Every class of warship has a first ship to draw blood. For the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer — the backbone of the modern surface fleet, with more than seventy hulls built and counting — that ship was USS Laboon. She earned the distinction in September 1996, barely eighteen months after her commissioning, when she launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraq during Operation Desert Strike.
A New Kind of Destroyer
USS Laboon (DDG-58) was commissioned on March 18, 1995, built at Bath Iron Works in Maine and homeported at Norfolk, Virginia. She was one of the early ships of the Arleigh Burke class, the Aegis-equipped destroyers designed to replace a generation of older escorts with a single, enormously capable platform. Armed with the Aegis combat system, the SPY-1 radar, and the Mk 41 Vertical Launching System, a Burke could defend a battle group against aircraft and missiles, hunt submarines, and strike targets ashore with Tomahawks — all from one hull.
The ship carried the name of Father Jake Laboon, a Navy chaplain and former submariner whose service spanned World War II through Vietnam. It was a fitting name for a ship that would spend her career in the hardest places.
Operation Desert Strike
In late summer 1996, Iraqi forces moved north into the Kurdish safe zone, seizing the city of Irbil in defiance of the protections the coalition had put in place after the Gulf War. The United States responded with Operation Desert Strike — a punitive cruise-missile campaign aimed not at the Iraqi incursion in the north, but at Iraq's air-defense network in the south, expanding the no-fly zone and raising the cost of the aggression.
On September 3–4, 1996, U.S. forces launched a coordinated barrage of Tomahawk land-attack missiles and air-launched cruise missiles against Iraqi command-and-control and air-defense targets. Laboon, deployed to the region on her maiden cruise, was among the shooters. When her missiles left the tubes, she became the first Arleigh Burke-class destroyer to fire in combat — the opening entry in a combat record that the class would go on to write across three decades and every sea in the world.
The Maiden Cruise
For a crew, a maiden deployment is a proving ground. Everything is new — the ship, the equipment, the routines, and for many of the sailors, the experience of being forward-deployed at all. To take a brand-new destroyer overseas and then, on that same first cruise, employ her in combat is about as demanding a shakedown as the Navy asks of a crew. Laboon's sailors passed the test. They took the Navy's newest warship into a real-world strike operation and executed it cleanly.
Life aboard a destroyer on deployment is close-quarters and constant. A Burke carries roughly 300 sailors, and every one of them wears several hats. The ship stands port-and-starboard or three-section watches through the night; the combat-systems team lives and breathes the Aegis picture; the engineers keep the gas-turbine plant turning; and the whole crew drills, endlessly, for the day the training becomes real. For Laboon in 1996, that day came.
Legacy
USS Laboon went on to a long and active career, deploying repeatedly to the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and later the Black Sea, and taking part in operations across the decades that followed. But her place in Navy history was fixed on that September night in 1996: the first of her class to fight. Every Arleigh Burke destroyer that has fired a shot in anger since — and there have been many — follows in Laboon's wake.
If you served aboard USS Laboon or want to honor a plankowner or crew member, browse the USS Laboon (DDG-58) 1996 collection and the USS Laboon ship's crest collection — apparel and gifts for the crew of the first Burke to fight.
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