They Sank My Ship Two Years Ago Today: Navy Veteran Michael Sinnock on USS Tarawa

AUTHOR: Michael Sinnock

They sank USS Tarawa two years ago today, and Navy veteran Michael Sinnock served aboard her during the WESTPAC deployment of 1996.

On July 19, 2024, as part of RIMPAC 2024, the Rim of the Pacific exercise, ships and aircraft from the United States, Australia, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Malaysia, and other partner nations fired on the decommissioned USS Tarawa (LHA-1) in waters 15,000 feet deep, more than 50 nautical miles off the northern coast of Kauai. An F/A-18 fired a Long Range Anti-Ship Missile. The ship that carried me through the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and nine named operations during a single deployment went to the bottom of the Pacific at 39,000 tons. It is down there now. Two years. I want to write about what that means, and I will be honest that I am not entirely certain I have it fully worked out yet.

What She Was

USS Tarawa (LHA-1) was commissioned May 29, 1976, and named after the Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific during World War II, a battle fought in November 1943 that cost more American lives per square mile than nearly any engagement in the history of the conflict. She was the lead ship of her class, the first large-deck amphibious assault ship the Navy had built that combined the capabilities of several different platforms into a single hull. She displaced 39,000 tons. She stretched 820 feet from bow to stern. Her motto was Eagle of the Sea. She could carry more than 2,000 Marines and their equipment. She operated helicopters and Harrier jets from her flight deck. She was not a subtle ship. She was designed to project power, land troops, sustain operations across extended periods in contested waters. She was built for the full weight of what the Navy is sometimes called to do. By the time I arrived aboard as a Boatswain's Mate Petty Officer 3rd Class in the mid-1990s, she had already lived a long life. She had carried thousands of sailors before me through deployments, operations, and the ordinary machinery of peacetime naval service. She did not know I existed, the way ships never do. But I knew her.

The work of a Boatswain's Mate puts you on deck and on the water in a way that most ratings do not. Line handling, anchoring, small boat operations, deck maintenance, standing watch over the ship and the water around her. You work outside. The ship is not abstract when your station is its deck. The wind off the open ocean is specific. The sounds are specific. The smell of the sea mixed with the working smell of a vessel that size is something the body holds onto for a long time.

During the 1996 WESTPAC deployment, we operated in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The operations we participated in during that time were real work in a real part of the world during a period of genuine regional tension: Operation Southern Watch, Operation Vigilant Sentinel, Operation Desert Strike, Cobra Gold 96, and several others. You do not think about those names the way a historian thinks about them. You think about your watch, your crew, the horizon, the job in front of you. The larger picture assembles itself later, over years, when you have the distance to see it. Michael Shane Sinnock understood somewhere in the middle of all of that, not as a thought but as something more physical, that a ship is not a machine you happen to work on. A ship becomes something you live inside, the way you live inside a neighborhood or a family. The Tarawa was that for three years, during the years when I was becoming whoever I was going to become.

What a SINKEX Is, and What It Actually Does

The Navy does not sink ships to be dramatic. A SINKEX is training. Decommissioned hulls give partner nations a realistic target for weapons systems that cannot be replicated in a simulator. You cannot test the full capability of a long-range anti-ship missile against a digital target. The weapons used to sink the Tarawa were tested against real steel in a way that directly improves the combat readiness of the ships and aircraft that would need to use them in conflict.

From a military standpoint, it is the right use of the ship. She had been sitting in reserve at Pearl Harbor since her decommissioning in 2009. There was consideration at one point of converting her into a museum ship, but that never moved forward. The SINKEX gave her one final contribution to the Navy she served for more than three decades. I understand all of that. I believe all of that. The SINKEX was the right call. What went to the bottom that day still had something to give, and the Navy made sure it gave it. And it still lands with a weight that does not reduce to logic.

Here is what I know about USS Tarawa and what she was:

- She was named after men who died taking a Pacific island in one of the bloodiest fights of the Second World War, and she carried that name across more than 30 years of American naval history.

- She was 820 feet of steel that became, for the thousands of people who served aboard her, something that functions more like a place you are from than a vehicle you rode.

- She carried Marines into uncertainty and brought them home. She performed the full weight of what the Navy asks of a ship her size.

- She was decommissioned in March 2009 with a proper ceremony. The sailors at that ceremony gave her a real ending. What happened in July 2024 was a second ending, a different kind, but not a dishonorable one.

- She is now 15,000 feet deep, off the coast of Kauai, in waters where light does not reach. She has been there for two years today.

I found out the way most veterans find out about things that happen to ships they served on, through the news and through the informal channels of people who were once part of something together and stayed loosely connected to it. There was a moment of sitting with it. There still is, two years later.

The ship did not know I existed. I spent three years living inside her. The layout, the sounds, the rhythms of life aboard are embedded the way any long residence gets embedded, in the body as much as in memory. You carry the place with you after you leave. She went down the way the Navy intended, not from neglect or accident or the simple passage of time, but from the weapons of allied nations training together for the kind of work she was always built to be part of. That feels, in some way I am still working out, like a sailor's ending.

I write about service and what it leaves behind every week at www.michaelsinnock.com. The full story of those years and what came after is on the About page there.

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About Michael Sinnock: Michael Sinnock is a U.S. Navy veteran and Office Automation Assistant with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Memphis District Office. A Memphis professional whose career spans military service, federal employment, and logistics management, he writes about public service, resilience, the curiosity that keeps life interesting, and the long, worthwhile work of becoming someone you are proud of. Find his full archive at www.michaelsinnock.com.