Bond of the Sea
The U.S. Navy has always faced unexpected threats.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Aboard the USS San Jacinto--This Memorial Day weekend, Martin Brown boarded a ship he had first known as a much younger man. The USS San Jacinto is today a 9,600 ton, 567-foot Aegis cruiser with phased-array radar that can simultaneously track scores of targets over hundreds of miles. In the spring of 1945, when Mr. Brown first came aboard, it was an 11,000 ton, 622-foot aircraft carrier headed for battle off the coast of Japan. "They have things on this ship we couldn't even contemplate," says Mr. Brown, 80. Yet the two San Jacs have more in common than just a namesake.

By the time the 18-year-old Mr. Brown reached the San Jacinto at its anchorage at the Pacific atoll of Ulithi, the carrier had already survived two typhoons, two close calls with kamikazes, the Marianas Turkey Shoot (in which pilots from the San Jac and other carriers shot down 300 Japanese planes) and the battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval engagement in history. During a bombing raid in September 1944 over the island of Chichi Jima a torpedo bomber from the San Jac was critically damaged by anti-aircraft fire. Of the plane's three-man crew only the pilot survived; 20-year-old Lt. George H.W. Bush was later rescued by a U.S. submarine.

Mr. Brown had decided to enlist in the Navy at 17 on the theory that serving on a ship "was better than being in a foxhole." "We couldn't wait to get in," he says of his childhood gang from the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., although he confesses to wondering on his way to basic training "what the hell I was getting into." One of his friends was later killed at Iwo Jima; another was taken prisoner at the Battle of the Bulge. "We used to get casualty lists in the paper every day, and it wasn't three or four names," he says. During his military service, a family friend paid a condolence visit to his mother after seeing his name listed among the dead. Fortunately for her, tragically for someone else, it was another Marty Brown.

The war in Europe was already over when Mr. Brown shipped out to the Pacific. But there were no expectations for a quick or easy victory against Japan, the anticipated invasion of which would cost "at a minimum one-quarter-of-a-million casualties," according to Gen. George C. Marshall. During operations in April 1945 near Okinawa, the San Jacinto's task force was attacked by nearly 500 kamikazes. Altogether, some 30,000 U.S. sailors were killed in the Pacific by the time the Japanese announced their surrender on August 15.

By his own account, Mr. Brown, who spent most of his days below deck as part of the "black gang" of ship mechanics, witnessed almost none of the combat, although he was nearly swept out to sea during a typhoon. "Whatever you do, don't make this column about me," he insists. The captain of the modern-day San Jacinto, Matthew Sharpe, disagrees. Mr. Brown's service, he says, "humbles me. I only wish I could be as devoted and selfless as he."

When Capt. Sharpe learned he had a veteran of the old San Jacinto on board during the ship's weeklong stay at Stapleton Pier in Staten Island, he rushed to greet him. "When we sail aboard the San Jacinto," he says, "we feel we have picked up the battle standard of those who fought there and that our actions reflect upon their service. When two sailors have served on ships of the same name, there is an immediate connection, a sense of being shipmates."

Capt. Sharpe comes from modest Midwestern origins, the child of a single mother who made it to Annapolis and has made his career at sea. The ship he commands is a fearsome thing, armed with more than 100 missiles of various types, some with ranges of up to 1,600 miles. In 1991 it fired the first salvo of the Gulf War; from its blue-lit combat information center it can coordinate the activities of a carrier battle group or take the controls of an airborne F-18.

But the ship, commissioned in 1988, was also designed primarily with a view to fighting the Soviets in blue-water operations. What does that mean for a Navy that just sent three aircraft carriers through the Straits of Hormuz to navigate the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf, rarely more than 50 miles from the Iranian shore? Last year, the Israeli navy belatedly recognized the danger when one of its ships was disabled by a single Chinese-made, Iranian-supplied anti-ship missile. And Capt. Sharpe got a taste of a different kind of threat when, in his previous command, his was the first ship to come to the aid of the stricken USS Cole, an $820 million Aegis destroyer nearly sunk in October 2000 by a bomb-packed dinghy fitted with an outboard engine.

The threat plainly weighs on Capt. Sharpe's mind. A ship like the San Jacinto would have only seconds to track, identify and destroy an incoming missile; in 1988, a mistake by the USS Vincennes led to the downing of an Iranian commercial jet and the killing of nearly 300 passengers. "How do you wield a gun in a knife fight?" Capt. Sharpe asks. Could he launch missiles while simultaneously defending against attacks from small boats? What about mines or submarines (Iran deploys three Russian-made, ultra-quiet, Kilo-class subs)? The Cole was struck, he admits, because "we never expected the enemy to look like that." So what will the enemy look like next?

That question was every bit as relevant in Mr. Brown's Navy days as it is in Capt. Sharpe's. As game theorist Thomas Schelling once observed, the U.S. was surprised at Pearl Harbor because intelligence services were obsessed "with a few dangers that \[were\] familiar rather than likely." Kamikazes--the suicide bombers of their day--were successful at first for similar reasons. By the time the Navy was able to devise effective countermeasures a heavy price had been paid.

It is in the face of these terrors that generations of American sailors, from Capt. Sharpe on the bridge to Seaman Brown in the engine room, have set sail, brought together by what Joseph Conrad famously called, in "Heart of Darkness," "the bond of the sea." That's a bond for which a landlubbing columnist can only feel grateful as he looks out from the bridge toward the Verrazano Narrows under clear skies.

Ellie