MURDERED BY TERRORISTS, BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN
by Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III
(Jun. 27, 2012) — As you may recall, I was the executive officer on a ship called the USS Mars, a combat stores ship. My commanding officer was Michael B. Nordeen, a full-bird captain, an “06,” which is the sixth-highest officer rank in the Navy. It’s a very senior rank, and the next step after Captain is Admiral.
I was Captain Nordeen’s second-in-command. We had just finished some very extensive engineering operations tests, an operational propulsion plant examination at our home port in Oakland, CA. Upon completion of what we call the OPPE, we sailed a beeline down to San Diego to participate in refresher training, what we call REFTRA, administered out of the Fleet Training Group, which is headquartered in San Diego, CA. We pulled in on the 28th of June of 1988. It was a glorious day in full summer. We sailed into the harbor and anchored next to the headquarters where the Fleet Training Group was officed in that day. The only way you could get to it was by a boat out to the ship. So we pulled in during the afternoon, and it was a perfect anchorage. Everything was done right.
Refresher training that year was a big deal because of procedures that were being implemented throughout the fleet to prevent the kind of things that happened to the men on the USS Stark when they were attacked. I was in the Persian Gulf when the Stark was attacked. The ship was supposed to have sunk, and nobody to this day knows why it didn’t go down. She was near mortally wounded; a lot of mistakes were made on the ship and the way the fires were fought, and lessons were learned. Those lessons were incorporated into the new training guidelines and protocols that came from the Fleet Training Group.
So we were going to the post-Stark REFTRA, and Captain Nordeen was contemplative. It was a big deal, and he was commanding officer of the ship. He was thinking about it a lot. So we get the hook dropped, and he was sitting on the port side of the ship on the 28th of June 1988.
To relieve the tension a little bit, as he was sitting in the XO’s chair with his legs kicked up on the angle-iron, I asked him, “How did you come into the Navy?” and he proceeded to tell me about his older brother, how they had grown up in Wisconsin and the two had worked in a grocery store. He kind-of chuckled about how it was so similar: working in a grocery store with his dad and now being the commanding officer of a ship that delivers groceries, among other things. We replenished the fleet with everything; we were a floating naval supply center. We sent over to other ships everything from micro-miniature repair parts to 10,000-lb. aircraft engines. We also provided fresh food and vegetables to these ships and, on occasion, different kinds of fuel. About the only thing we didn’t deliver to the fleet was ammunition, as that was all concentrated on our ammunition ships, which was another specific tasking for the combat supply forces.
The skipper went on to tell me about his brother, who had gone into the Navy before him and into naval aviation. William Edward Nordeen had encouraged his younger brother to do the same thing. He became a helicopter pilot. The skipper, Mike Nordeen, had gone on to tell me that his older brother was on pins and needles as we were speaking because he was three weeks away from a 30-year retirement. He was the naval attaché in Athens, Greece, working in the U.S. Embassy.
William Nordeen was getting ready to go home, and the officer who had preceded him, another Navy captain, had been assassinated by a terrorist group known as “November 17.” Its nickname was “N17.” So Mike Nordeen was telling me that his brother had been alternating routes to the best of his ability in and around Athens. He told me about the pranks and antics that two brothers would have been involved in back in their younger days.
So this went on for a while, and the sun was going down, and it was getting chilly on the bridge. It was just a beautiful day; I’ll never forget it. The next day, June 29, was the commencement of our refresher training, and we were going to be receiving the fleet training group instructors, bringing them on board, lifting the hook out of the sea and beginning our first day of prep training. That was the plan. Without either one of us knowing it, as I was on the bridge of the ship talking with Michael Nordeen about his brother William, at almost the same time, William was being blown up in a car bomb attack by “November 17.” I retired to my stateroom, pushed some paperwork, and made a tour of the ship. I came back to my stateroom and hit the pillow.
At about 02:30 in the morning of June 29, 1988, there was a knocking at my door. My stateroom was not very big; it was a very small metal room. Two watch standers came to my cabin and were knocking on the metal door to the metal compartment and yelling, “Get up! Get up!” So I jumped out of my rack, half-dressed, looked around for my glasses and shouted, “I’m coming!” thinking that the ship was on fire or flooding or that somebody was dead. That was the urgency that these men were conveying to me. So when I opened the door, they handed me a message that had just come in by teletype from Radio Central. The message was highly classified and protected, and the distribution on the message was very tight. I wasn’t supposed to see it. The duty radioman and the command duty officer both knew that but took a chance and asked, “We need to know if these two men are related.” The message was one which announced the murder by N17 of this Navy captain in Athens, Greece and named “William Edward Nordeen” as the object of the attack. The command duty officer, who was alerted by the duty radioman first, said, “We need to know if this man is related to our commanding officer, Michael B. Nordeen.” And in fact, the two men were brothers.
I had gone to bed just having heard about William Edward Nordeen for the first time in my life. I didn’t know that our skipper had a brother; I didn’t know that the men were both Navy captains and naval aviators; Mike Nordeen was an A-7 pilot, an attack pilot, and went on to command the USS Constellation, a carrier, after he left the USS Mars. So I read the message, and I said, “Yes.” Had the skipper not told me just a couple of hours before, I would not have been able to answer the question, and it would have been a really ticklish situation for me to have to go to the skipper and say, “Captain, we just got this message….” but I had just been told. I knew that these men were brothers.
So I dispatched the command duty officer to wake up our command chaplain, Bradford Abelson, a very dear friend of mine who passed away a couple of years ago of cancer at the age of 50. He was a brilliant individual. I briefed Chaplain Abelson on what had happened and then proceeded up to Radio Central, and using a secure frequency, alerted higher command. We were in San Diego, so the headquarters of the Third Fleet was right there. The commander of Naval Service Forces, Pacific, who was also Commander of the Third Fleet, was right there, just a couple of miles away as the crow flies from where our ship was anchored. Some watch-standers were alerted between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. about what was going on, and then Brad got up and I briefed him, and at about 4:30 we notified Mike Nordeen of the bad news.
The 29th was a pretty powerful day. When the instructors from the Fleet Training Group came out that morning, the story was on the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune, which they brought out to the ship. They brought a stack of newspapers because we weren’t ashore. We were at anchor afloat, and none of the crew was allowed to go ashore. They were bringing out the newspaper whose front page had a photo of the bombed-out vehicle. The terrorists from November 17 had parked the vehicle on the side of the street which Capt. William Nordeen had to ingress and egress to get to and from his home. There were so many routes you could take, but at the end of his trip, he had to go up this one street. They parked the car on that street that he had to travel, and as I remember, it was a Toyota sedan. They had packed the vehicle and shaped the charge so that the force of the explosion would go into the street and not anywhere else. They had put sandbags around this very high- explosive charge. Capt. William Nordeen drove past the parked vehicle, they detonated it. Capt. Bill Nordeen had just had breakfast with his daughter, Annabel, who was 12 years old at the time. Again, the whole family was thinking that they were three weeks away from going home. Capt. Nordeen was gong to retire, she had just had breakfast with him, and then the entire neighborhood was shattered with the explosion. Annabel ran out into the neighborhood to find her father…As the reports were coming in, it was gruesome.
Our skipper, Michael Nordeen, was ordered off the ship. There was no way they were going to let him stay, as it was the second time it had happened and it was a national news story. On the 29th, the boss of our group, Admiral Robert Toney, was the one-star admiral of Combat Logistics Group 1, which had 14 ships, as I recall, as part of the command. All of them were combat logistics ships. Bob Toney sent his chief of staff to take command of the ship, another Navy captain named Michael Edwards. So Mike Edwards flew down to San Diego and then he was flown out to the ship, and we went to sea on the 29th to begin our training. At one point that day, without our captain knowing about it, the men of the ship constructed a wreath.
When you report in for refresher training, your ship is turned over to the Fleet Training group. Our skipper was taking orders from the instructors of the Fleet Training Group. They gave the orders, and we were under their authority. We went to the instructors of the Fleet Training Group and their senior member, said we wanted to take a moment of time…[pause] This is bringing back some memories here.
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Editor’s Note: A continuation of this story will be published shortly.