Chief Larson placed himself directly in front of me. “Captain, you need to get down or get back behind something,” he said, reaching out to try to tuck in the collar rank insignia on my coveralls. “Sir, you really need to take your khaki belt off and stop pointing at things. You could be a sniper target!”
“Chief, don’t worry about me. I’m not a sniper target,” I told him. “These guys don’t operate like that. Let’s get the focus off me and back out on the harbor. We cannot allow anyone else to get alongside.”
The list to the port side was slowly increasing. The ship was flooding. Carefully, I leaned over the side of the ship and could see the top curve of what had to be a huge hole. Black and brown scorch marks sprayed out from the blast hole itself. Small pieces of black residue speckled the side of the ship. And the metal surrounding the hole was bent inwards in huge jagged shards from the force of the explosion.
Clearly, something had detonated alongside us. The ship’s general workshop, the adjoining sixty-foot-wide main engine room 1, the galley one deck above where the crew had just been taking their lunch, and the chief petty officers’ mess, were all in the part of the ship where I was standing. In the engine room were the two gas turbine engines that powered the starboard propeller shaft, as well as the two reverse-osmosis water processing units that made fresh water out of 24,000 gallons per day of seawater. The explosion had been so powerful that I knew almost everything in these and immediately adjoining spaces must have been destroyed or severely damaged, crippling the ship and killing or severely wounding anyone who had been in these areas.
But what could have done this? With my mind racing to explain the devastation in front of me, I could see four orange rafts in the water along the length of the port side. Questions burst into my mind, “Could these have been the vehicle for a bomb?” “How did someone manage to get these rafts alongside the ship with no one seeing them?” They were evenly spaced, from directly below where I was looking into the blast hole to the area back by the flight deck at the stern of the ship. The first raft, in the area of the blast hole, was mostly sunk and in tatters. The next two were deflated, lying flat on the surface of the water. The fourth raft, however, was fully inflated and gently rubbing and bobbing against the ship back by the flight deck and fantail area. Based on the limited evidence I had before me, it seemed as though the raft nearest me must have been the one that detonated and blew the hole in the side of the ship. The force of the explosion must have damaged the detonators on the two deflated rafts and caused them not to go off. In my mind, the fourth raft alongside the flight deck area now posed the greatest danger to the ship. It had to be full of explosives ready to detonate and cripple the twin rudders and propellers for steering and driving the ship, and if that happened we could not get underway and out of port. At the same time, I could see the crew streaming out onto the flight deck area, peering over the edge of the port side. They could all be killed if the raft exploded. I had to do something, fast.
Meanwhile, Chief Larson had issued Cole’s rapid response security team every weapon available: 9 mm pistols, M-14 rifles, twelve-gauge shotguns, M-79 grenade launchers, and ammunition. “Get everybody who isn’t part of the security team back inside the skin of the ship,” I barked out to him. He immediately passed the order to those on the flight deck, hollering, “We don’t know what we’ve got out here.”
The security teams began rounding up the crew and shoving them back inside. One of the wounded being attended to by other crew members was Fireman Raymond Mooney, his face covered with blood. He was lying in the aft passageway near the exit onto the flight deck when he saw Chris Peterschmidt, the XO. Calling out and grabbing him by his coveralls, he pulled him close: “Sir! I saw what happened! I saw what happened!”
Mooney told Chris that he had been stationed near the forward refueling station, on the harbor side of the ship opposite from the refueling hose connection from the pier. His assignment had been to watch for a fuel spill into the harbor. He had seen the two garbage barges slowly make their approach to the ship, he said, but since they were expected—these were the first two, and there was to be a third—he saw no reason to be concerned. Once the crew had loaded the boats up with trash and debris, both headed together back to shore. He was watching them cross the harbor when he saw a third boat coming toward the ship at high speed.
Mooney wondered at first why it was coming toward Cole so fast, but as it got closer, it slowed to make a steady approach about forty-five degrees off the port bow. He could see it was white, about thirty feet long, with red on the interior. There was an open well in the boat with a center console for the controls and although it looked clean, almost new, it also didn’t look so different from the previous two trash boats. The security team member who was watching its approach with him also seemed unconcerned, Mooney said. From when they first saw it, it took about thirty-five seconds to come alongside. The two men in the boat then looked up at Mooney, waved, and smiled. He was surprised, and hesitated before waving back. The boat bumped solidly into the side of the ship and drifted slightly away from the side.
Then, Armageddon.
A huge red fireball vaporized the boat and both of the men. Mooney’s vision went black, and a quick flash of intense heat blew by him. He raised his hands to his face and pulled them away, seeing what appeared to be only a few spots of blood.
Tearing off his headset, he jumped the eight feet down onto the deck from the refueling station. He ran across the front of the ship toward the starboard side and then down the starboard brake past the ship’s small boats, past injured sailors lying on the deck, and back onto the flight deck. Two engineers he came across told him he looked in bad shape and should get to medical immediately.
Chris told two sailors to grab Mooney and get his wounds treated. Reaching a large medical box near the entrance to number 3 gas turbine generator room, they let Mooney sit down with a slump, and suddenly he was overcome with the most intense pain had ever felt in his life. His eyes were burning and he could barely see. The fireball from the explosion had caused flash burns to his face and eyes, now quickly swelling shut.
Chris relayed Mooney’s account of the attack to the security team. One of the team’s members found me within less than a minute, and corrected my misinterpretation of the rafts. “Captain, it wasn’t those rafts alongside the ship that blew us up. It was another boat that came out from shore. We thought it was the third garbage barge. Those rafts are our rafts, look.” He pointed to the now empty twenty-five-man life raft racks on the port side of the ship. Almost every one of the life rafts had been blown out of its fiberglass container.
So: we had been attacked by kamikaze terrorists. One of the most modern twenty-first-century destroyers of the world’s most powerful navy had been successfully attacked by a technologically primitive, explosive-laden suicide boat. We might as well have been in 1945.
Chris had been below the flight deck, well aft of the explosion’s epicenter, when it had happened. The force of it almost blew him off his feet. He set off toward the forward part of the ship to see what had happened, but was quickly overcome by smoke and ordered the watertight door leading forward closed to keep it from spreading aft.
Crossing over to the starboard side to try to continue forward, he saw crew members streaming back, fleeing the blast zone. Though he knew almost everybody aboard by name or by face, he was unable to recognize many of them, so much blood was streaming down their faces, arms, and hands. Some had been on the mess decks or standing in the mess line picking up their meals. There, at the focal point of the blast, the force of the explosion had shattered the plastic coating that kept the steel decks of the ship from rusting and blown it into the sailors like flechettes from a grenade. Chris also found sailors who had been outside at the moment of the attack almost unrecognizable because they were covered from head to toe with residue from the black, sooty wave of water that the explosion had washed up onto the ship. Their eardrums were ruptured and they wer
e dazed and confused.
Despite his shock at the scene around him, Chris quickly got his bearings and fell back on the training provided by hundreds of damage control drills. The Navy trains repetitively for this very reason: during a crisis, people don’t have time to think, they only have time to react, and everyone had to get to work immediately to save the ship.
The standard list of tactics, techniques, and procedures—manning general quarters stations, manning the repair lockers, closing all hatches and doors, assessing the damage to the ship—this is what everyone was thinking, as if each step had been indelibly imprinted on their brains. At this point, Chris did not know if the captain was killed, wounded, or incapacitated. He began barking out orders, and the crew organized itself to stop the flooding, stop the spread of smoke, prevent fire, and man the battle-dressing stations to treat the wounded. With the ship’s communications system knocked out and the battery-powered backup system out of commission, all that could be heard were the shouts of crew members as they went to work to save their ship and shipmates.
Making his way to the central control station, Chris was shocked to come across one of Cole’s leading damage control experts on the Damage Control Training Team, Gas Turbine System Technician-Mechanical Chief Mark Darwin, lying seriously wounded on the deck. Ships like Cole in the Arleigh Burke–class of guided missile destroyers were intended to have a chief petty officer in charge of the damage control division. However, chiefs with that kind of experience and leadership were scarce. Our ship had worked hard to train and educate other personnel, including Darwin, to fill the gap with their background and experience in the Engineering Department. Now, with him wounded and unable to directly contribute to the damage control effort, Chris began to seriously worry about our prospects for saving the ship. Kneeling down, he saw that Darwin was having trouble breathing. Some of his ribs had been cracked or fractured. In the past, Darwin and Chris had had a very contentious relationship—now all Chris wanted was to stay and give comfort. Even so, Darwin told Chris the best thing he could do for him was to keep moving and look after the ship and crew.
Topside, with Chief Larson standing by me, I now understood what had happened. My mind was clear and sharp. I told Larson, “I have got to get to the bridge to tell the Yemeni port authorities what’s happened. Do not allow any more boats to come alongside the ship. We cannot afford another hit.”
I walked up the port side, opened up a watertight door, and in the dark began to climb the stairs leading to the bridge. Why us? Why now? What did we miss that allowed this to happen?
As I opened the door and stepped onto the bridge, I came upon the Navigator, Lieutenant Ann Chamberlain, as well as my leading electronics technician, Senior Chief Pam Jacobsen and leading operations specialist, Senior Chief Al Trapani. I still held my 9 mm handgun at the ready as the three of them looked at me wide-eyed and asked what was going on. Although they were shocked by what I told them, I needed them to focus on getting me in touch with the Yemeni port authorities immediately. Without power on the bridge to operate the ship’s bridge-to-bridge radio, used earlier to contact the Aden Port Authority, Ann found an alternative and passed me the hand held bridge-to-bridge walkie-talkie that operated on the same channel. As the operations officer, Lieutenant Derek Trinque, came onto the bridge from the port side. I keyed the radio.
“Aden Port Control, this is USS Cole, over.”
“This is Aden Port Control.”
“This is USS Cole. We have experienced an explosion amidships. I need your assistance, over.”
“This is Aden Port Control. We understand. What do you need us to do?”
“Aden Port Control, request you stop all harbor movements until we know what has happened and we know the status of the security situation. I say again, request no ship movements in the harbor, over.”
“This is Aden Port Control, we understand. We will not allow any ships to move in or out of the harbor. Is this correct?”
“This is USS Cole. Roger, that is correct.”
“I need you to notify your local hospital. We have wounded on the ship and they will need medical treatment. Do you have a facility available, over?”
“Yes, yes, we have two hospitals. We will notify them and get ambulances down to the pier to take your wounded to them.”
Time was of the essence, and the “golden hour” for saving those most seriously hurt was inexorably ticking away.
But when Cole pulled into Aden, I had made that decision not to put a picket boat in the water. As with any decision you make in command, even the best ones given the surrounding conditions can have effects that cannot be anticipated. In this case, the result was that the ship’s boats were now not available for use at all. They were still in the boat skids on the starboard side of the ship. Since we were moored starboard side to the pier and without power, there was no way to lower them to the water, since we were too close and the large rubber fenders keeping us off the pier would have hemmed them in. So I had one last request for the port authorities.
“Aden Port Control, request you send boats out to the ship to take wounded ashore. Do you have any boats available to help do this, over?”
“Yes, we have boats available and will send them out to your ship.”
“Aden Port Control, thank you, but I must insist that they approach the ship in the following manner. When they come toward the ship, they must not approach my port side any closer than 100 meters. They should stay clear of my port side, come around the stern of the ship, the back of the ship, and make a very slow approach to the back side of the refueling dolphin.” I repeated the message to them again and added: “If you come any closer than 100 meters to my port side, I will shoot you. I repeat. Do not come any closer than 100 meters to my port side or I will shoot you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, yes, we understand. We understand. Do not come any closer than 100 meters. We will come around your stern to the back of the refueling pier. Yes we understand.”
I placed Derek, the senior officer on the bridge, in charge, and told him we were changing the rules of engagement. If another boat approached on the port side and came within a 100-meter arc, it was to be considered a danger to the ship and given warning with the battery-powered bullhorn to stay away. If it continued to close on the ship, he was to direct the security team to fire a warning shot in the boat’s direction. If it kept coming after that, the security team was to open up with every weapon available.
We were now listing at over five degrees to port and over one degree down by the bow, and I had to get to the central control station, the nerve center of the ship, to oversee the damage control effort. “Make sure the security teams know about the rules of engagement and don’t let them accidentally shoot any of the boats coming out to take off the wounded; otherwise, we are screwed,” I told him. He looked me square in the eye and said, “Got it, Captain.”
On shore, Major Mark Conroe, the assistant defense attaché of the U.S. embassy to Yemen, soon got a vivid experience of what these instructions meant. He had been at the refueling pier while we moored the ship, making sure the arrangements made with the Yemeni firms to resupply Cole were working. Once refueling began, he had taken a boat and gone back into town. He was sitting at an outdoor café sipping coffee when he heard the explosion; the defense attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Newman, in Aden on leave with his family, also heard it while playing with his children near his hotel swimming pool. Separately, they both made their way to the harbor to see what had happened.
As the first to arrive, about twenty-five minutes after the explosion, Conroe had commandeered a boat and, minutes after the attack, tried to make his way out to the ship. As he approached, he saw the sailors in the security force pointing a number of guns at his boat. If he had proceeded within 100 meters, he may well have been fired upon. He then made the wise decision to turn around and wait until he could communicate with us to approach. Back at the pier, he found Newman and briefed him on what had happened. Toge
ther they went to the port control office and were able to get through to Cole’s bridge team. Within another half-hour, they were on a Yemeni boat back to the ship. Newman had a cellular phone—a rarity back then—and was telling his office at the embassy in Sana’a that there had been an explosion of some kind on the ship when he suddenly interrupted himself: “Oh my God! We’re coming around to the other side of the ship. There’s a big hole in the side—maybe forty feet wide, right in the center of the ship. We’re going to try and get on board. I’ll call you later.”
Reaching the refueling pier, Conroe saw me and yelled up to me to ask what he could do to help. By that time, almost an hour after the explosion, our rescue and damage control efforts were in overdrive, and I told him we needed water for the crew as soon as possible; the temperature was in the nineties and the humidity was high, and without a fresh-water supply, there was the danger of dehydration. He said he would take care of it and left with the next boat in search of bottled water, returning about twenty minutes later with 240 one-liter bottles that were tossed up to crew members. “Keep bringing us water until I tell you to stop, and that isn’t going to be for awhile,” I said. “Tell every boat coming out here to bring more water.”
Newman walked over the pier to get within speaking range and asked me, “Have you had a chance to tell Fifth Fleet what has happened to you?” There was no way to communicate with them. Radio central, with all the communications equipment on the ship, was without power, and so far we had been unable to restore it. Hearing this, Newman pulled out his cell phone, which had the global system for mobile communications (GSM) capability, and held it above his head and yelled up to me: “I have the number to the Ops Center at Fifth Fleet. Do you want to use it to give them a call?” With an underhand motion, he tossed it in my direction.
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