Valdez oil spills, or a hellacious amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, depending on how you look at it.

  The captain is the last to be frisked and questioned. Everyone is then escorted through interior hallways to the galley area. I opt to sweep the engine room with Machinery Technician Second Class Wally Waldron and Seaman Sheridan “Rook” Roebuck, who at twenty, with big biceps, bangs, and freckle
s, is the youngest member of the Wrangell crew.

  It’s about eighty-five degrees on deck and over a hundred by the time we climb down into what shouldn’t really be called an engine room but a six-deck-deep propulsion atrium larger than some hotels I’ve stayed at. It’s eerily empty, also noisy as hell with its 32,000 hp engines turning. We descend several more ladders and enter the glassed-in control room with its banks of switches and consoles. Here a crewman has been left to monitor the main power plant. Wally and Rook search around, checking through drawers and file cabinets, even the fridge.

  We descend a few more flights to the main engine area and behind it into a cavernous room with open metal lattice flooring above the main propeller shaft as thick as a mature Douglas fir. The only ship I’ve ever been on of comparable size is the U.S. aircraft carrier Stennis, which has also sailed through these waters. The Stennis has a crew of over five thousand. This supertanker is crewed by twenty-seven. Redundancy in personnel is not a safety feature of the world’s oil tanker fleet.

  “You should have been here doing this with us in the summer, when I saw a temperature reading of 127,” Wally says to me, almost shouting, as he pokes around some thigh-thick coils of rope and barrels of paint.

  We spend the next hour in various rooms that ought to be occupied by giants. When they find two lockers with dead bolts on them that the crew were supposed to have removed, Rook first tries to smash them with a pry bar, then grabs and peels back the doors’ metal corners with his hands and peeks inside with a flashlight (he’s in competition with Matt, the CO, over who can bench-press the most on the Wrangell’s improvised fantail gym).

  Eventually we climb back to the tanker’s deck, wiping sweat from our eyes. It’s now dark outside and cooled down into the seventies. There’s a half-moon reflecting off the Arabian Sea, the Wrangell is playing a red spotlight across the water, and in the distance the terminal is lit up with colored lights like it’s a holiday—Ramadan at the Manama shopping mall.