The USS Kidd

Moored on the Baton Rouge riverfront, below the downtown bluff, sits a destroyer that has been in this spot since nineteen eighty-two. The USS Kidd is a Fletcher-class destroyer, commissioned in April of nineteen forty-three, and it is the only vessel of its type preserved in its World War Two configuration. Every other surviving Fletcher-class destroyer was modified during the Cold War. The Kidd was not.

The ship's crew chose a pirate for their mascot: Captain William Kidd, the seventeenth-century privateer who was eventually hanged in London. The Navy was not entirely pleased with this choice, but the crew was committed, and the name and the pirate insignia stayed. The crew called their ship the Pirate of the Pacific.

The Kidd fought through the Pacific campaign and survived the war's most dangerous stretch: the Battle of Okinawa in the spring of nineteen forty-five, where Japanese pilots flew kamikaze missions against Allied ships in the hundreds. On April eleventh, nineteen forty-five, an enemy aircraft struck the Kidd. Thirty-eight men were killed and fifty-five wounded. The ship kept fighting.

After the Korean War, the Kidd was decommissioned in nineteen sixty-four. Louisiana acquired it as a memorial. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-six.

It sits now in the same muddy river that brought French explorers up from the Gulf three centuries ago, an unlikely neighbor to the Gothic castle above and the Art Deco tower beyond. From the deck you can watch the Panamax ships pass, still using this river exactly as everyone who ever built anything here intended.