USS Sterett (CG-31)

USS Sterett (CG-31): She Downed a MiG

Commissioned on 8 April 1967, USS Sterett was a Belknap-class guided missile cruiser that earned seven battle stars for Vietnam service and achieved in 1972 one of the rarest feats of the Vietnam naval campaign: shooting down a North Vietnamese aircraft with a surface-to-air missile in combat. Named for Andrew Sterett, master commandant who distinguished himself in the Quasi-War with France and the First Barbary War, she carried an early American naval fighting name into the age of missiles and proved the weapons worked when the target was real.

During the intensified operations of 1972, when the Nixon administration mined Haiphong Harbor and unleashed sustained air strikes against North Vietnam, Sterett's Standard missile system engaged and downed a North Vietnamese aircraft operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. The kill was one of only a handful of confirmed American surface-to-air missile engagements against manned aircraft in the entire Vietnam War, a significant operational demonstration that the surface-launched missile had matured as an anti-aircraft weapon under actual combat conditions.

Beyond that single engagement, Sterett's seven Vietnam battle stars represent the sustained carrier escort and task force screening mission that was the daily work of Belknap-class cruisers in Southeast Asian waters. The missile kill was the exception. The routine work of maintaining the anti-air warfare envelope for American carriers was the rule, and Sterett performed that rule reliably through seven deployments.

Sterett was decommissioned on 26 February 1994. Seven Vietnam battle stars and a confirmed missile kill. Tactically Acquired's USS Sterett (CG-31) collection honors the crew of a ship that proved the surface-to-air missile could do its job when the target was real and the stakes were not an exercise.