Seventy kilometres north-east of Qatar, the American Perry-class frigate's radar had picked up the Iraqi Mirage F-1 as it flew low and slowly down the coast of Saudi Arabia towards Bahrain. But Captain Glenn Brindel and his crew were used to Iraqi jets flying over them. Iraqi aircraft, he was to tell journalists later, were "deemed friendly." The green speck on the radar did not represent a threat. Because the Stark held a course almost directly towards the Iraqi Mirage, the frigate's superstructure blocked the anti-missile sensors and the Phalanx antimissile battery which had the ability to pick up an incoming missile and fire automatically. But the system had anyway been switched to manual to avoid shooting down the wrong aircraft in the crowded Gulf. The captain would later claim that the detection systems were also malfunctioning. At 10:09 p.m., Brindel ordered a radio message to be sent to the pilot: "Unknown aircraft, this is U.S. navy warship on your 078 for twelve miles. Request you identify yourself." There was no reply. A minute later, the aircraft banked towards the north and rose to 5,000 feet. The crew in the Stark's "combat information centre" failed to identify the two Exocet missiles with their 352-pound warheads which had detached themselves from the Mirage and were now racing towards them.

It was a lookout who first saw the rocket skimming the surface of the water towards the ship and telephoned Brindel. Two seconds later, the Exocet punched into the Stark at 600 mph and exploded in the forward crew's quarters, cremating several of the American seamen as they lay in their bunks. The second missile exploded thirty seconds later. More than a sixth of the frigate's crew were to die in less than a minute after the first Exocet spewed 120 pounds of burning solid missile fuel into crew sleeping quarters. The warhead failed to explode but smashed through seven bulkheads before coming to rest against the starboard hull plating. The second missile sent a fireball through the crew's quarters, its 3,500-degree burning fuel killing most of the thirty-seven victims, turning many of them to ash. The Stark filled with thick, toxic smoke, the temperature even in neighbouring compartments soaring to 1,500 degrees. Bunks, computers and bulkheads melted in the heat. One petty officer spent thirteen hours in a darkened magazine room spraying water on 36 missiles as a 2,ooo-degree fire raged only a bulkhead away. The ship burned for two days. Even after she was taken in tow, the fires kept reigniting.

Listing and flying the American flag at half-staff, the Stark was pulled towards Bahrain. Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger [sic; Weinbergerger was Secretary of Defense] called the attack "indiscriminate." The Iraqi pilot, he said, "apparently didn't care enough to find out what ship he was shooting at." But there America's criticism of Iraq ended. Even before Saddan Hussein made his own unprecedented and contrite expression of remorse - and long before the U.S. Navy had begun its own three investigations into the attack — President Ronald Reagan decided to blame Iran. "We've never considered them hostile at all," he said of the Iraqis. "They've never been in any way hostile." The Gulf was an international waterway. "No country there has a right to try and close it off and take it for itself. And the villain in the piece is Iran. And so they're delighted with what has just happened." (my emphasis)

A visit by a group of U.S. senators to the melted-down crew quarters on the Stark was sufficient to set them off in a spasm of rage at the one country that had nothing to do with the American deaths. Republican Senator John Warner, a former secretary of the U.S. Navy, described Iran as "a belligerent that knows no rules, no morals." Senator John Glenn was reduced to abusing Iran as "the sponsor of terrorism and the hijacker of airliners." Thus Saddam's attack on the Stark was now bringing him untold benefits. Americans were talking as if they were themselves contemplating military action against Iran.

It transpired that the Americans had no minesweepers in the area, had not even bothered to look for mines in the 3O-kilometre-wide channel where the tanker was struck, and now feared that their own warships were more vulnerable to mines than the vessels they were supposed to protect. Kuwaiti and American officials now sought to load the Bridgeton with crude oil, an overtly political act because, as one shipping agent asked contemptuously, "Who in their right mind would load his cargo onto a damaged ship?" The sorry tale of military unpreparedness was only made worse when Captain Yonkers, the U.S. naval officer in command of the three warships — the destroyer Kidd and two frigates — blandly admitted that he did not wish to sail back through the same sea lane because "one of the things I do not now have is the capability to defend my ships against mines." This statement was compounded by Rear Admiral Harold J. Bernsen, who told reporters accompanying the convoy that "it may sound incongruous, but the fact is [that] a large ship, a non-warship such as the Bridgeton, is far less vulnerable to a mine than a warship ... if you've got a big tanker that is very difficult to hurt with a single mine, you get in behind it. That's the best defence and that's exactly what we did." Such statements provoked an obvious question: if the U.S. Navy could not protect itself without hiding behind a civilian vessel, how could it claim to be maintaining freedom of navigation in the Gulf?

In April [1988], the American warship USS Samuel Bo Roberts was almost sunk when it struck a mine while on Gulf patrol. On 21 September, Rear Admiral Bernsen, the same officer who had meekly agreed that his ships were better off using supertankers for their own protection, decided that sonar-equipped "Seabat" helicopters aboard the USS Jarrett — by historic chance, a sister ship of the Stark — should attack the Iranian naval vessel Iran Ajr after it was observed for thirty minutes laying mines in the Gulf 80 kilometres north-east of Bahrain. Reporters later taken aboard the 18o-foot Iranian vessel — an unromantic nine-year-old Japanese roll-on-roll-off landing craft — saw ten large black-painted mines bearing the serial number "Mo8" near the stern of the boat with a special slide attached to the deck so that the crew could launch them into the sea. Bullet holes riddled the deck, cabins and bridge structure, with trails of blood running along the galleyways. Three of the thirty-man Iranian crew were killed in the attack, two more were missing believed dead and another four wounded, two seriously. [Iranian President] Rafsanjani said that the American claim of minelaying was "a lie." but it clearly was not, and the Iranians finally retracted their assertion that the Iran Ajr was an innocent cargo vessel. Saddam Hussein now had the satisfaction of knowing that the United States had aligned itself with Iraq as an anti-Iranian belligerent.

The United States followed up on its success against the Iranian minelayer just over three weeks later with a naval strike against two Iranian oil platforms 130 kilometres east of Qatar. Four U.S. guided missile destroyers firing 5-inch guns demolished the Rustum and Rakhsh platforms. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger called it a "measured response" to an Iranian missile attack on an American-flagged tanker the previous week. All that initially came from the Iranians was a distant Iranian voice pleading over a crackling radio for a naval ceasefire so that wounded men could be evacuated from one of the burning rigs. The two platforms had been used as military bases by [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards, the Americans claimed. Tehran warned, not very credibly, that the United States would receive a crashing response from Iran. (my emphasis)

The Pentagon's clinical details [of the incident] cannot reflect the appalling human dimension of the charnel house in which I am standing [in the immediate aftermath], where three-year-old Leila Behbahani lies in her cheap, chipboard coffin. She was a very little girl and she still wears the small green dress and white pinafore in which she died three days ago when the United States Navy missile struck the Iran Airbus over the Gulf, killing Leila and her 289 fellow passengers. She was pulled from the water only minutes after the explosion and she looks as if she has fallen asleep, her left wrist decorated with two bright gold bangles, her feet still in white socks and tiny black shoes. Her name is scrawled in crayon on the coffin lid that is propped up beside her. Her equally small brother - a dark-set, handsome boy with very short black hair - lies a few inches from her, cradled inside another plywood coffin.

... [T]here is no avoiding some terrible conclusions: that so many of the dead - sixty-six - were children, that some of the coffins are so very small, that one twenty-year-old girl lies in the same wooden box as her year-old baby. Fatima Faidazaida was found in the sea three hours after the Americans shot down the plane, still clutching her child to her breast; which is why the baby, Zoleila-Ashan, is beside her now. "That is why we put them in together," and Iranian official says quitely. "We found them together so they must stay together."

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

[Whoever fights with monsters should take care that he doesn't become a monster in doing so. And if you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.]