USS MULLINNIX DD-944

17-25 April 1972
A Long Time At Sea...

Pearl is only a few miles from The Canal as the crow flies but the reality was that the crow never did fly in that direction.

From leaving the canal zone on 16 April, Mullinnix steamed towards Pearl Harbor, arriving on 26 April - a long long time at sea. Steady steaming, no stopping, just heading west at full speed, throwing out a hissing arc of spray each time the bow guillotined down into the sea. To make it even longer, we all knew where we were headed.

She ran force draft on two boilers - 24 hours a day, leaving a trail in the empty blue sea. The sky overhead was a cloudless blue most days. On others, the high-level winds streaked the cloud cover like a juvenile artist’s brush strokes. At dusk, the sky would turn a greenish pink with the sunlight leaving it slowly, and the smoke from the other ships, snaking into the atmosphere.

The night skies were mostly clear and sparkled with stars that gleamed with the blue-white brilliance only seen at sea. The moon reflected on the water’s surface and Mullinnix as she relentlessly continued West. Watching the water roll under the moon is one of life's precious moments that most people never get to experience.

Some nights had a low cloud-base and would hide even the moon. Only the sea was visible, stretching faintly luminescent and peaceful under a black emptiness, more threatening and elemental than the absence of light. When the night rains would stop the sky would turn a tumult of gray clouds through which the moon reeled like a pale, demented ghost. My mind would stretch out over this restless sea, remembering Nebraska. Would I ever see it again? I could literally smell the galley tang in the rain-washed air.

On other nights, there was no moon – total blackness. You could hear, smell, and taste, even feel the sea, but you could not see it. The plankton sparkled in the water like 4th of July sparklers.

About halfway to Pearl a thin cloud layer was overhead, dimpled like last night’s tapioca, then they simply evaporated into nothingness. For two straight days, the water's surface was smooth as glass with no hint of movement of any kind. You could literally look off either side of the ship and see its reflection and your own. It felt like being in a Salvador Dalí painting, like his ‘The Persistence of Memory’ with its striking and bizarre melting clocks. Blue and smooth as a silk kimono stretched over a pretty girl’s thigh. You couldn’t see the horizon as the sky and sea became one.

At night, mirrored in pinpoint clarity every light blazing from the ship. The peaceful sea had a calming, almost hypnotic hold, allowing one's imagination to reach farther than the horizon itself.

The uneasy feeling of being the only thing alive blossomed in my mind. Quickly, I mentally filled in the mortar around the bricks of information that it wasn’t, couldn’t, be true. I’d been in Norfolk less than two weeks ago. It seemed like yesterday and it seemed like years. Time had a way of dissolving. Memories about the past are always about the present.

Once on the fantail, I went to the lifeline and leaned one elbow on a stanchion, watching the dark water swirl below, mesmerized by the motion as it surged and fought its way back to the center of the ship’s wake. Lost in thought, I …

By the third evening, the sea was back to its normal – moving in every direction. The afternoon light had begun to dissolve. The sun turned redder as it fell. The clouds were pink continents, edged in luminous gold. The sea glittered copper, then tangerine. The dark was beginning to take over the sky. The horizon was banded silver, silhouetting the mast and stacks. Sitting on the fantail smoking, we’d look forward and slightly to port, toward the dying light of the warm evening sky glimmering faintly beyond the horizon, looking for our ultimate destination – the Vietnam gunline.

The isolation of the sea is a sailor’s oyster. The smell of the sea - invigorating.

__________





The North Vietnamese did not take the U.S. presence in the Gulf of Tonkin lightly, NVA shore batteries struck the destroyer USS Buchanan on 17 April 1972, killing one sailor and wounding seven others.









On 19 April, the destroyer USS Higbee had the distinction of becoming the first U.S. ship attacked by enemy aircraft during this war. In the ensuing raid, one MiG dropped a bomb on the vessel’s stern, wounding four sailors.

On the same day, the missile frigate USS Sterett scored one hit when it downed a MiG with a Terrier missile near Dong Hoi. Earlier in March, she bagged two enemy planes with the same projectile.

In all, Communist shore batteries struck 16 U.S. ships, but none were ever sunk.

























Finally, the morning of 26 April, we sighted Pearl, the sea floated in the morning mist as Mullinnix begin maneuvering various courses and speeds to conform to the Pearl Harbor channel. Under clear blue skies and a calm rolling sea, the wind wasn’t up yet leaving the surface glassy with the consistency of thirty-weight oil. Mullinnix tied up to Pier 14-4, US Naval Station, Pearl Harbor. GMG3 Danny Perrine's older brother was standing on the pier waiting on Mullinnix. He'd been on the Mullinnix in 1969 when she went to Vietnam.

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