Retired Navy Warrant Officer Dave Walker, of Jamestown, welcomes retired Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Alex Perez, of San Antonio, at a reunion.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

One minute, the Samuel B. Roberts was steaming through the Persian Gulf at 25 knots, not a hostile ship or aircraft in sight. The next, three Iranian mines were bobbing in the water directly ahead.

The guided missile frigate reversed propulsion and stopped just in time. But as the ship tried to back out of the perilous waters, the sickening sound of metal-on-metal reverberated below deck. In an instant, an explosion ripped a truck-sized hole in the hull and spewed super-heated gases and flames across the engine room and up the ship’s exhaust stack.

Flames engulfed 23-year-old David Burbine, of Hopkinton, at his post in the engine room. He managed to grab a younger shipmate by the shirt and pull him into a control room, where stunned crew members gaped at Burbine. The skin on his arms, legs and face was so badly charred it was bubbling and peeling.

“I remember running my hands through my hair and my hair feeling crispy and coming off,” he says. “I lifted up my arms, and skin was falling off. I felt like my legs were on fire, and I pulled my pants down and I had huge blisters on my legs.”

Twenty years ago this spring, the crew of the Newport-based frigate, including a handful of Rhode Island sailors, struggled desperately to rescue the injured and to prevent the ship from sinking after hitting the mine. Days later, the U.S. would retaliate against Iran in its largest naval battle since the Korean War.

On this year’s anniversary of the Roberts’ mining, and in the wake of a book about the episode, crew members reunited for the first time since their ingenuity and bravery saved the ship. Most went their separate ways after the mining, some to other Navy deployments and a few, such as Burbine, to painful hospital stays and eventual retirement.

While time and other conflicts in the Middle East have largely erased the incident from public memory, the details of what happened are as vivid today as they were back then for the crew of the Roberts.

THE PERSIAN GULF was a war zone in 1987. The seven-year-old battle between Iran and Iraq had reached a stalemate on land and spilled into the vital shipping channel, with both sides targeting each other’s cargo and oil shipments. The United States, seeking to protect its interests, agreed to escort Kuwaiti tankers, many laden with Iraqi oil, through the dangerous waters.

Nine months before the Roberts arrived in the Persian Gulf, another guided missile frigate, the Stark, joined the first wave of ships to arrive for duty. Almost immediately, an Iraqi jet fired a pair of Exocet missiles at the warship, killing 37 sailors.

By that time, the Roberts, commissioned only the year before, had moved to its home port in Newport and garnered record training scores. Among the original crew was Burbine, who enlisted in the Navy after graduating from high school in 1982. On the Roberts, he was a third-class gas-turbine systems technician. Also aboard was his supervisor, chief engineer David Walker, 35, of Newport, and the chief cook, Kevin Ford, 28, of East Providence.

In 1988, the Roberts was ordered to the Persian Gulf. Burbine doesn’t recall feeling apprehensive about the mission. Countless times the “general quarters” alarm sounded, sending the crew to its battle stations. For him, that meant descending to the main engine room between a deafening pair of turbine engines and standing ready to use an emergency joystick to control the rudder should other systems fail. That’s where he found himself on April 14, after commanding officer Paul X. Rinn announced over the intercom that the Roberts had stumbled into a minefield. Rinn had rushed to the bridge from his cabin, where he had been discussing the next week’s menu with Ford.

As the minutes ticked away, Walker got an uneasy feeling. Burbine and a few others in his engineering section were stationed below the waterline, a few feet above the hull, a vulnerable spot if the ship were to hit a mine. Walker ordered them up a level, a move later credited with saving lives. Rinn then announced the ship would reverse course.

The Roberts didn’t make it far. At 4:50 p.m., the mine packed with TNT exploded, its shockwave literally lifting and bending the 453-foot ship, causing extensive structural damage. A fireball enveloped the area where Burbine and his fellow engineers had been stationed before Walker ordered them out. Still, the flames flashed through the steel grates below Burbine’s feet and around him.

To imagine what it felt like, “think of the biggest fire you can imagine and that loud roaring sound and standing in the middle of it. It sounded like a freight train.”

When Burbine reached the control room, dripping fuel and shedding chunks of skin, Walker could do nothing for him. He was overwhelmed, responding to reports of dead engines and generators, spreading fires and seawater flooding two compartments and filling the third and final one.

“Personal casualties, major fires and flooding, fuel tanks and equipment exploding, and on board weapons in danger of igniting and exploding. A rather busy day at sea,” Walker recalls.

Ford joined a damage-control team fighting the flooding in the last compartment, ignoring the possibility that another mine could explode any second.

“We got down there and the water was waist level and coming from everywhere,” he says.

They encountered problems that never came up in training. When they plugged leaks with pieces of wood, the bulkhead simply split around them. Ford got an idea. He sent for pillows and mattresses and used them for plugs. They worked, stanching flooding enough for pumps to catch up.

Several hours later, all the fires were extinguished.

“What I remember is burnt flesh, blood, wrecked machinery and a group of guys who were so close, so brave and did super-human things without question,” says Walker. “Everyone worked not just for their own survival, but for the survival of their shipmates and ship.”

Four days later, the United States retaliated, sinking and damaging five Iranian warships and attacking two Iranian oil platforms that served as command-and-control centers.

IT WAS AN historic episode, according to Bradley Peniston, author of the 2006 book No Higher Honor, about the Roberts.

“No U.S. ship has come closer to sinking under hostile fire since the Korean War,” says Peniston, managing editor of the weekly newspaper Defense News, in a recent interview. And the military battle that followed featured “the first ship-on-ship missile duel” since World War II.

The mining, says Peniston, demonstrated that “a weak enemy will always be able to find a crude and simple way to do damage to a sophisticated military.”

The incident had lasting impacts, says Peniston. It convinced Iran “it was not going to be able to win the war,” and it allowed Saddam Hussein, after the hostilities ceased, to reconstitute his forces and attack Kuwait in 1990. That sparked the Gulf War that preceded the current conflict in Iraq.

Also, says Peniston, the Roberts enters contemporary debates about operating naval ships with smaller crews.

“One of the questions that always comes up is could the Samuel Roberts have been saved with fewer people on board,” he says.

Peniston attended the reunion last month in Portland, Maine. One highlight of the event was a ceremony at Bath Iron Works, where the Roberts was launched and where it was taken for repairs after the mining. Thousands of active and retired ironworkers, including many who worked on the Roberts, gave a prolonged standing ovation to the crew of the ship.

During the weekend, the old crew shared a lot of stories about the events of 20 years ago, and they were told with “a pride of accomplishment,” says Ford, who now lives in Warren and works for a contractor that provides training in military finance. His actions aboard the Roberts earned him a Bronze Star, also awarded to Walker.

Walker, of Jamestown, attended the reunion, too. He’s a manager for mobile technology company KVH Industries and recently worked in Iraq overseeing engineering projects and, he says, dodging bullets and ambushes.

Burbine, who is married with four children and manages a bike shop in Westerly, couldn’t make it. He says he would like to catch up with his old shipmates, although he rarely thinks about the Roberts or the injuries that ended his naval career. He displays no souvenirs in his house, unlike Ford who maintains what he calls a “shrine” to the Roberts, including one of its flags.

While Burbine says he has no emotional scars, the physical ones are plain to see. He suffered burns on 40 percent of his body and the lines on his forearms where skin was grafted from his thighs are visible when he wears short sleeves. In the summer, he tans everywhere except where his skin was burned badly, including his back, chest and ears. These areas just get sunburned.

Still, he has no regrets.

“I needed to get out of the small town,” he says. “The Navy was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

rsalit@projo.com