Newsworthy

Naval Station Mayport, Florida (CNN)The USS Simpson has turned into a ghost ship.

Its passageways are pitch black and steamy hot. It’s silent, the constant hum of machinery that’s the heartbeat of a warship eerily absent. Its windows are covered and ventilation sealed off. Its battle ribbons have been removed, its flag lowered.
But the ship still has a story to tell.

The U.S. Navy decommissioned the 30-year-old frigate Tuesday and with it shut the back cover on one of the most significant — yet little-heralded — stories in U.S. military history.

The Simpson was the last modern U.S. Navy warship to sink an enemy vessel in action. Of the 272 ships in the fleet now, only one ship can claim a similar honor: the USS Constitution, now a showpiece in Boston harbor, which sank British vessels in the War of 1812.

The Simpson’s moment came in 1988, when it scored four missile hits on an Iranian gunboat, the Joshan, during a battle in the Persian Gulf, the only U.S. Navy surface battle since World War II.

“We don’t do battles like that anymore,” the Simpson’s final executive officer, Lt. Eddie Davis, said Monday. “It’s a tremendous feat for a ship like this to be able to do.”
Three men who agree with Davis are Mark Tierney, Tom Buterbaugh and James McTigue. They’re the guys who pulled it off, and they got together Monday for the first time in 27 years to tell CNN about the encounter on April 18, 1988.
Tierney, 59, and Buterbaugh, 55, are Simpson “plank owners,” sailors with the ship when it joined the fleet in 1985.

“We commissioned the ship, trained everybody up, took them to sea and then we made history,” Tierney said. Eighty percent of the crew were on their first ship. “They were learning as they went,” he said.

McTigue, 67, the ship’s captain in 1988, came aboard Simpson four months before the face-off in the Persian Gulf.

“I was the rookie, I was the new guy on board,” he said, though he was likely the oldest person among the 200-person crew. And he had combat experience in Vietnam.
The Simpson was tasked that morning with taking out an Iranian oil platform as U.S. retaliation for a mine strike on the Simpson’s sister ship, the USS Samuel B. Roberts, four days earlier. The Navy dubbed it Operation Praying Mantis.

After the morning attack on the oil platform, the Simpson and the two other ships in its group, the cruiser USS Wainwright and the frigate USS Bagley, detected an Iranian ship on radar shortly before noon.

When Wainwright Capt. James Chandler, the commander of the three-ship group, told McTigue it was the Joshan and it was known to have a deadly U.S.-made Harpoon missile aboard, “that upped the ante a bit,” McTigue said.

The Harpoon, which could travel at 600-plus mph with a 500-pound warhead, could have sunk the Simpson or any of the ships in the group.

Chandler warned the Iranian ship via radio at least four times to stop approaching the U.S. group, according to published accounts of the battle.

“Finally it got to the point where he (Chandler) said, ‘If you don’t stop, I’m going to sink you,’” McTigue told CNN. The Iranian ship responded by firing a Harpoon missile.

McTigue said the Wainwright could not respond because of the formation the ships were in. Its missile batteries were obstructed.

Simpson, however, had a shot. Chandler ordered McTigue to take it.

“I turned to Mark and said “Shoot!” McTigue said. “Mark turned to Tom and said –”
“Shoot!” Tierney said.

Buterbaugh said the same to a sailor at his side, who pushed a button that sent a Standard missile screaming off the front of the Simpson at 1,900 mph and toward the Iranian ship.

“We were locked and loaded and ready to go,” Buterbaugh said. “We already had a war shot, a white bird on the rail, all of our fire control radars were pointing right at him. It was not going to take long for us to get the weapon away.”
McTigue said it all took less than three seconds.