New Coast Guard cutter bears name of Benbrook man who saved others

BY CHRIS VAUGHN

cvaughn@star-telegram.com

BENBROOK -- The U.S. Coast Guard is scheduled to introduce its newest fast-response cutter to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico this week.

It will bear the name of a young man who left Benbrook in the late 1970s to become a "coastie," a name that has never been forgotten by the men who knew him and what he did during one of the Coast Guard's worst hours.

Seaman Apprentice William R. Flores -- Billy to all who knew him -- never made it to his 19th birthday. He died trying to save the lives of crewmen aboard his rapidly sinking ship in the winter of 1980. He had joined when he was 17 and had been in the Coast Guard barely a year.

"He was really gung-ho," said Alan Nations, a retired master chief petty officer who served with Flores at the Coast Guard station in Galveston. "He was eager and already very self-disciplined. You don't see a whole lot of 17-year-olds with as much discipline as he had. And he was sharp, too."

Two decades after Flores' actions, somehow overlooked in the aftermath of the Coast Guard's worst peacetime disaster, he was posthumously awarded the Coast Guard Medal, the highest decoration that service can bestow. The Coast Guard chose to name its latest fast-response cutter after Flores. The ship is being launched from the Bollinger Shipyards in southern Louisiana and will undergo several months of testing before it is commissioned and joins the fleet.

"This class of cutter is known as the Sentinel class," said Angela Hirsch, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard in Washington. "Each of the fast-response cutters will be named for an individual in Coast Guard history who went above and beyond the call of duty and represents the very best of our service."

Flores' parents, Robert and Julia Flores, still live in the same house in Benbrook. They can hardly comprehend that their son will continue to be remembered by a new group of Coast Guard personnel.

"It is a great, great honor from our government," his 83-year-old mother said.

The Floreses will not attend the launching, although they said they were not invited either. Because the Coast Guard is rolling out new cutters every few months, the service plans to have a ceremony only for the commissioning, Hirsch said. That is tentatively scheduled for late 2012. The cutter will then join the fleet in Miami, she said.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for all of us," Flores' older brother, Tom, said.

It wasn't until about six months ago that the Flores family even knew that William Flores would be honored with a ship. It was Flores' nephew, a young boy he never met, who found it doing research on his uncle on the Internet.

"He came to me and said, 'Tell me about Uncle Billy,'" his mother said. "I get too emotional. I couldn't tell him. I said, 'You should read about it yourself.'"

Born in Carlsbad, N.M., in 1961, Flores was the sixth of seven children born to small-town New Mexico natives. His father worked in the potash mines there until he had an opportunity to move his family to the Fort Worth area in 1967 and work at what was then General Dynamics.

As a young man eager to start a life of adventure, Flores pestered his parents during his senior year at Western Hills High School to let him drop out so he could join the Marine Corps. They told him they wouldn't give him permission, though, and he needed it since he was only 17. He didn't give up. He just changed goals. He presented them with an offer to let him join the Coast Guard. They relented and gave their permission.

When Robert Flores, 84, had refused to let his son join the Marines, he knew he wasn't on solid parenting ground. He had done the same thing in 1944 during World War II.

"I joined the Navy the day I turned 17," he said. "I was the youngest man on my ship. I didn't even shave yet. He had always been interested in my service, and I think that made him want to do the same thing."

Flores' first assignment was in Galveston, where he took to his job with relish.

"He liked to save lives," his father said. "That's why he lost his life."

Flores worked on the 180-foot Coast Guard vessel Blackthorn, which had been undergoing extensive repairs and updates in Tampa, Fla.

On the night of Jan. 28, 1980, the Blackthorn departed from Tampa Bay in the dark and collided with a 605-foot oil tanker named Capricorn. The Capricorn's anchor slashed the Blackthorn's hull open, and the Blackthorn started rolling portside and sinking.

An orderly evacuation wasn't possible. Men started jumping in the water. Flores, however, stayed aboard, made his way to the starboard life jacket locker and began throwing life jackets to crewmen in the water. Even as more crewmen abandoned ship, Flores "remained behind to strap the life jacket locker door open with his own belt, thereby contributing to the survival of struggling shipmates who retrieved life jackets as they floated to the surface," according to his citation.

"Even after most of the crew members abandoned ship, Seaman Apprentice Flores, with complete disregard for his own safety, remained on the inverted hull to assist trapped shipmates and provide aid and comfort to injured and disoriented shipmates," the citation continued.

Then the Blackthorn went down. Twenty-three men died that night, but 27 of them survived.

The night of the collision, Flores' mother, aunt and youngest brother had been in a car wreck in far West Texas, returning from a funeral in Carlsbad. Robert Flores was on his way to the Colorado City hospital, undoubtedly when the Coast Guard was trying to reach him.

At some point that night, one of Flores' daughters called the hospital and told him the Coast Guard was trying to reach him with bad news.

"It took an eternity to get back here," his father said. "I didn't know what was going on."

All the Coast Guard could tell the Floreses was that their son was missing. Day after day, they knew nothing of their son, except that it became clear he likely had not survived.

"That was the longest time," his mother said. "Waiting and waiting and waiting. It was terrible."

Finally, six days after the collision, Billy Flores' naked body washed ashore on the coast of Florida.

The Floreses had a funeral at St. Patrick Cathedral downtown because it was much larger than their church, San Mateo Catholic just off Vickery Boulevard. They buried him near their home, in Benbrook Cemetery.

Amid all the investigations into what happened and who was at fault that night, the actions of Flores were overlooked. In fact, no commendations were awarded to any men on that ship.

"I think it was the magnitude of the whole thing," said Nations, who at the time was president of the Chief Petty Officers Association. "That was the Coast Guard's biggest peacetime tragedy. It was shocking. At Base Galveston, for six months people walked around and didn't even speak. The Coast Guard is a very small organization and very tightknit."

But the men who survived that night kept talking about Flores, even if Coast Guard commanders weren't doing anything about it. Nations promised the Flores family that he wouldn't let it go and persuaded a close friend, former Master Chief of the Coast Guard Vince Patton, to help initiate another investigation. "I knew that Billy Flores had done something heroic," Nations said. "When I retired in 1994, I made the Flores family a promise that I would see this through concerning their son."

Nations was present at Benbrook Cemetery in 2000 when the Coast Guard Medal was presented to Flores' parents, as were Patton and the former chief who recruited Flores in 1978. But over the last few years, he had not spoken to them and was unaware a cutter would be named for Flores until a reporter contacted him.

"That's the best news I've gotten in a long time," he said. "You can bet I'll be there for the commissioning. I feel my promise to them has really been fulfilled."

Chris Vaughn, 817-390-7547