History
Briscoe conducted firing trials in 1981-1982 in support of the SALGP (Semi-Active Laser Guided Projectile) off the coast of Vieques, Puerto Rico. These projectiles were fired from the 5 inch (127 mm) gun at a range in excess of 11 miles (18 km). While in flight, an optical sensor would detect the signature of a laser-painted target on shore and convert the shell to an actively homing rocket for pinpoint destruction of moving and stationary targets on shore.
Participated in Operation Urgent Fury, the liberation of Grenada, and in the Multi-National Peacekeeping Forces off the coast of Lebanon, and in Baltic Operations 1990. Briscoe also participated as a member of Middle East Forces deploying twice to the North Red Sea conducting Maritime Interception Operations in support of U.N. sanctions against Iraq. Briscoe established a U.S. record of 275 merchant vessel boardings in the North Red Sea during the first of her two deployments to the area.
In her second North Red Sea deployment in March 1994, Briscoe responded to a distress call from an Egyptian passenger ferry, the Al-Qamar Al-Saudi Al-Misri. Briscoe acted as the On-Scene Commander for the ensuing rescue efforts for the over 500 passengers, coordinating the actions of the numerous vessels in the area.
In 1996, Briscoe deployed to the Mediterranean and Black Sea for a six-month period. Deployed with Helicopter Antisubmarine Squadron Light 44 (Detachment 5), Briscoe in Exercise Atlas Hinge with the Tunisian navy and Exercise Shark Hunt and Jaws, an undersea warfare exercise against U.S. submarines in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Briscoe took part in Exercise Classica 96, from 31 August through 9 September, in the spirit of Partnership for Peace. Ships from the U.S. 6th Fleet, Black Sea and Mediterranean littoral nations (including Italy, Ukraine, Greece.
In July 1999, at President Bill Clinton's orders, warships of the U.S. Navy assisted in the search for the downed plane of John F. Kennedy, Jr. With the permission of Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a memorial service for Kennedy, his wife, and sister-in-law was later held aboard the Briscoe and their ashes were scattered from this ship off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.
Read more about this topic: USS Briscoe (DD-977)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)