Front Burner

by Kirk S. Lippold

  Fire Controlman Third Class Dyon Foster, who had rushed toward the source of the explosion to get to his emergency station, heard the cries for help and came to the galley. He looked at the mass of tangled equipment and saw two or three bodies in the wreckage, but there was no way to get to them from where he stood. He and another sailor, Gunner’s Mate Third Class Kenya McCarter, saw that Hull Technician Fireman Jeremy Stewart, who had been working in the galley as a food service attendant, was alive but trapped in the wreckage of the steam tables. Stewart’s right forearm was bent at a ninety-degree angle and he was in severe pain. With his left arm, he could reach down to his lower leg and feel metal pinning him to the deck. Stewart sensed movement next to his head and saw that Mess Specialist Seaman Elizabeth Lafontaine, who had been working in the galley with him, was regaining consciousness, but was in great pain. He tried to lift the metal off his legs but found it would not budge, and then felt his legs and realized they were both broken at mid-shin. Bones were sticking out from his lower left leg and his right leg felt like mush.

  Foster and McCarter, joined now by Operations Specialist Second Class Jaja O’Neil, climbed over the metal and saw that they would need to get Stewart out first before they could extricate Lafontaine. Grabbing him by the upper arms and the belt loops on his pants, O’Neil got ready to pull. “This is going to hurt,” Stewart heard, and answered, “I don’t care, just get me out of this galley.” Straining to lift the twisted metal off Stewart’s legs, they succeeded in pulling him out and got him to a triage station, where Hull Technician Second Class Christopher Regal saw him. “Chris, you’ve got to save the ship,” Stewart told him. Staring down at him in disbelief, all Regal could whisper in response was “Jesus Christ,” when he saw how badly injured Stewart was.

  Lafontaine, who had only recently reported to Cole, had just walked by the huge convection ovens near the middle of the galley when the blast went off. The deck beneath her feet buckled and tore to pieces, smacking her into the air and brutally tossing her sideways, almost horizontally. The oven sheared off at the base from its mountings, and pinned her beneath a mass of other debris. Lieutenant (junior grade) Jim Salter, who had made his way to the galley a few minutes after leaving me just after the blast, saw Storekeeper Senior Chief Joseph Pelly and Petty Officer Dyon Foster trying to free her and bent down to see what he could do to help. He could not immediately make sense of what he could see of her legs.

  Lafontaine was on the deck with her back to the wall but pushed down by the debris on top of her and all around her. She faced the hole in the side of the ship, but her torso had been twisted slightly to the left by the displaced oven and other debris, near the smashed and buckled galley door. Her left leg was bent backwards and behind her at the femur, and the lower part of her leg was snapped and bent upward, with the bottom of her foot facing towards the ceiling. Her right leg, visible beneath the oven, was clearly broken in more than one place, and the lower part was crushed and bent at an odd angle.

  As Salter peered into the darkened recesses of the galley, he saw the lifeless body of another sailor, Seaman Lakiba Palmer, folded over and leaning up against the far wall and covered by debris. Salter knew that time was not on the side of the rescuers.

  Pelly and Foster, working feverishly to try to free Lafontaine, could not pry the metal off her legs. Foster was holding an oxygen mask a few inches from Lafontaine’s face to keep her breathing. Jim Salter jumped into the middle of the effort. Each of the three grabbed pieces of metal to try to shove, bend, and pry them back. Lafontaine was in tremendous pain. Even the slightest movement caused her to cry out or scream every time the metal debris around her body moved even slightly. Jim, kneeling in front of her, kept calmly telling her to just hang on, they would get her out in only a few more minutes. When it looked to the three as if they had freed her enough to pull her out, Jim leaned in over her body, putting his chest in front of hers and told her, “Honey, I know this is going to hurt like hell, but grab onto my neck and hold tight when I lift you.” The three rescuers looked at each other, and Foster and Pelly lifted and pushed upward on the debris. Lifting the debris just enough, in one smooth motion, Jim slid her sideways and upward. As her left leg straightened out, hit the deck, and slid grotesquely underneath him; she let out a series of blood-curdling screams. He reached beneath her shattered legs and cradled them as he walked through the vestibule into the mess decks to lay her gently down on a clear table near the rear entrance.

  How Jim Salter came to be part of the rescue effort in the wreckage of the galley speaks volumes. After blurting out to me his blunt reaction that fuel had caused the explosion, he had hurried down the passageway and then smelled the acrid stench of something like cordite, like the smoke after artillery shells have been fired. His instincts and his training then kicked in, and led him to help shipmates, too. Salter’s mind absorbed but did not understand why no alarms were going off on the ship to send the crew to their general quarters stations. He also had an odd sensation that no 1MC announcements had been made to tell the crew what had happened or what to do next. While he knew getting to the fuel lab might be important, he also knew he had a more critical obligation to get to his general quarters station.

  Turning toward the forward part of the ship and proceeding that way, up a port side passageway, Salter had passed the ship’s administrative office, rounded the corner, and entered combat system maintenance central (CSMC). Light from the one or two battle lanterns cast hazy beams that stared down at the deck to illuminate an otherwise dark space. There was no power and only a couple of technicians had shown up, responding like him to their battle stations.

  Salter’s primary technical expert on Cole’s combat system and fellow general quarters responder, Fire Controlman Master Chief John Henderson, still had not arrived on station. The internal phone system for the ship did not work and no one was communicating on any of the sound powered phone circuits. After waiting just a few minutes, Salter announced that he was going to go out into the ship and see what he could do to help. He also told the other sailors who had arrived in the space that there was nothing they could do there. He ordered them to leave and go see if anyone needed their help at any of the repair lockers. Clearly, there was nothing more they could do up there in the dark.

  As he walked out of CSMC, Salter paused for just a second to once again sniff the air. Something was just not right about that smell. Directly in front of him was a ladder that went down one deck and stopped directly in front of Repair 2. Looking down the ladder as he descended, he could see the Repair 2 team already getting equipment out of the locker as crew members decided to go out and investigate damage around the ship. The Repair 2 locker officer, Ensign Greg McDearmon, had not arrived, so Jim, with years of experience and shipboard training, stepped into his role of repair locker officer. Already, word had reached the locker that the chiefs mess was heavily damaged by the blast. A team from the repair locker was needed to break into the space and rescue many of the wounded chiefs. Salter quickly assessed who was getting equipped to go out as damage control investigators, who would form the team to rescue the chiefs, and who would remain behind at the locker to help coordinate any responses to damage that might be found.

  In the middle of this action, word now came to them that there was a huge hole in the port side of the ship. That would explain the sideways list that everyone could feel worsening as they rushed about the locker. Seconds later, Greg arrived and Jim briefed him on the status of the investigators who were out checking for damage and a laundry list of what else needed to be done. Just as quickly as he had taken over, he was now free to examine what had happened to the ship.

  Rather than walk out of the repair locker into a darkened ship, Jim instead left through the emergency escape scuttle in the overhead of the repair locker, which opened onto the forecastle just behind the forward vertical launching system magazine. He wanted to know more about this “hole” in the port side that had been reported to him and what the si
tuation was topside.

  As he crawled out of the scuttle into the bright sun, Denise Woodfin immediately confronted him. She was holding her right arm, which had been injured in the blast. Clearly, she was still dazed by the effects of the explosion. Not quite knowing what to do, she looked at Jim, “Hey, STO, I still have people down in the supply office and it’s flooding.”

  Jim looked back at her as he decided what to do next, “I’ll go down and see what I can do,” he said, and with that, he turned and walked across the forecastle. Quickly he ducked through the forward door, down the starboard brake, and into the darkness of the ship. If there were sailors trapped below the waterline in flooding spaces, he knew what he had to do. As Salter walked down the starboard passageway toward Repair 5 and the mess line, it was still a whirlwind of triage and rescue efforts. The bulkhead around the door to the repair locker was oddly bowed out with the door jammed shut and denying access to the damage control teams. Turning down the mess line, he confronted the jumble of twisted and torn metal in front of him but nothing immediately registered in his mind.

  He stopped and asked several sailors in the area if they knew about any crew members trapped in the supply office. Quickly Jim learned that the only people trapped down there, Petty Officers Davis and Taitt, had been rescued and were being attended to for their injuries. Instead, Salter heard a commotion coming from inside the galley and made his way down to the mess line, where he helped in the rescue of Seaman Lafontaine.

  Of all the mess specialists and food service attendants who had been working in the galley to prepare the noon meal that day, Lafontaine and Stewart were the only survivors.

  Petty Officer Campbell had been working to keep Stewart stabilized, urging him to stay focused and not close his eyes, when she learned that Chief Moser was working above decks, and knew she needed to tell him what was going on inside the ship. She walked up the ladder into the sunshine. As soon as he saw her, Chief Moser directed her to begin administering morphine to those in the worst pain, first among them Gas Turbine Technician Senior Chief Keith Lorenson. As the painkiller worked its way through his system and tense calm settled over Lorenson’s face, Chief Moser continued triage, working on the most seriously wounded and prioritizing their injuries in the order they were to be evacuated from the ship.

  It was now about half an hour after the explosion. Returning amidships from the central control station at that point, I walked up to Chief Moser and asked him: “Doc, what do you need from me?” His answer was, “Nothing right now, Captain, but we need to start getting them off the ship as soon as possible.” I told him about my radio conversation with the Yemeni Port Authority and confirmed with Chief Larson that the rules of engagement were now clear and that no one would shoot the Yemeni boats that would be coming out to the ship to take wounded ashore. He said he would guarantee it personally.

  Master Chief Parlier had sent two critically wounded patients, Petty Officer Timothy Saunders and Fireman Jeremy Stewart, to the amidships triage area for priority evacuation. It was a setback to me to see, in the third litter in that group, Senior Chief Lorenson. He was my most experienced gas turbine technician and the most senior enlisted man in the Engineering Department. I had been counting on him as a mainstay in helping us through this event.

  Chief Lorenson had been sitting at a table in the chiefs’ mess just forward of the entrance to main engine room 1 eating lunch, with the movie Mission Impossible: 2 playing in the background, when smoke suddenly filled the room with a sharp crack of glasses and coffee mugs shattering on the deck, then complete silence. He found himself lying on the deck, unable to move and covered by debris. He did not feel the blast or hear the explosion, which trapped everybody there. A vision of a black-and-white photo of his family that his wife, Lisa, had given him before Cole set sail floated into his mind. In the minutes afterward, though he could not make out shapes or see any of his fellow chiefs, he could hear shouts, moans, and screams for help. Damage control personnel had arrived outside and were swinging axes to chop a hole in the lightweight, honey-combed, composite nomex wall in the port passageway to get personnel into the space and begin to pull everybody out.

  All Chief Lorenson could sense around him was that crew members were moving around. He became aware of a foot near his head. Be careful, he warned the rescuers, there were body parts in the area and they should take care not to do more harm to those already wounded. He knew he was bleeding from his right leg, and used his training to remove his belt with one hand, slide it down to his inner thigh and wrap it tight around his thigh to slow the bleeding. After some of his colleagues were pulled out, he found himself in the dark alone, and feared he had been forgotten, but the rescue personnel reentered the space and began trying to free him as well. Mindful of the foot near his head, he told them to be careful of the person who was on top of him, because whoever it was had not moved since the explosion. This met with silence. When the rescuers finally started moving him onto a litter, he looked at his lower body and realized that the foot near his head was actually his own. He had suffered a compound fracture to his right femur and that leg had been wrenched violently up and across his body, with his foot resting on his left shoulder. He had as yet felt no pain, and when he told his rescuers to straighten out his leg, they were amazed at how calm he was.

  Now he was lifting his head and motioning for me to come over to him. I walked over and knelt down, and he grasped my hand. “Captain, I don’t think I am going to make it,” he said in an unsteady voice. I saw that he was scared, afraid, but not panicked. “Senior Chief, I don’t want to hear that. You are not going to die,” I told him firmly. “I want you to think of Lisa and those two blond-headed kids of yours who want to see their Daddy again. You are going to be fine.”

  He looked back at me through the haze of the painkiller and said, “But Captain, I don’t think you know how badly I’ve been hurt.” I told him, “Senior, I know what happened. So, you have a badly broken leg; you’re not even the first priority to leave the ship. You’re going to be fine.” But I was worried, not only for Lorenson but for his wife. Lisa Lorenson had become ombudsman for Cole just before I took command, filling one of the ship’s most critical family-support functions. Ombudsmen keep the commanding officer informed about the general morale, health, and welfare of the ship’s families by staying closely in touch with them and helping them deal with support agencies like the American Red Cross and the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society. They circulate newsletters and maintain telephone trees for normal and emergency communications, and I had instantly taken a liking to Lisa and come to rely on her. But she was now going to be more concerned about her husband than about USS Cole.

  As I started to get up, the Chief managed to say, “Hey Captain, thanks.”

  Now we needed to get him and the other seriously injured victims off the ship within the “golden hour,” and we were already coming up on thirty minutes after the explosion. Designated for evacuation first was Petty Officer Timothy Saunders, whom Chief Moser had determined to have suffered internal injuries far more serious than the badly cut leg Seaman Sanchez-Zuniga had swathed in bandages. Now, morphine helped him cope with the pain, but he was lying in an evacuation litter on the deck and the heat of midday was debilitating, both for him and the rescue teams.

  At this point, my navigation officer, Lieutenant Ann Chamberlain, who had come down from her general quarters station on the bridge, pointed out a problem. “Captain, we are evacuating all the sailors off the ship and sending them to hospitals ashore but we have no idea which hospital they are going to, what the diagnosis is on their injuries, or what they are doing to treat them. I recommend we send someone ashore to track them.”

  “Nav,” I said, “that’s a great idea. Who do you recommend?”

  In a very matter-of-fact way she said, “Sir, I’ll volunteer to go.”

  I was thrilled at her decision. Looking quickly toward the back of the ship to see the boatswain’s mates still working on getti
ng the brow into position to be lowered to the pier, I told her, “Great. As soon as the brow is down on the pier, I want you to be the first one off. Let us know how they’re doing and if you need anything.”

  With a quick nod of her head she turned away, saying only, “OK, sir.”

  I was moved by the quality of leadership shown by this decision. She didn’t ask, Where do I go, who will go with me, how do I get money if I need it, how do I get protection ashore? She took on the responsibility for figuring all that out and getting it done herself. And she knew that I trusted her to be able to do it.

  When Cole arrived in Aden, we had not put a brow or gangplank down to the refueling pier. Aden was not a liberty port and no visitors were expected; there was no need for it, and because of the configuration of the refueling piping on the pier, a brow would have had to be positioned at the back of the ship, away from the quarterdeck watch, and would have required an armed guard on the refueling pier and another one on deck to verify the identities of people coming aboard. Now, looking for options, someone noticed a twelve-foot wooden extension ladder, like one you might use to paint the side of your house, lying on the pier. Crew members yelled down to the Yemeni fuel workers and motioned them to get the ladder, pull it out to its fullest length, and lean it out to the ship. A good boatswain’s mate could rig this to get litters safely down to the pier, and an excellent one was standing near me, Boatswain’s Mate First Class Randall Butte. Seeing what needed to be done, he soon had a team tying steadying lines to the top and bottom of the litter carrying the first injured sailor to be evacuated off the ship. With three sailors tending each of the two lines at the head of the litter and the Yemeni fuel workers tending the two lines tied at the foot, they lowered him, and quickly others as well, down to the pier, where the workers lifted them carefully to the boats that had begun to arrive at the back side of the refueling pier.