25 years later, WHS grad remembers attack on USS Stark

Gary Goodale, GSE2, is shown standing in the Central Control Station of the USS Stark next to the Electric Plant Control Console in the late 1980s. (Photos courtesy of Gary Goodale).

GULF BREEZE, Fla. — The 25-year anniversary of the attack on the USS Stark (FFG-31) in the Persian Gulf was May 17. A combination of an anniversary, reunion and memorial will be held in Mayport, Fla., and Gary Goodale, a Watsonville High graduate, class of 1972, will be there.

Goodale on was board the Stark, a Perry-class, guided-missile frigate, when it was struck by two Excocet anti-ship missiles fired from an Iraqi Mirage F-1 aircraft during the Iran-Iraq War on May 17, 1987.

The attack killed 37 people on board the Stark and injured 21. The incident made the front covers of TIME and Newsweek magazines and the front pages of newspapers around the world.

“I knew every one of those men that died that day,” Goodale said from his Gulf Breeze home. “When you spend three years on a vessel 408-feet long, you get to know everyone. These were my friends.”

Goodale said he volunteered to join the U.S. Navy and served from 1984 to 2001. He served aboard the Stark for three years. He was 33 at the time of the attack and working in the central control station as an assistant engineering officer of the watch when the attacks occurred with about 210 aboard the ship. The frigate did not detect the incoming missiles by radar; warning was only given by a lookout moments before the missiles struck. The first penetrated the portside hull and failed to detonate, Goodale said. The second entered almost the same point and exploded in the crew quarters.

“I remember we just heard a big thud,” Goodale said. “I was 150 feet from the explosion. We thought a compressor blew up.

I was down inside the center of the ship. We were just trying to deal with all the alarms sounding; five console alarms lit up like a Christmas tree.”

The damaged ship limped its way to Bahrain after crew members extinguished the fire triggered by the missiles. Repairs were conducted, making the Stark just seaworthy enough to return to her homeport in Mayport, Fla.

“We learn from our mistakes, sometimes at a pretty high cost,”

Goodale said.

In the week following the attack, standing beneath a banner of the Stark, then president Ronald Reagan told a large gathering: “Today we know such great heartache. We ask ‘why did this happen? Could anything be worth such a sacrifice?’...We can now truly say they are heroes. The men of the USS Stark protected us…they have done their duty. We must keep faith in their sacrifice.”

Goodale said that his first job in Watsonville was at his family business, Goodale Manufacturing on Menker Street. The business eventually became Goodale Bearing Store on Beach Street, which, in turn, became Bearing Specialty. In the late 1970s the family sold the business.

“Our family goes way back in Watsonville,” Goodale said. “My grandfather started working in food processing equipment there in the 1920s — Everett Goodale. My father flew a P51 in World War II.”

Goodale said he plans to attend the memorial Thursday in Mayport, Fla., where the USS Stark was last stationed before it was dismantled elsewhere, for a number of reasons, some of which he was unable to give voice to.

“You live with it every day; it’s not easy,” he said. “After the ship got back and I was transferred off of it, I haven’t seen these guys since then. Some of the families of those that died that day are coming to the memorial. I’ve never met them. Some of the deceased were my best friends. I want to tell their families what good people they were.”

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