USS Saratoga Arrives in Texas for Scrapping

The USS Saratoga has arrived in South Texas and she will soon be scrapped.

The fabled warship departed Rhode Island on Aug. 21 after resting there since 1998 and was given one last farewell from thousands who lined Narragansett bay to watch her slip under the Claiborne Pell Bridge for a final voyage to Brownsville, Texas, where she will broken down and recycled.

The U.S. Navy sold the USS Saratoga to ESCO Marine for one cent. Unable to find funding or a buyer to convert her into a museum, the Navy made the difficult decision to let her go.

The Saratago, often referred to as Super Sara, is a Virginia-class warship that saw action near Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the Person Gulf during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

She was decommissioned on Aug. 20, 1994, in Mayport, Fla.

The Navy competitively awarded the contract on May 8, 2014 to ESCO Marine of Brownsville, Texas, for the towing, dismantling and recycling of conventionally powered aircraft carriers stricken from the Naval Vessel Register.

The USS Saratoga is an important ship with a storied history that includes a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam and Gulf wars and other events.

Also known as “Super Sara,” the vessel was also involved in an 1986 airstrike against Libya.

“[It is] emotional in that we who served on ‘Sara’ feel that our ‘surrogate mother’ is passing from our lives,” Sammy King, secretary of the USS Saratoga Association, told FoxNews.com in an email. “We owe her a lot. We went aboard as ‘snot-nosed kids’ and left as ‘men.’ Some of us are very sad and some are very angry at the decision to scrap her.”