When Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003, USS Nassau (LHA-4) was operating in the region with a Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked, ready to project amphibious combat power wherever the theater commander needed it. The large-deck amphibious assault ship — part helicopter carrier, part landing platform, part floating base — represented exactly the kind of flexible, self-contained capability that the joint force required in a campaign where the operational picture was shifting daily. Nassau’s sailors and the Marines who sailed aboard her were part of a tradition of amphibious warfare that ran from the Pacific islands of World War II through Inchon and through every beach and landing zone where American forces had gone ashore under fire.
The Ship
USS Nassau (LHA-4) is a Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship, commissioned on July 28, 1979, and the fourth ship of her class. She was named for the Battle of Nassau in 1776, when the Continental Navy — the first American naval force — conducted its first amphibious assault, landing on New Providence Island in the Bahamas. At more than eight hundred feet long and displacing nearly forty thousand tons fully loaded, Nassau was one of the largest amphibious ships in the Navy, capable of carrying a reinforced Marine battalion landing team, an aviation combat element, and a combat service support element into any operational theater. She was homeported at Norfolk, Virginia.
The 2003 Deployment
Nassau deployed to the Fifth Fleet area of operations in early 2003 as the military buildup for Operation Iraqi Freedom accelerated. The amphibious forces operating in the northern Persian Gulf during OIF were a critical component of the coalition strategy — their presence forced Iraqi planners to account for the possibility of a seaborne assault, tying down defensive forces that might otherwise have been positioned to resist the coalition’s ground advance from Kuwait. Even when no amphibious assault was ultimately executed from the sea, the capability and its threat influenced the campaign.
Nassau’s embarked Marines flew combat missions throughout the theater, with her helicopter assets providing lift, reconnaissance, and close air support that the joint force required. The ship’s well deck gave the Marine ground element options for movement ashore. In the fluid operational environment of the early weeks of OIF, the ability to project force from the sea — and to sustain that projection across weeks of high-tempo operations — was exactly what Nassau was designed to provide.
The Amphibious Assault Ship’s Unique Role
An LHA is a different kind of warship from either a carrier or a conventional transport ship. She has the flight deck and aviation facilities of a small carrier, the well deck and landing craft of a traditional amphibious ship, and the command facilities to serve as a floating headquarters for an expeditionary force. The integration of those capabilities — sea-based aviation with surface landing — is the essence of amphibious warfare. Nassau represented that integration at the operational level, giving the theater commander a tool that no other hull type could replicate.
Life aboard Nassau with a full MEU embarked meant a crew of over a thousand sailors sharing the ship with two thousand Marines, all of them preparing for operations that could require any combination of their skills on any given day. The sailors ran the ship; the Marines prepared to fight ashore. The partnership between the two communities, forged over weeks of underway time, is one of the distinctive features of amphibious service that veterans of both communities describe as formative.
If you served aboard USS Nassau or want to honor someone who did, browse the full Nassau collection — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
USS Nassau was decommissioned on July 30, 2011, after thirty-two years of service and deployments that included Desert Storm, Bosnia, Haiti, and multiple operations in the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. Her 2003 OIF deployment was one of the last major combat operations in a career that stretched across the post-Vietnam era, the Cold War’s final years, and the opening decade of the war on terror. The ship named for the Continental Navy’s first amphibious assault served in every significant American military operation of her era — a record that honors both the name and the tradition it carries.