Former USS Decatur sailor Bob Burnz, left, described his assignment on the destroyer to Tom Moore on a recent visit to where the ship is moored among Pearl Harbor's mothball fleet. The destroyer will be sunk off the coast of Kauai during a naval exercise in July. Below, the USS Decatur was helped to a pier on Ford Island on May 8 after being towed to Pearl Harbor from California. It was later moved to Pearl Harbor's inactive shipyard fleet.
Warship’s final mission
Former sailors on the USS Decatur reminisce
as the destroyer is prepared for sinking next month
When the nearly half-century-old USS Decatur goes to its watery grave off Kauai next month, the initials of Tom Moore and Robert Burnz will be on its hull.
Moore, a retired Pearl Harbor Shipyard worker, and Burnz remember the destroyer as "a good ship."
The two recently got their last look at the Decatur as it rested in Pearl Harbor's "mothball fleet" after it was towed from California May 8.
The 4,000-ton warship, with its gray painting now peeling and rust covering other parts of its hull, is destined to be part of a SinkEx exercise as early as July 14 in waters off of Kauai along with two other destroyers and an amphibious landing ship. The four vessels will be the targets of the deck guns, missiles and perhaps a torpedo from other vessels in the Pacific Fleet and one or two allied naval ships.
Moore said just being able to touch the ship's hull "brings back memories."
"It's good to see her again," Burnz added. "It was good times coming through the (Panama) Canal after putting her back into commission."
Then the two sailors added their initials to the Decatur's starboard hull just above the water line.
This Decatur is the fourth in a line of Navy warships by that name and was launched in 1954. The fifth and remaining USS Decatur, still on active duty, was launched on Nov. 9, 1966.
Burnz, who sailed on the Decatur from 1966 to 1970, said he may even shed a tear when the destroyer is sunk 12,000 feet off the Barking Sands coast line on Kauai.
"It's really sad," said Burnz, a 1963 Kauai High School graduate. "It was the best ship I was on and I sailed on four different ones."
Moore, 62, was only 19 and year out of high school when he reported to the Decatur in Newport, R.I., on March 14, 1961. He served 17 months on the 418-foot warship, calling those years as critical times in his 20 years as a Navy sailor.
"I was weaned on the Decatur," said Moore, who eventually transferred to the submarine service and retired as a chief petty officer with 20 years of service. "They were good years. She's a good ship.
"We sailed up and down the East Coast doing local ops (operations), stopping at one time at Puerto Rico."
Kailua resident Moore recalled that in September 1961 the Decatur served as an orbital spacecraft recovery ship.
The fourth USS Decatur, like its predecessors and successor, were named after War of 1812 hero Commodore Stephen Decatur. It was commissioned in December 1956 as a Forest Sherman-class destroyer. Over its 28 years of service, the Decatur participated in the Cuban blockade in 1962 and steamed in waters off Vietnam. During the past 10 years the Decatur was a self-defense test ship whose only job was to tow decoy barges off the coast of the Southern California. It was the job of the remote-controlled weapon systems on the Decatur to bat down incoming missiles.
The Decatur had at least one major accident when, on May 6, 1964, it sustained heavy damage to its superstructure after colliding with the aircraft carrier USS Champlain 150 miles east of Cape Henry, Va.
The warship was placed "in commission, in reserve" to await modernization and was decommissioned for the first time in June 1965. During the following two years, the Decatur was modified at the Boston Naval Shipyard and reclassified as a guided-missile destroyer in September 1966.
Burnz, 59, was part of the crew that recommissioned the Decatur in 1966 as a technician assigned to the ship's fire control radar.
"I remember bringing it down the East Coast," Burnz said, "sailing through Caribbean and transiting through the Panama Canal on the way to our home port in Long Beach."
In 1968, the Decatur was deployed to Vietnam. "I remember steaming behind an aircraft carrier," Burnz said, "recovering pieces of downed aircraft while working off Yankee Station." (Yankee Station was a point in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam used by Navy aircraft carriers to launch raids.)
After serving in the Vietnam War and numerous Pacific deployments, the Decatur was again decommissioned at Pearl Harbor in June 1983 and placed in the Pacific Reserve Fleet. It was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register in March 1988. In the late 1980s through last year, the Decatur continued to sail along the Pacific Coast, conducting trials of various systems for countering cruise missiles and other threats as a test ship.
It made its last Pacific voyage last month to Pearl Harbor tethered by a half-mile-long chain to a tug called the Sioux from Port Hueneme. On May 10, the Decatur joined other aging members of the Pacific Fleet's "mothball" navy moored off the Pearl City Peninsula.
Next month, along with the destroyers USS Harry Hill and Kinkaid and the amphibious landing ship USS Peoria, the Decatur will complete its last mission as targets for U.S. and Pacific Rim warships participating in the biannual RIMPAC naval exercises.
Marston Al Hauge, a sonar technician on the Decatur from February 1962 to November 1963, recalled the Cuban blockade.
"One time we steamed at flank speed for hours to find that a suspected sub contact was nothing more than an enormous tree floating below the surface," Hauge wrote in an e-mail. "Every once in a while it would roll over and a small branch would break the surface and look like a periscope."
Burnz, now an electronic technician for a civilian contractor at Barking Sands, added: "It's going to be a good ending. She lasted a lot longer than many other ships and served her country well."
