When the Coast Guard cutter Blackthorn capsized in the channel off Mullet Key on a January night in 1980, twenty-three of her fifty crew died. One of them was an eighteen-year-old seaman apprentice who spent the last minutes of his life making sure other men could live, throwing them life jackets, then strapping open a locker with his own belt so still more would float up to the water as the ship went down. His name was William Flores, and the service that lost him eventually did the rarest thing it can do to honor a sailor: it gave his name to a ship.
William Ray Flores, called Billy, was born on 6 November 1961 in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and grew up in Texas. He joined the United States Coast Guard in 1979, still a teenager, and completed basic training at the Coast Guard's recruit depot at Alameda, California. From there he was assigned to the USCGC Blackthorn, a 180-foot seagoing buoy tender then finishing a major overhaul at a Tampa shipyard. He had been in the Coast Guard only months, and aboard the Blackthorn a shorter time still, when the ship made the routine evening departure that would kill nearly half her crew.
On the evening of 28 January 1980 the Blackthorn got underway for her homeport of Galveston, heading down the channel toward the Gulf. Near the Sunshine Skyway, after maneuvering clear of an overtaking Soviet liner, she came into the path of the inbound oil tanker SS Capricorn. The ships could not arrange a safe passing, and they collided. The collision alone might have been survivable, but the tanker's thirteen-thousand-pound anchor caught the cutter's port side and tore it open as the vessels separated. The Blackthorn flooded and rolled, capsizing in under ten minutes in the dark water of the channel.
In those few minutes, Flores acted. As the ship listed and men went into the water, he and another seaman began grabbing life jackets and throwing them to the crewmen already overboard. The other seaman, as the ship went over, abandoned ship to save himself, an entirely human choice in a vessel capsizing in seconds. Flores stayed. The life-jacket locker would not stay open against the roll of the dying ship, so he took off his own belt and lashed the locker door open, so that the rest of the jackets spilled out and floated up to the men struggling in the water. Even then he did not leave; he turned back to try to help the wounded and trapped seamen still aboard. He was still on the Blackthorn, doing that work, when she went under. He was eighteen years old. Survivors lived to tell exactly what he had done, and his actions are credited with saving the lives of many of his crewmates.
For two decades Flores's act lived mostly in the memory of the men he had saved and the grief of his family, his brothers Sam and Richard Flores among those who carried it. Then the recognition came. The Coast Guard awarded William Flores its Coast Guard Medal, posthumously, the highest decoration the service gives for heroism not involving direct conflict with an enemy. The State of Texas awarded him the Texas Legislative Medal of Honor. And in November 2011 the Coast Guard did the rarest thing of all: it selected Flores as the namesake of a brand-new cutter, and the USCGC William Flores (WPC-1103), the third of the service's Sentinel-class fast response cutters, was commissioned in his honor. An eighteen-year-old seaman apprentice who had been in uniform only months now has a warship of his own carrying his name and the flag he died under.
Billy Flores is buried at Benbrook Cemetery in Tarrant County, Texas. Near the water where he died, his memory is kept in several places: at the annual ceremony at Blackthorn Memorial Park in St. Petersburg each 28 January, where the names of all twenty-three are read; in a statue at Coast Guard Sector St. Petersburg; and, since January 2020, in a statue placed in the underwater Circle of Heroes memorial off the Pinellas coast, where divers can visit him among the figures honoring American servicemembers. His story is the human center of the Blackthorn disaster, and a reminder that the channel Fort De Soto was built to guard against an enemy that never came has asked for sacrifice anyway, on ordinary nights, from very young people simply doing their jobs.