JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — The radio signal was weak and sounded like static. But John Lipscomb, a 19-year-old radioman on the USS Saratoga, somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, thought he could hear a pattern hidden in the noise. He managed to tune it in and made out a panicked voice, speaking over a backdrop of gunfire and explosions.
Any station this net, any station this net. This is Rockstar. We are under attack.
It was June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War between Israel and three Arab states. Rockstar was the call sign for the USS Liberty, an American spy ship in international waters near the Gaza Strip.
It was in deep trouble: Thirty-four men were killed and another 171 were wounded as the Liberty was struck by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats.
With minutes, the aircraft carrier Saratoga, far from its home at Mayport, quickly launched attack planes, headed to the slaughter.
Lipscomb returned to Mayport Naval Station, driving a truck pulling a trailer that carried most of what little remains of the venerable Saratoga: A 3-foot-by-16-foot section of steel, 5/8 of an inch thick, newly repainted battleship gray.
On it, raised black letters, a foot high, spell out the name, eight letters long. It was once on the ship's stern, and right between the R and the A there's still one rung from a ladder that ran up the ship.
The aircraft carrier was sold in 2014 for a penny and sent to Texas to be scrapped. It was a sad, inevitable end for the proud vessel which, after its decommissioning in 1994 and a failed attempt to convert it into a Jacksonville museum, spent almost two decades at a Rhode Island dock, getting increasingly dilapidated.
That's heartbreaking to many of those who served aboard. Lipscomb and the USS Saratoga Association, a group of veterans of the ship, felt they had to do something to save what they could of the Saratoga.
So he and one-time fellow radioman T.C. Chastain, drove to Brownsville, Texas, in 2017 and picked up the ship's nameplate — in bad shape after years of neglect — and brought it back to Lipscomb's home in north Georgia. Many people helped: The salvage company sold it for a penny, and in Georgia businesses worked without charge to restore it.
On a cold and sunny morning, they delivered the nameplate to its new/old home at Mayport, which just seemed fitting to the two men, each now 72 years old: After all, Mayport was home port for the Saratoga its entire career, from 1957 to 1994, and many thousands of sailors served there upon it, 5,000 at a time.
Out on Charlie Pier, a small crowd gathered as Lipscomb gave a speech on the Saratoga's storied past — Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam War, Libya, Desert Storm and other duties — and how the nameplate ended up back home.
He was followed by base commanding officer David Yoder, who said plans for displaying the nameplate haven't been made final. But he pledged that the relic from the "iconic" ship would one day be displayed properly there so sailors, many of them not born when the Saratoga left Mayport, would know of its presence, its history.
"Naval Station Mayport is going to take care of her, like we always did, when she was in service," Yoder said.
Before coming to Mayport, over the phone from his home in the countryside northeast of Atlanta, Lipscomb talked about his days on the Saratoga.
He told of the attack on the Liberty: He was just a teenager when he received the call, and he was "scared to death" when he realized what it meant. The Saratoga's planes were quickly recalled to the ship after Israel apologized for the attack; it was labeled a mistake, though much skepticism remains about the official explanations for the attack.
He told of how it was like a family on board the ship, which the crew inevitably called "The Sara." You work and live and eat with your shipmates, month after month, and you get close. And you often stay close, for the rest of your lives.
And he told of the homecomings, the bands and the crowds of thousands of people there to greet the ship. "Jacksonville and Mayport always gave us a good homecoming," Lipscomb said. "I feel like this is the final homecoming of the Saratoga. This is all that's left of the Saratoga."
He drove the nameplate in through the back gate at Mayport and waited out on Charlie Pier while workers put it on a forklift and carefully cut off its protective plastic wrap.
Lipscomb, who was aboard the ship from 1966 to 1968, was joined there by Chastain (1965-1969) of Ringo, Ga., who drove to Mayport with him, and Skip Burnham (1967-1971), who flew in from Dayton, Ohio. They told yarns and made old-man jokes as they waited for the brief speeches to start.
Chastain chuckled while marveling at the changes at the old base since he'd been a teenager there. "That's not a Navy base! That's a country club. Brand-new world, brand-new Navy."
He got serious though when he told about the Sara and what this trip means to him. "We brought her home, to her final resting place," he said.
Chastain admitted that he's cried some over what's become of the Sara, and he's not alone in that. "My dad said, 'Men don't cry.' Well, old men do."
After the speeches were over, in front of that hunk of steel with his old ship's name there in proud, big letters, he admitted that he had teared up again, just a bit.
"I did. Could you tell? It happens."