Description On 16 October, Sea Isle City was in Kuwaiti waters, waiting to be loaded. It had been escorted there by U.S. warships, but was not under their protection at the time. An Iranian Silkworm missile launched from the Iranian-occupied Al-Faw Peninsula hit the ship's wheel house and crew quarters, blinding its master, a U.S. citizen and wounding 18 crew members. The damage to the ship would take four months to repair.
In retaliation, U.S. officials decided to attack two platforms in the Rashadat oil field (named Rostam oil field before 1979). Having been damaged by Iraq a year earlier, the platforms were not producing oil, but had been used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for military purposes.
Twenty minutes before the surface action group opened fire, USS Thach radioed the platforms, telling the crews to abandon them. At 2 pm, four U.S. destroyers opened fire: USS Hoel, USS Leftwich, USS Kidd, and USS John Young. One platform was boarded by U.S. special forces, who recovered teletype messages and other documents, then planted explosives to destroy the platform. Air cover was provided by the cruisers USS Long Beach and USS William H. Standley, two F-14 Tomcat fighters and an E-2 Hawkeye from USS Ranger. The high-explosive shells did negligible blast damage to the steel-lattice platforms, but eventually set them ablaze.
U.S. officials said the platforms were being used by Iranian forces as command-and-control posts with radars to track shipping in the area and communications gear to relay messages between the mainland and Iranian forces operating near the platforms. U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said Iran used the facility to "launch small boat attacks against nonbelligerent shipping." U.S. President Ronald Reagan called the operation "an appropriate and proportionate response" to the Silkworm strike. When asked by reporters if the situation constituted a state of war, Reagan replied: "No, we're not going to have a war with Iran: they're not that stupid."
