“Do it,” I said. “Just make sure we measure not once, not twice, but three times, and take the list of the ship into account. If we start cutting and it’s below the waterline, we’ll be screwed.”
Hull Technician Second Class Chris Regal, whom Fireman Jeremy Stewart had implored to “save the ship” after he was rescued from the galley, was the most experienced welder in the crew, and volunteered to do the job. With other members of his division, he set up a portable exothermic cutting torch near the exposed hull and marked the section to cut. Donning his protective gear, Regal picked up the torch and tried to strike a spark. Nothing happened. The batteries were dead. Once again, it seemed that if anything could go wrong it would. We were apparently out of options again. USS Cole continued to sink next to the pier.
“Captain, I’m not sure what else we can do at this point,” the XO told me after reporting this latest setback to me on the quarterdeck. Looking him squarely in the eye, I told him, “XO, we have over two hundred able-bodied sailors on this ship. I want every one of them to find a bucket. Line them up going down into main two and if we have to use a bucket brigade for the next two hours until I can get a portable torch from Hawes or Donald Cook and we can make those cuts, that’s what we’ll do. We are not going to lose this ship.”
By word of mouth, the order energized the crew. Everyone swung into motion and the ship seemed to come to life as sailors rushed about the ship gathering buckets and staging them near the entrance to the engine room. By now the floodwaters were four feet over the deck plates in the lower level, and vital equipment needed to get the generator running again was partially or completely submerged. After taking about fifteen minutes to get organized, the crew had established a line that ran from the flight deck, into the starboard side passageway, and down the ladders to the lower level of the engine room. Soon bucket after bucket of water was being handed up and dumped over the side. We were saving our ship.
In what seemed like only a few minutes, a boat from Donald Cook raced into the harbor and loudly throttled to a stop at the refueling pier with not one but two portable torches, which were raced aboard Cole and straight to the engine room.
The bucket brigade cleared out of the space, and with the smell of the fuel that was mixed with the floodwater heavy in the air, Regal began to make his cut. Slowly and methodically, he cut through the half-inch thick hull plate, making one six-by-twelve-inch cut about a foot above the waterline. Once the steel had cooled to the touch, a P-100 pump was moved into position, rigged, and started.
Floodwaters from the engine room began flowing out the discharge port. Within minutes, the engineers were able to report to me in the central control station that the water level was holding steady but had already flooded to four feet over the deckplates in the lower level of the space. While the level was not going down, it was no longer rising and covering any more equipment. To my enormous relief, it also meant the ship was no longer sinking.
I was sitting at the damage control console, across from the ship diagrams where we had plotted the initial explosion and aftermath of the attack, and I was alone. The space was dark and empty except for the morning sunlight shining hotly through the open watertight scuttle that was right above me. It was about 0830 Sunday morning. Sitting there, I suddenly found myself unable to move. My head drifted closer to my chest. Everything went dark.
I had not slept for over seventy-two hours since docking in Aden. For two nights, I had allowed Chris and Master Chief Parlier to sleep, thinking that I would wake them when I needed some rest. But waking them had never been an option I allowed myself to think about exercising. Now, paralyzed by exhaustion, I found myself overtaken by sleep without warning.
Yet only an hour later, my body was screaming at me to wake up. It felt as if a truck had run over me. I was still alone. I felt personally embarrassed, and angry at myself for leaving the ship and crew vulnerable even for an hour, and I went out into the sunlight of the flight deck to find Chris and Debbie to give me an update.
The bucket brigade and temporary pumps had held the floodwaters at bay. Debbie and her engineers were still racking their brains to find a way to restart the ship’s working gas-turbine generator with high-pressure air and reactivate the main drainage system, so that we could fully pump out the flooded engine and machinery rooms. At 1000, the engineers told me that they had put their heads together with the crack Navy divers of Detachment Alpha who had flown in the day before, and come up with an imaginative way to produce a new supply of high-pressure air. By jury-rigging fittings from their diving gear, they could take our two shipboard self-contained breathing apparatus chargers, useful in an emergency to refill firefighting breathing bottles, to get air from the two compressors they had set up on the flight deck to the ship’s high-pressure air system and the air flasks that could restart the generator. Could something designed to supply emergency air for shipboard firefighting equipment be effective in restarting a powerful turbine generator supplying electricity to an entire ship?
The engineers and the divers said it could. The portable pumps could produce pressure of 5,000 psi. After spending over an hour tracing system lines, the engineers and Warrant Officer Perna and his divers found a gauge line that, with the jury-rigged fittings, could be hooked up to the air hoses running down through a watertight hatch on the flight deck into the generator room. If they could refill one of the flasks, they estimated that they could try again to restart the generator in about twelve hours.
Around 1030, the compressors started and HP air slowly started to fill the flasks. A bit longer than twelve hours later, at five minutes after midnight Monday morning, the engineers shot compressor starter air from the recharged air flask into the generator. As if there had never been a problem, gas turbine generator 3 smoothly restarted, electrical power was applied to the switchboard, and one by one, pumps and equipment came online and, within minutes, pumped main engine room 2 dry.
It had been a long and tense twenty-one hours. The crew had performed flawlessly under trying and unnerving conditions. They had weathered poor sanitation, an absence of operable toilets on the ship, and no ventilation. There had been an outbreak of abdominal cramps and diarrhea. Several crew members had become dehydrated. In response, Chief Moser instructed the crew to use bottled water to wash their hands and faces before handling or eating food. Those measures, plus Imodium and Ciprofloxacin, brought things under control before we had a crisis on our hands. Illness still affected a number of the crew, but they had persevered. They had kept the ship from sinking.
They were not going to give up the ship—their ship.
8
Assessing the Damage
IT WAS 0530 WHEN THE ALARM next to my head began once again to beep incessantly, not even four hours since my collapse onto the flight deck in a horizontal pile of flesh and bones. Slowly and with the hazy blur from lack of sleep, the reality sunk in that it was now Monday morning, day four after the attack. The steady high-pitched whine of the generator in the background was still the most comforting noise in the world. Given the implications of its silence, everyone had slept better knowing it was running, providing us with power, and keeping us afloat. But now it was time to get up and start the day.
Over the past three days, the Navy, Department of Defense, and other branches of the U.S. government had deployed a series of people and organizations into Aden. Across the globe, the ripple effects from the attack were being felt, especially in the Middle East where the threat level was raised to Threat Condition Delta, meaning another attack could be imminent. Almost every ship deployed overseas across the world sortied out of port, and security at every military base was markedly and visibly increased.
Less than twenty-four hours after the attack, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton, U.S. Army, ordered the creation of Joint Task Force (JTF) Determined Response to coordinate the U.S. government response to the attack. Rear Admiral Mark “Lobster” Fitzgerald, U.S. Navy, the Deputy C
ommander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, was designated to head up the new organization. He was immediately dispatched to Aden to take charge of the many disparate groups and organize them to provide support to Cole without overwhelming the ship and crew.
The night after the attack, Commander Patrick J. Keenan and Lieutenant Commander Matthew Long, the Officer in Charge and Assistant Officer in Charge of the Navy Ship Repair Unit stationed in Bahrain as part of the Fifth Fleet Staff, had arrived in Aden. They planned to conduct a SCUBA dive under USS Cole to see if the ship could eventually be moved to a safer location. They were using the diving gear of a Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal team that had been helping the Yemeni government remove thousands of mines left over from the civil war in the 1990s.
In the early morning hours of October 13, they had disappeared into the eighty-five-degree water under Cole and slowly and methodically swam the length of the ship. A large sheen of oil coated the water, but beneath it there was visibility of about fifteen feet. Taking their time to ensure they did not miss any damage, Keenan and Long worked their way up to the forward part of the ship near the sonar dome, then back along the keel to the stern of the ship near the rudders and propellers. They planned to enter the hole in the side only to the extent necessary to determine the structural integrity of the ship and perhaps take some measurements, because jagged and sharp metal protruded inward around the entire circumference.
While the curve of the top of the hole could be seen above the waterline, the widest part was several feet below water. Carefully, both divers measured the hole’s extent down the side and underneath the ship. They were awestruck by the amount of devastation caused by the force of the hydraulic impact from the detonation. Numerous cracks emanated away from the blast hole where the steel had been deformed and torn like thick paper. The bilge keel, a large strake of metal attached to the ship on each side and running along most of its length, had been torn in about a sixty-foot section, although it was still attached at each end. It was clear from the amount of fuel still in the water that the fuel tanks underneath main engine room 1 had been breached by the force of the explosion. These were still leaking fuel into the harbor.
The explosion of the suicide boat had created a massive shock wave, which in the incompressible water of the harbor instantly translated tremendous force in all directions outward and downward—outward into the side of Cole, punching through the half-inch hull and inward into the ship, and downward into the seabed to form a crater about twenty feet across and four feet deep, then reflecting upward toward the bottom of the ship and its keel.
The initial damage assessment listed the following:A 9-meter long by 12-meter high (roughly 30 × 40 foot) hole in the portside shell-plate of the hull extending 5 meters (16 feet) below the waterline.
Significant radial cracking and dished plating emanating from and adjacent to main engine room 1, completely flooded and in free communication with the sea.
Blast damage to equipment extending to amidships in the engine room with significant damage to adjoining main deck and first platform spaces.
Auxiliary machinery room 2 flooded to a level equal to the external waterline via cracks and tears in bulkhead 220, which separates it from the engine room.
Main engine room 2 flooding progressively from auxiliary machinery room 2 through the bulkhead 254 starboard shaft seal (30 gallons per minute).
No electrical power in the forward two-thirds of the ship.
Although the ship’s initial list and trim (sideways and longitudinal tilt) immediately after the blast were greater, it settled to a 4.6 degree list to port with a 0.5 degree (1.6 meter) trim down by the bow.
Amidships bank compensated fuel oil storage tanks and port side service tank ruptured.
Starboard propulsion plant (main engine room 1) out of commission.
Port propulsion plant status unknown.
The divers estimated that 200 tons of fuel (almost 60,000 gallons) had been lost from the damaged tanks and that the ship had taken on approximately 2,300 tons of floodwater.
This information was sent to the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington. There, experts developed a plan of action to continue the work the crew had begun to stop progressive flooding, maintain power and keep the firemain operational, and reduce the list (sideways tilt) and trim (longitudinal tilt) of the ship caused by the flooding. Later, they developed a plan to move the ship from Aden to a safe location.1 Our own next step would be to decide how to begin the recovery of the remains of sailors trapped in the wreckage of the mess line, galley, and main engine room 1.
Today there would be no rest for the weary. While the crew had already seen Ambassador Bodine, Vice Admiral Moore, and several Yemeni government officials come out to the ship to view the results of the attacks, General Tommy R. Franks, U.S. Army, the Commander of Central Command, was to make a visit (his only one) to the ship. Cole was under General Frank’s operational control and this visit, while expected, came sooner than we anticipated.
A tall and imposing figure, the general arrived by one of the Marine anti-terrorism security team’s zodiac inflatable hull boats. With an armed security detail in tow, he strode quickly and confidently across the refueling pier and up the brow. There was no place to mount the ship’s bell and still no fanfare for any visitor, regardless of rank. Chris, Master Chief Parlier, and I greeted him at the brow. After a quick brief about the stability of the ship and the welfare of the crew, we started to walk the now standard visitors’ route.
At the epicenter of the explosion, the galley, the general paused and we talked about the effects of the blast on the ship. He seemed very interested in how watertight integrity on the ship worked. I explained—in probably more detail than he wanted or needed—how our decision to set modified condition Zebra on the damage control deck and below and to compartmentalize the ship as much as possible was a key factor in our ability to save it. He had also heard how, despite an inoperative 1MC and no one to tell the crew what to do, they had performed magnificently and used their training to respond to the attack with damage control and security measures. He seemed impressed at how well the crew had held up in the days since.
But as we walked about the ship, he repeatedly did something that made me think he was disconnected from the reality of what had happened to us. As we passed crew members going about their work or standing their watches, he would stop them, shake hands vigorously, and slip from his palm to theirs small metal coins. These were called challenge coins, with a red Central Command emblem on one side and a miniature relief map of the region on the other. These were his personal challenge coins, with his name on them, and he seemed fixated on handing them out to crew members right and left.
At first, I thought it was a nice gesture and a measure of his respect for the crew. As we continued to walk around, however, it seemed to me that he thought this was just another peacetime visit to troops in garrison. We still had bodies trapped in the wreckage of the mess line, galley, and the destroyed engine room. The crew, only hours before his arrival, had barely been able to prevent the ship from sinking. Everyone was traumatized and exhausted. Yet here was the commanding general in charge of a major theater of operations, walking about a devastated ship, handing out coins and backslapping the crew as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
As we wrapped up the tour and walked back to the flight deck, General Franks asked if he could address the crew for a few minutes. While I looked composed on the outside, inside, my mind was churning with the disbelief about his casual demeanor. As calmly as possible, it was explained to him that the crew was extremely busy preparing for the coming onslaught of support personnel. While they would probably have enjoyed hearing his remarks, it would be disruptive to stop everything. No doubt disappointed, but thankfully accepting my explanation without a clue as to the real reason, he prepared to leave the ship from the quarterdeck. Again without fanfare, he saluted, walked down the brow and across the pier, and quickly faded into our mem
ory as he went ashore, with his security detail in tow.
Back again on my black fender perch, I motioned for Chris to come over. With no one in earshot, I pulled from my pocket a plastic bag of about twenty coins the general had handed me and asked, “Can you believe him? He was totally oblivious to what happened to us. As we were walking around the ship, he kept handing these coins out to the crew like he was on some walking tour of an Army base.” Chris just shook his head in amazement. “Captain, do you want me to take those from you and distribute them?” he asked with a smile. I just smirked back at him and said, “No, I’ll just hold onto these for now. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them but I’ll just hold onto them. I just can’t believe him.”
More pressing matters soon consumed our attention.
Besides the FBI team and the divers (joined by the lead officer from their home unit in Norfolk, Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2, Commander Barbara L. “Bobbie” Scholley, USN), volunteer workers and technical experts from the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and the Shore Intermediate Maintenance Activity in Norfolk came aboard to assist in the ship stabilization efforts. Lastly, a Special Psychiatric Rapid Intervention Team (SPRINT) deployed from the Naval Hospital in Sigonella, Italy, plus two Fifth Fleet chaplains, arrived to begin working directly with the crew to start the process of helping everyone deal with the post-traumatic stress from the attack.
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