The sixth ship to carry the name Somers was laid down at Bath Iron Works in Maine on March 4, 1957, and launched the following May. She was commissioned on April 3, 1959, as a Forrest Sherman-class destroyer -- a fast, versatile warship designed for the open-ocean demands of the Cold War. Her maiden voyage took her to the ports of northern Europe: Copenhagen, Stockholm, Portsmouth, and Kiel, where she represented the Navy during Kiel Week. After transiting the Panama Canal, she arrived at her home port of San Diego in July 1959. Over the next six years, Somers alternated between West Coast operations and deployments to the 7th Fleet in the western Pacific. Twice she steamed to Australia to help commemorate the Battle of the Coral Sea.

As American involvement in Vietnam escalated, Somers found herself in the thick of it. She plied the Gulf of Tonkin on plane guard duty, shadowing aircraft carriers as their strike groups pounded supply lines in North Vietnam. The work was relentless and unglamorous: station-keeping in tropical heat, ready to recover downed aviators, punctuated by the thunder of naval gunfire support along the coast. Between 1969 and 1973, she returned to the Gulf of Tonkin repeatedly, plane-guarding carriers like Hancock, rendering gunfire support, and standing watch on search and rescue stations. In the gaps between line periods, she made port calls that traced the arc of American power across Asia -- Subic Bay, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sasebo, Keelung, Penang.

In April 1966, Somers entered San Francisco Naval Shipyard at Hunters Point for a transformation. Over the next twenty-two months, ninety percent of her superstructure was torn out and replaced. She received the AN/SPS-48A three-dimensional air search radar, the Tartar surface-to-air missile system, and the ASROC antisubmarine rocket system. Her engineering plant was completely overhauled. When she emerged in February 1968, she was reclassified as DDG-34, a guided missile destroyer -- essentially a new ship on an old hull. The conversion reflected the Navy's Cold War calculus: it was cheaper to modernize an existing destroyer than to build one from scratch, and the Forrest Sherman class had proven hulls worth the investment.

After Vietnam, Somers shifted her home port to Pearl Harbor in 1973 and continued western Pacific deployments through the late 1970s. In July 1981, she participated in FLEETEX 1-81, described as the largest U.S. Navy exercise in history at that time. Her final deployment came later that year with Battle Group Delta, led by USS Constellation. She operated primarily in the Indian Ocean, making port calls in Guam, the Philippines, Diego Garcia, Bunbury in Australia, the Maldive Islands, and Singapore. Returning to Pearl Harbor in May 1982, her crew was preparing for more operations when word came that she was to be decommissioned. The announcement was abrupt -- Somers had earned two Marjorie Sterrett Battleship awards, a Meritorious Unit Commendation, and three Battle Efficiency E awards. She was decommissioned on November 19, 1982.

After decommissioning, Somers sat in the Inactive Ship Facility at Pearl Harbor until about 1988, then was transferred to the Maritime Administration and towed to Port Hueneme, California, where she served as an experimental ship for several years. On May 20, 1998, she was towed out of Port Hueneme for the last time. During the Rim of the Pacific 1998 exercise -- RIMPAC, the world's largest international maritime exercise -- she was set adrift northwest of Kauai as a target. The B-52 strikes and the demolition charges that followed sent her to the bottom in deep Pacific water. For a ship that had crossed the Pacific dozens of times, visited ports from Kiel to Penang, survived Vietnam and the Cold War, the ocean off Hawaii became both her final port and her grave.