They'll tow Old Swayback Maru out to blue water sometime next week---and sink her.

Our own guns will train on her battered, lop-eared carcass. But Old Swayback's rifles won't answer. The angry muzzles that poured steel at the enemy in the Marshalls when the US Navy was backed to the wall in 1942 at Jap-held Wake, Guadalcanal, the Aleutians, Leyte, Iwo and Okinawa---those muzzles will be cold and still.

Maybe you know Old Swayback as "the One-Ship Navy.' She got that name at Cape Esperance on Oct. 11, 1942, when she personally promoted a Nipponese heavy cruiser and destroyer to the locker of Master Davy. Jones.

Or perhaps, if you're the precise type, you prefer to call Old Swayback, the USS Salt Lake City, CA25, oldest heavy cruiser in the US Fleet.

Her demise somewhere off San Diego early next week won't be so ignominious at that. In World War II, Old Swayback, 10,826 tons, 585 feet, 107,000 shaft horsepower, 10 8-inch main battery guns, took everything a skillful enemy could ladle out.

Her labors ended, in the bright summer of 1946 she joined the iron guinea pigs at Bikini. Even here Old Swayback had a place of honor --- within 400 yards of the ancient Arkansas for Test Baker, the underwater atomic blast bull's-eye.

Sure, when the poisonous smoke cleared away, she seemed relatively undamaged, but "contaminated" forever by gamma rays.

Two weeks ago the mare Island Navy Yard announced that Old Swayback would become a punching bag for the last time. Deep waters were to receive her loyal ones, as they already have received the nautical remains of the Pennsylvania (once the Pacific Fleet flagship), the gallant destroyers Talbot, Wilson & Trippe and the courageous attack transport Fallon, Bracken and Banner.

Naval statisticians figured it cost $100,000 a month to maintain the ghost ships that survived Atomic Tests Able and Baker in July - August, 1946. It also took 260 men to guard them, keep their deadly bilge's pumped out, repair their battered hulls.

Last year, with a grim assortment of sister target ships, Old Swayback returned to the West Coast at the end of a towline. Nobody was aboard her. In the Central Pacific less "lucky" vessels already had found their graves; the mighty Saratoga, Arkansas and the erstwhile foremen ships Prinz Eugen (German cruiser) and Nagato (Jap battleship).

But 25 craft in all were earmarked for scuttling this year by the Navy. They are the last. Most lie uneasily at anchor in Kwajalein Lagoon.

It may take more than mere gunfire to finish off Old Swayback, the Navy said. Maybe torpedoes, rockets and aerial bombs will assist in the coup de grace.

That's only right. Old Swayback was nurtured as a tough baby from the very day they laid her keel at Camden, NJ, on June 9, just 21 years ago. She was a "treaty class" cruiser---our first. Her tonnage hovered exactly at the limits set by the optimistic Washington Arms Conference, where some of the world put its best warships in the ash can while the rest put its tongue in its cheek.

At an early age the Salt Lake City appeared to have nautical lordosis, or curvature of the spine, at least as far as unpracticed observers were concerned. Fondly, even her men called her Old Swayback. When we got into the Asiatic war "Maru" (Jap for ship) was appended.

Later cruisers were much better armored, so Old Swayback also earned the sobriquet "tinclad."

Dec. 7, 1941, found her in Adm. Halsey's task force heading back to Oahu from delivering planes to the doomed marine fighter squadron on little Wake Island. Thus she escaped sitting duck damage that tragic day. Her skipper for those early months was Capt. (now retired Rear Adm.) Ellis M. Zacharias, the Japanese-language expert who "gave the word" to the enemy high command via short-wave radio in the war's eleventh hour.

Old Swayback claimed to have opened fire first at Wotje Atoll in the Marshalls on Feb. 1, 1942 during Halsey's daring shoestring raid. Thus she may have been the first US Ship to lob shells into Jap-held territory.