Front Burner (16 page)

Leaning over and placing a hand on his shoulder, I quietly told Chief Moser, “Chief, keep going as long as you feel you need to, but if the time comes, you have to make the call.” “I think we'll be all right,” he said, but a few minutes later, the team stopped working on Chief Costelow and slumped back, exhausted. He was now clearly dead. Chief Moser got up, his face twisted in anguish and anger, with tears streaming down his face. I turned to speak to him but as I did so, he turned away and tried to go back to work on the lifeless body. I reached out to try to comfort him, but he resisted me. Firmly, I reached out, grabbed his upper arms and looked into his tear-filled eyes. “Chief, we have a lot of sailors here who still need you to save their life. I need you to pull yourself together for their sake. Can you do it?”

He took a deep breath, looked at me, and with a cracking voice said, “Yes, I can, Captain. Just give me a minute,” and walked toward the port side to compose himself. As he did, I turned back to the sailors who had tried so hard to save Chief Costelow and said, “I'm sorry you couldn't save him. You did the best you could. Let's get him moved over there and get him covered up. We'll take care of him later, but we need to keep going with saving these other guys first.” They got up and gently moved him out of the way, covering him with a gray wool blanket.

Chief Moser was back in the middle of the triage area directing life-saving efforts within a minute. It must have been the most difficult decision of his medical career, but he was poised and in control, and I knew his professionalism would see him through and enable him to save other lives.

Without even a pause in the triage and damage control action, Chief Electrician's Mate James Newton came up to me with a couple of other engineering petty officers. He was a plankowner, or one of the ship's original crew members, when it was commissioned on June 8, 1996, and had served on board since then. Like Chief Costelow, he had been promoted to chief petty officer only three and a half weeks earlier. Since the leading chief for his division, Electrician's Mate Chief Fred Strozier, was seriously wounded and staged for evacuation off the ship, Chief Newton was now in charge, and presented me with a dilemma.

USS
Cole
's information systems technicians, who operated the ship's radios and associated equipment, knew that we had to get a radio operating in order to communicate with higher authority. Since radio central and its associated power panel were in the forward part of the ship without power, they had approached the engineers in the central control station with an idea. If they could run the emergency casualty power cables from a part of the ship that had power up to the panel for radio central, in the forward area of the ship, they should be able to establish communications using the installed radio equipment.

Chief Newton, standing on the deck by the triage area asked me, “Captain, I would like permission to run the casualty power cables from back aft to radio central. It's the only way we can get power to the forward part of the ship until we know what's been damaged.”

“Chief, do it. Make sure you follow EOSS and safety procedures,” I replied.

The Navy developed EOSS, the engineering operating and sequencing system, to provide watch standers with technically correct, logically sequenced procedures, charts, and diagrams tailored to each ship's specific configuration. It dictates the process to be followed to complete major and most minor plant status changes with minimal risk of damage to equipment or injury to personnel.

He then looked at me with a concerned expression and told me, “Captain, we've never done this before.”

At first, I was almost irritated at this statement. In my mind, I knew that of all the engineering drills and exercises
Cole
's crew had completed in the fifteen months since I had taken command, we had not made time to actually rig casualty power cables to test this vital damage control capability. In an odd way I was thinking to myself, Why is this new chief busting my chops now, in the middle of everything else going on around me?

I looked back at him and with a straight face said, “OK, chief. So what? Follow EOSS, follow the safety procedures, and let's get it hooked up.”

Chief Newton looked at me again and with all seriousness said, “Captain, I got it but I don't think you understand. We have
never
hooked up casualty power on
Cole
.”

I was dumbfounded. Here was a ship that had been through the most rigorous and intensive training necessary to successfully commission a new ship into the Navy; it had then done all the workups necessary for her first deployment; then successfully deployed to the Middle East and returned safely; then her crew had gone through a maintenance period and again completed the workups for the current deployment. Now I was being confronted with the fact that this crew might not know how to safely carry out this vital procedure.

Taking a deep breath, I looked back at the chief again and said, “It's OK, Chief. I understand what you are telling me. I know you know how to do it. Follow EOSS, follow the safety procedures, and take your time to get it hooked up without damaging equipment or hurting anyone. You can do it.”

I told him of my faith in his technical abilities. With a renewed sense of confidence Chief Newton looked at me and said, “Got it, sir,” as he turned and headed back inside the ship.

Unfortunately when Chief Newton attempted to get power to the power panel for radio central, there was a ground in the system, which greatly increased the chances of starting an electrical fire. Chief Newton made the wise decision not to troubleshoot the problem in the dark and later told me he had called off trying to get power to the panel.

He had given me this information and I had just mentally filed it away when Lieutenant Colonel Newman and Major Conroe from the defense attaché office in Sana'a had made their way out to the ship, about an hour after the explosion. As I have already related, at that point, because we had no radio communications, I had not yet been able to send my Front Burner report on what had happened. Some of the communications between Newman and Conroe and their office in the Yemeni capital, which I learned about only much later, gave a sense of how completely surprised the embassy was that terrorists were able to mount an attack of such size and scope.

As their boat left the dock, Newman received a call from Master Sergeant James A. Brown, U.S. Army, the Operations Coordinator and the third person in their office in Sana'a. “Sir, it's Sergeant Brown. We got a call about an explosion on board a U.S.-flagged ship in Aden. Do you know anything about this? The
Cole
is refueling today.”

“The explosion was on the
Cole
,” he responded. Brown could hear a motor running in the background. “I'm on a small boat trying to get out to the ship now. Major Conroe tried to get to the ship in the boat earlier but not knowing who he was, the crew trained their guns on him and he had to turn back. I've called from the harbor master's office to
Cole
's bridge and identified myself and told them not to shoot me. Hope this goes well.”

In an attempt to gather as much information as possible for the embassy staff, Brown asked, “Do you know anything about the explosion?”

“No,” Newman replied, “I was at the pool in our hotel when I heard it. I knew we had a ship refueling today and figured the explosion could only mean trouble, so I came down to the harbor. That's where I ran into Major Conroe.”

That was when Newman's tone suddenly changed and he exclaimed, “There's a big hole in the side.”

Realizing it was the
Cole
that had blown up, Brown told his coworkers, “It is the
Cole,
big hole in the side of the ship.”

Everyone wondered if it had indeed been an accident during the refueling that caused the explosion. “I've got to call Washington and Fifth Fleet and tell them there's a problem with one of our ships,” Newman said
to Conroe. But it was not until he had tossed me his cell phone that I was able to make the call myself and report that it was an attack that had blown us up.

Sitting at the time in a conference in Bahrain, home of the Fifth Fleet, Commander Lee Cardwell, the Fifth Fleet Cryptology Officer, was enduring a rather lengthy contractor briefing when the Fleet Intelligence Officer, Commander Sam Cox, quietly slipped in. Cox discreetly tapped Cardwell on the shoulder and told him to come out of the meeting. Cox told Cardwell that something had happened to the
Cole
in Aden and to go see what he could find out. Cox was going to talk to their boss, Vice Admiral Moore.

Cardwell went onto the Intel Watch Floor and talked to the staff's cryptological support group, which was assigned there from the National Security Agency (NSA). While no one knew for sure what might have happened to
Cole
, repeated calls to the ship using a satellite communications circuit that the ship was required to monitor went unanswered. Cardwell ordered the group to contact an NSA field office in the United States that gathered and monitored satellite information on unusual infrared events worldwide. He specifically asked them if there had been any detections or “blooms” in the area of Aden, Yemen.

While Cardwell continued his discussion with the watch standers about what may have happened, somebody came onto the watch floor and announced that
Cole
's CO was on the phone again in the Operations Center. Commander Gordon Van Hook, the Deputy for Surface Operations for Fifth Fleet had taken the call. Seeing Cardwell, Van Hook motioned him over and, as Lee flipped open a small notepad, Van Hook tilted the phone so both of them could hear the report.

The initial report had already been made to Fifth Fleet and this was my second call; I made it about ten minutes after the first voice report notifying them of the attack. The initial report focused on the damage control status of the ship and only indicated there were numerous wounded. There was specifically no mention of anyone killed in the attack.

From their perspective, this report was more specific—it articulated the compartments that had flooded, giving a more detailed overview of
the damage control status and the efforts being made to control flooding and possible fires. It also contained the devastating news that six sailors had been killed in action and over twenty sailors wounded in the attack. The report also indicated there were a further number of missing personnel inside the ship with an ongoing rescue and triage effort. The last part of the report included a request that when Fifth Fleet personnel came to the ship, that a chaplain accompany them.

Immediately after this latest report, Lee knew he had to get the information about the attack out to as many higher headquarters as possible. He decided to use a Critical Incident (CRITIC) report designed to get important critical information to the President within ten minutes of a message being released.

In all, such messages go to over a dozen different watch centers worldwide that are part of the National Operational Intelligence Watch Officers Network and includes the White House Situation Room, National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, Treasury Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Military Command Center, and the Combatant Commanders.

One of the great advantages of a CRITIC message is the fact that responsibility for sending it often rests with midgrade officers like Cardwell, and does not have to be authorized by senior officers in the chain of command. Having gathered all this information from the reports coming off the ship, he tried to convey it to one of the watch standers to have them type out the report. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent to Cardwell that it was taking too much time for the watch team to get organized and set up the computer to send out the message. Instead, he made an on-the-spot decision, sat down in the chair, typed out the message, and hit the send button without consulting the chain of command. The world now learned that a U.S. Navy ship had been the target of a deadly terrorist attack.

A few minutes after I had completed the first call to Fifth Fleet, at about the one-hour point after the attack and with the brow lowered to the pier, Ann was among the first people to leave the ship as she headed
directly to a boat waiting to take wounded crew members ashore. Following close behind her came litter after litter of wounded. Ensign Kyle Turner, the ship's anti-submarine warfare officer, had been in the wardroom eating lunch and, immediately after the explosion, ran, first to the bridge, then to his general quarters station in the combat information center, before ending up on the flight deck carrying the wounded down the brow to the pier from the secondary triage area. On his way to the flight deck, he had made a quick walkthrough of the mess decks area where he had found the remains of Seaman Gunn. Along with Hull Technician First Class Michael Hayes, they carried his body into the passageway, where I would come across it a few minutes later.

Once ashore, Ann talked with the doctors, made an on-the-spot assessment that the Yemeni hospitals were running dangerously low on blood supplies, and got word back to the ship that donors were needed to help. Chief Moser then took a couple of volunteers down into the dark of the main medical treatment area. While undamaged, the area was in complete darkness and disarray from the explosion. Using flashlights, they found medical records of crew members with key blood types, most of them O
₊
and O
_-
, and then located them and asked if they would volunteer to go ashore and give blood for their shipmates. Despite the danger and fear of going into what was now deemed to be a hostile country, none of those asked refused, and still others came forward and asked to help. Ultimately, about twenty sailors, including Sonar Technician Second Class Charles McPeters, Operations Specialist Second Class Denise Alton, Operations Specialist Second Class Earl Morey, Operations Specialist Third Class Missy Butler, Sonar Technician Third Class Kristen Wheeler, and Electrician's Mate Fireman John Buckley courageously went ashore, some to help Ann with the wounded, others to give blood at the main hospital and visit for a few short moments with their injured shipmates.