Neches was laid down at the Boston Navy Yard on June 8, 1919, launched in June 1920, and commissioned that October. Originally classified as Fuel Ship No. 17, she spent her early years with the Atlantic Fleet, performing the essential but unglamorous work of keeping warships fueled along the East Coast. She carried mail, towed targets, and made regular runs to Port Arthur, Texas, to load fuel oil and gasoline. In March 1922, she transferred to the Pacific, steaming to her new home yard at Mare Island, California, and then to San Diego. For the next fifteen years, Neches helped develop fleet refueling tactics, supplied oil and gasoline to bases in the Panama Canal Zone, the Caribbean, and Hawaii, and kept the Pacific Fleet moving. A 1926 overhaul at Mare Island installed a new hydraulic gasoline stowage system. The work was steady, critical, and almost entirely invisible to anyone outside the Navy.

Neches was underway from San Diego to Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941. She arrived three days later, rapidly offloaded her cargo, and hurried back to San Pedro to take on more supplies for the damaged base. On December 28, while returning to Pearl Harbor, she towed and then scuttled the damage control hulk DCH 1 -- the gutted hull of a former destroyer, no longer useful -- putting it down with gunfire at a position roughly 26 degrees north, 143 degrees west. The war was barely three weeks old, and Neches was already disposing of the wreckage.

On the afternoon of January 22, 1942, Neches steamed out of Pearl Harbor headed west to rendezvous with a carrier task force that needed refueling. Shortly after midnight on the 23rd, the watch spotted what appeared to be a submarine about a thousand yards away and took evasive action. At 3:10 a.m., a heavy thud struck amidships -- probably a torpedo that failed to detonate. Nine minutes later, a torpedo from a Japanese submarine hit the starboard side behind the engine room. Flooding swallowed the engine room spaces, though the fire room stayed dry. At 3:28, the crew spotted the submarine to port just before a second torpedo struck the opposite side. Both five-inch guns opened fire and kept shooting until 3:35, when the increasing starboard list made it impossible to depress the barrels far enough. Neches settled forward and listed steadily to starboard. She went under at 4:37 a.m., an hour and eighteen minutes after the first hit.

Commander Fletcher, who died with his ship, was the son of Rear Admiral William Bartlett Fletcher Sr. The younger Fletcher's death in the opening weeks of the Pacific war did not end the family's naval service -- he would posthumously be promoted and recognized. The loss of Neches had immediate tactical consequences: without her fuel, the carrier task force she was meant to supply had to cancel its mission. In the desperate early months of 1942, when every ship and every gallon of fuel mattered, the sinking of a single oiler could unravel an entire operation. Neches rests somewhere in the deep Pacific west of the Hawaiian Islands, near 21 degrees north and 160 degrees west. No memorial marks the spot. The ocean that she crossed hundreds of times, carrying the fuel that kept the fleet alive, became her grave before the war was two months old.