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USS L. Mendel Rivers (SSN 686)

USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was the second-to-last of the STURGEON - class submarines commissioned and the last of the class to be inactivated. The submarine was the first ship in the Navy named for the South Carolina congressman who served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in the 89th, 90th and 91st Congresses. Congressman Rivers was an outspoken advocate of nuclear propulsion for submarines and aircraft carriers.

Deactivated while still in commission at Naval Station Norfolk's Pier 22 on July 28, 2000, the L. MENDEL RIVERS departed Norfolk for the last time in September 2000, heading for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Bremerton, Wash., where the L. MENDEL RIVERS entered the Navy's Nuclear Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program. Both decommissioned and stricken from the Navy list on May 10, 2001, recycling of the L. MENDEL RIVERS was completed on July 19, 2002.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS L. MENDEL RIVERS. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

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About the Ship's Namesake:

Lucius Mendel Rivers was born on September 28, 1905, in Gumville, Berkeley County, South Carolina. After studying at the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina, he read law, passed the bar in 1932, and began practicing in Charleston. He first entered politics in the South Carolina House of Representatives, serving from 1933 to 1936, before winning election as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives in 1940. Rivers represented South Carolina's First Congressional District from January 3, 1941, until his death on December 28, 1970.

In Congress, Rivers became closely associated with naval affairs and national defense. After joining the House Naval Affairs Committee in 1941, he built his career as a strong advocate of the armed forces, increased military spending, and the development of a nuclear-powered Navy. In 1965, after the retirement of Carl Vinson, he became chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and held that position until his death. His support for military pay, benefits, shipbuilding, and naval modernization made him especially influential in defense policy during the Cold War.

Rivers was also a conservative southern Democrat whose career reflected the politics of his region and era; he opposed the major civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and supported segregationist positions. He died in Birmingham, Alabama, after surgery on December 28, 1970, and was buried at St. Stephen Episcopal Church Cemetery in South Carolina. The United States Navy later named USS L. MENDEL RIVERS in recognition of his long service and his close association with naval and military affairs.

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USS L. MENDEL RIVERS History:

The contract for USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was awarded to Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company on July 1, 1969. She was named for Lucius Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, the long-serving chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a strong congressional supporter of the United States Navy and nuclear propulsion. Her keel was laid at Newport News, Virginia, on June 26, 1971. USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was launched on June 2, 1973, sponsored by Margaret Rivers Eastman and Marion Rivers Cato, members of the Rivers family. After fitting out, dockside testing, reactor-plant work, sea trials, and Navy acceptance preparations, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was commissioned on February 1, 1975, with Commander Roderic L. Wolfe as her first commanding officer. She entered service as a STURGEON-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, one of the long-hull units of that class, designed for sustained submerged operations, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, intelligence and surveillance missions, special operations support, mine warfare, and operations in high-latitude waters.

Following commissioning, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS entered the Atlantic Fleet training and readiness cycle. Her early months were occupied by post-commissioning inspections, shakedown training, tactical qualification work, engineering and weapons-system certification, and the gradual integration of the new boat into the Atlantic submarine force. These activities took place against the strategic background of the mid-1970s, when the United States and the Soviet Union remained locked in a maritime competition that made the North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Norwegian Sea, and Arctic approaches especially important. Commander Wolfe commanded the submarine through her initial operational period and her deployment. From February 1976 to August 1976, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. This placed her under the broad operational context of the United States Sixth Fleet, whose submarines supported NATO presence, tracked Soviet naval activity, trained with allied forces, and contributed to the protection of carrier and amphibious forces in a region that linked southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

In September 1976, Commander Ray G. Jones Jr. relieved Commander Wolfe as commanding officer. Under Commander Jones, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS continued the Atlantic Fleet cycle of training, maintenance, and forward operations. From August 1977 to December 1977, she made another Mediterranean deployment. This second Mediterranean period came at a time when the Sixth Fleet continued to monitor Soviet naval activity in the eastern and central Mediterranean and maintained a visible American naval presence near several politically sensitive regions. From August 1978 to November 1978, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS shifted to a North Atlantic deployment. That operating area was central to NATO planning because of its connection to the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, the Norwegian Sea, and the sea lines of communication between North America and Europe.

Commander John F. Jordan Jr. took command of USS L. MENDEL RIVERS in July 1979. From November 1979 to April 1980, the submarine returned to the Mediterranean Sea for another forward deployment. This deployment occurred during a period of heightened tension following the Iranian Revolution, the seizure of the United States Embassy in Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, and a broader American effort to maintain naval presence across the Mediterranean, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean. The Mediterranean remained a critical operating area for the United States Navy, both as a NATO theater and as a staging and support region for wider crisis response.

By December 1982, Commander Hollis W. Holden had relieved Commander Jordan as commanding officer. From July 1983 to October 1983, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS deployed to the North Atlantic and Arctic. Arctic and high-northern operations were a specialized mission for United States nuclear submarines because they required navigation beneath sea ice, operations in poorly charted waters, careful understanding of ice thickness and water-column structure, and the ability to work in an environment where magnetic, acoustic, and navigational conditions differed sharply from open-ocean patrol areas. The North Atlantic and Arctic also had direct strategic importance because Soviet ballistic-missile and attack submarines operated from northern bases and because control of the northern approaches would have been critical in any NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict. After that deployment, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS made another North Atlantic deployment from May 1984 to August 1984.

From May 1985 to October 1985, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS again deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. Public naval reporting places her in the Mediterranean during the summer of 1985, confirming her presence in the theater during the middle of the deployment. This period coincided with a particularly active phase of Sixth Fleet operations, including continued monitoring of Soviet naval activity, American presence operations during regional instability, and a broader maritime-security environment shaped by terrorism, crises in Lebanon, and tensions across the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Commander Mario J. Bagaglio Jr. relieved Commander Holden in November 1985. In May 1986, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was publicly recorded at Annapolis, Maryland, for Armed Forces Day ceremonies.

From October 1986 to December 1986, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS made another North Atlantic and Arctic deployment and an Arctic operation in 1987. From August 1987 to October 1987, the boat made another North Atlantic deployment. From February 1988 to May 1988, she again deployed to the North Atlantic. Commander Russell A. Pickett relieved Commander Bagaglio in November 1988. Under Commander Pickett, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS continued the intensive northern deployment pattern of the final Cold War years, deploying to the North Atlantic from February 1989 to April 1989 and again from September 1989 to November 1989. These repeated North Atlantic operations took place as the Soviet Union was entering its final political crisis, but naval competition at sea had not yet ended.

The end of the Cold War changed the strategic framework in which USS L. MENDEL RIVERS operated. Commander Carl V. Mauney relieved Commander Pickett in August 1991. During the early 1990s, the United States Navy shifted from a primarily global Soviet-containment posture toward regional crisis response, intelligence collection, special operations support, strike planning, and continued alliance operations. On August 1, 1993, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was photographed moored at Port Canaveral, Florida. Commander Bradford N. McDonald relieved Commander Mauney in April 1994. From August 1994 to January 1995, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. This deployment was part of the post-Cold War operational pattern in which Mediterranean-based naval forces supported NATO presence, crisis response, exercises with regional partners, and operations connected to instability in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East.

During the 1994-1995 Mediterranean deployment, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS took part in Exercise African Eagle 94, a bilateral United States-Moroccan exercise that began on December 4, 1994. The exercise involved amphibious planning, formation movement, protection against air, surface, and submarine threats, rehearsal, landing-force activity, and reembarkation. For USS L. MENDEL RIVERS, the exercise shows the submarine integrated into a wider amphibious and surface-force training environment rather than operating only as an independent patrol unit. After returning from the deployment, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS left Charleston Naval Base in March 1995 and shifted permanently to Norfolk, Virginia, as her home port.

From February 1996 to August 1996, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS conducted another Mediterranean deployment. By this point, her late-career mission set increasingly included special operations support. Commander George M. Petro relieved Commander McDonald in October 1996. USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was publicly identified in the late 1990s as a submarine configured for Dry Deck Shelter operations. A Dry Deck Shelter was a removable hangar-like module fitted aft of the sail on selected submarines to support submerged launch and recovery of swimmer delivery vehicles and combat swimmers. Navy inactivation material also states that SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team Two worked closely with USS L. MENDEL RIVERS and that the boat supported covert SEAL delivery into littoral waters. In addition, the submarine was fitted to serve as a Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle mother submarine, giving her a role in submarine-rescue support. From October 1997 to April 1998, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS again deployed to the Mediterranean. Later officer biographical material links service aboard USS L. MENDEL RIVERS in this period with Dry Deck Shelter operations during deployments to the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Gulf.

Commander David A. Portner relieved Commander Petro in March 1999. From June 1999 to December 1999, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS made her final Mediterranean deployment. This deployment occurred in a year dominated in the European theater by the Kosovo crisis and NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia, while United States naval forces in the Mediterranean continued to support presence, surveillance, contingency planning, and regional stability operations. By the time she returned from this deployment, the STURGEON-class was rapidly disappearing from active service. USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was one of the last regular STURGEON-class attack submarines remaining in commission and was the last East Coast STURGEON-class boat to approach retirement; after her departure from active service, the extensively modified USS PARCHE (SSN 683) remained in commission for several more years.

On July 28, 2000, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS held her inactivation ceremony at Pier 22, Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia. Admiral Richard W. Mies, Commander in Chief, United States Strategic Command, was the principal speaker. His presence also connected the ceremony to the boat's own history, because Mies had served earlier in his career aboard USS L. MENDEL RIVERS before later commanding USS SEA DEVIL (SSN 664) and eventually rising to senior command. The ceremony marked the end of USS L. MENDEL RIVERS's regular operational life from Norfolk, but the submarine had not yet completed her final mission. She remained in commission for a last transit that would take her from the Atlantic, under Arctic ice, and into the Pacific on the way to deactivation and recycling.

USS L. MENDEL RIVERS departed Norfolk on September 20, 2000, for her final voyage. Instead of making a direct surface or open-ocean transfer to the West Coast, she undertook a final North Atlantic and Arctic transit identified in public material as PacSubIcEx 3-00. An Arctic Submarine Laboratory team embarked for the mission, and the voyage combined the boat's transfer to the Pacific with under-ice and oceanographic data collection. After leaving Norfolk, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS proceeded northeast, passed the Flemish Cap area, continued toward the Denmark Strait, and entered the marginal ice zone north of Iceland. She then operated beneath the polar ice cap. During the mission, the embarked scientific team launched 77 under-ice conductivity-temperature-depth probes and collected data on water-column structure and ice thickness in shallow and insufficiently charted Arctic areas. Public accounts of the voyage also describe technical navigation difficulties, including loss of the normal electromagnetic log and difficulties with heading reference near the North Pole. The crew used other methods, including celestial and GPS-based fixes when possible, to reestablish reliable navigational references. USS L. MENDEL RIVERS surfaced at the North Pole during this final Arctic voyage, a symbolic and operationally significant event near the end of her career.

After operating at and beyond the North Pole, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS continued her submerged transit through Arctic waters toward the Pacific side. She proceeded in the direction of the Bering Strait, passed the St. Lawrence Island area, and continued toward the Pacific Northwest. Before reaching Puget Sound, she surfaced in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and made a liberty port call at Victoria, British Columbia. This was the final publicly identified foreign port visit of the submarine's career. From Victoria, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS proceeded to Bremerton, Washington, where she entered the last phase of her service life at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. There, she began deactivation, defueling, and preparation for dismantling under the United States Navy's nuclear-powered ship and submarine recycling program.

USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was decommissioned and struck from the Naval Vessel Register on May 10, 2001, at Naval Station Bremerton, Washington. Her recycling was completed on July 19, 2002. Across more than twenty-six years from commissioning to decommissioning, USS L. MENDEL RIVERS was credited with six Battle Efficiency "E" awards, three Damage Control "E" awards, three Operations and Weapons "E" awards, three Engineering "E" awards, five Supply "I" awards, a Communications Excellence "E", two Sixth Fleet anti-submarine warfare "Hook 'em" awards, two Meritorious Unit Commendations, and two Navy Unit Commendations.

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