Aboard was a crew of 354 including 24 officers. The vessel carried the AN/SPS-39 3D air-search radar, the AN/SPS-10 surface-search radar, and the AN/SPG-531 missile fire control radar alongside its AN/SPG-53 series gunfire control radar unit. Sonar was fitted to the hull and in a towed array.
Buchanan was completed at Long Beach Naval Shipyard in California in March of 1962 and homeported from San Diego. Her early life kept her in Pacific Waters and she was briefly stationed off the coast of South Vietnam during a military coup attempt. From Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the warship once again returned to the theater to take part in the Vietnam War (1955-1975), providing patrol, escort, and general defense across the South China Sea. 1965 saw her receive a needed overhaul at Long Beach. She returned on station in June of 1966 and another overhaul followed in 1967. In September of that year, the warship collided with Holiday, a fishing craft.
In January of 1968, she returned to Vietnam Waters to take part in Operation Sea Dragon, the initiative looking to apply a stranglehold on war-making supplies from North Vietnam attempting to reach forces fighting in the South. Her guns were brought to bear during the Tet Offensive and at the Battle of Hue. By 1971, she was repositioned outside of the warzone, operating in the Eastern Pacific before seeing another overhaul at San Francisco later that year. In 1972, she returned to action in Vietnam and took action to support retreating Allied forces. Her days of war officially came to an end by 1974.
She was modified in 1975, losing her original 127mm cannons and ASROC launchers along with other dated equipment. The remainder of her sailing days were relatively quiet aside from a row with New Zealand due to sensitivities regarding nuclear weaponry. Decommissioning then followed in October of 1991 and her name was struck from the Naval Register on November20th, 1992 bringing about her formal career. Her inherent fighting spirit proved hard to kill for, as a target, she survived multiple missile and bomb strikes before going down off the coast of Hawaii to become a reef. It took 200lb of explosives to finally do her in, this unceremonious "death by scuttling" occurring on June 14th, 2000.
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