The sea was glass that night, illuminated under bright moonlight, sailors recalled. It was late spring of 1969 and the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans, which had been bombarding the coast of South Vietnam just a couple weeks earlier, was steaming in close formation with three other vessels, including the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne, as part of multinational training exercises in the South China Sea.
The exercises were going well, until the early morning hours of June 3, when the Melbourne collided with the Evans. The hulking Australian ship knifed into the Evans just aft of the ship’s forward smokestack, quickly slicing the much smaller ship in two.
The impact was so violent that it tossed Signalman Marcus Rodriguez into the air and onto the Melbourne’s flight deck, seriously injuring him, according to the U.S. Naval Institute…