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Hanna and one other member of the team made their way to the port to get out to the ship. The Yemeni military and police forces had set up numerous checkpoints, and Hanna felt that he might have been able to get through them more easily if he had been wearing a uniform. Somehow he managed to persuade each one to let them through, and soon he was on the harbor master's bridge-to-bridge radio communication system telling the watch team on
Cole
that he was on his way out via a Yemeni small boat.

Stepping onto the pier, Hanna was struck by the overpowering smell of fuel. It permeated everything. He walked up the brow and was met there by Petty Officer Crowe, but again, Hanna felt that being in civilian clothes lowered his credibility, since no one on the ship could immediately recognize that help had truly arrived.

When I met Captain Hanna, other than the obligatory salute to a senior officer, there were no formalities or pleasantries extended by either of us. We got down to business straightaway. He was quickly but thoroughly
debriefed on what had happened throughout the day, the status of the damage control effort, and the latest information the ship had regarding the wounded ashore. He also received my assessment of how the crew was doing and what security and other watches were manned.

An exceptionally sharp officer, Hanna quickly absorbed this information and told me that he was going to establish an initial headquarters in the Aden Mövenpick Hotel downtown. Most important at that moment, he said he could see that because the galley area and food stores had been destroyed in the attack, we had no ability to feed the crew. The first thing he was going to do was to arrange for food to be brought out to us. He walked down the brow and, just before midnight, called the bridge watch and told them he was on his way back to the ship with meals for the crew cooked by the Mövenpick. A Yemeni boat glided up with him aboard, and its crew began to unload Styrofoam boxes of sliced roast beef, rice with brown gravy, bread rolls, apples, and more water onto the refueling pier.

The food was brought up onto the ship under the tarp covering the forward part of the flight deck, but when told to queue up to get the meal, the crew balked. They wanted nothing to do with meals that came from the Yemenis, who had in their minds attacked them or at least allowed an attack to happen. There was even talk that the food might be poisoned. So we quickly assembled all hands for a frank talk.

I told them how Captain Hanna had been dispatched by Fifth Fleet to help us deal with the aftermath of the attack. He had personally overseen the preparation of the food by the Mövenpick Hotel. It was safe for them to eat, and they would need it for the hard work they needed to keep doing to prevent the ship from sinking or being attacked again. They could not subsist on Slim Jims and Snickers; they needed real food. And though I didn't really know whether we could trust the Yemenis either, I took a Styrofoam box meal and some plastic utensils, and sat down to eat. With the XO and CMC queuing up next, only then did the crew relax and follow suit.

Captain Hanna checked in with me before leaving the ship and told me that the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, was expected to
return from a trip to Washington, D.C., during the night and would probably come down to the ship with him the following morning. There would also be more support personnel coming from Bahrain, including additional NCIS agents, as well as divers who would assess damage to the ship below the waterline.

It was now already early Friday morning, October 13. The ship's engineering force was continuing to work on
Cole
's vital systems. Two of the three 750-gallon-per-minute eductors—devices that depend on water pressure in the main drainage system and operate something like powerful siphons—were operational, keeping the leakage of water from the flooded sections of the ship under control. With workarounds to isolate sections ripped apart by the explosion, the fresh water and wastewater disposal systems were also operational in the aft berthing compartments. Although everyone was dirty and tired, adrenaline kept us all pushing forward. But the fans and air conditioning units for the crew's berthing spaces were shut off to conserve power, and it was over 100 degrees inside. I had told the crew we would be sleeping under the stars until we could get to the point where those systems could be safely operated, and as I looked at the deck it seemed that every piece of horizontal space on every level was now covered with sailors lying down and trying to sleep. And, about 0130, Chris and Command Master Chief Parlier came up to me and told me that we all needed to take some time to power down and get some sleep as well. We went to a small area at the very back of the ship to try to rest, and I closed my eyes with no real intention of sleeping.

Even if I had tried, sleep proved to be impossible. The images of the day kept replaying, even with my eyes shut. My mind raced with the many questions of what I needed to do next to keep USS
Cole
afloat. Chris and the master chief soon fell into rhythmic breathing, but I could not follow suit. I raised myself up quietly and got up to walk around the ship alone, my first chance to get a really good look at what had happened to us.

I checked in with the quarterdeck watch at the brow and told them I had my handheld radio walkie-talkie. Walking up the stairs to my cabin, I found the table still lying on its side, the rug stained and damp from
spilled coffee and water. The paperwork that had dominated my world a little over twelve hours ago lay scattered on the desk, singularly unimportant now. The pistol and three clips that had been returned to my cabin were in my desk drawer. I walked into the bedroom, opened the weapons key safe, and locked them away. I hoped I would not need them again anytime soon.

The bridge area was relatively undamaged, but looking back at the face of the forward engine exhaust stack, I could see that the dome for the ship's satellite phone antenna had been blown away, and on the mast, all the antennas for the radios appeared damaged, and one had been sheared off. Back inside, I walked down the ladder from the bridge and then forward up a port side passageway by combat system maintenance central towards Repair 2, crossed to the starboard side, and entered the combat information center, where the radars were dark and the space lifeless. I crossed through and went back into the port side passageway, going aft to where it was blocked by bent and twisted metal. At the entrance to the chiefs' mess was the large hole cut by the rescue teams. I stepped inside, where the sight I met took my breath away. The entire space had been crushed, the aft wall on the right side smashed and bent and folded over the edges of the tables, the seats shoved underneath so forcefully that they had bent the table supports. It was obvious that anyone sitting there when the explosion hit would have been cut in half.

I continued just behind the chiefs' mess entrance to look at the watertight hatch leading down to the destroyed fuel lab, engine room, and general workshop. My flashlight shone down into oily water. The ladder frame and handrails were twisted and deformed with several steps sheared off and missing from the force of the explosion. No wonder Petty Officers Lopez and McTureous had chosen to crawl through a tear in the wall near the waterline and swim out of the hole in the side of the ship. Crossing forward again by Repair 2, I paused to see the locker again restored after the pandemonium that had earlier defined our day. Continuing on to the starboard side, I made my way down the starboard passageway before walking down the ladders leading into the auxiliary machinery room forward of the flooded engine room. I descended to below the ship's waterline, and
could see from the emergency lights that had been run down into the space that small holes from various places along the bulkhead between the two spaces had been stuffed with rags and wedges to keep water from leaking in, but fuel and water were relentlessly filling the space. Back up in the starboard side passageway, I walked by the damaged Repair 5 locker. At some point in the evening, the Repair Locker Officer, Ensign Jason Grabelle, and members of the locker's repair team had pried open the door to Repair 5. Damage to the storage lockers and the crushed and bowed-in walls of the space had made it unusable. Rather than abandoning everything inside, however, the crew had completely emptied it of every bit of damage control equipment. Initially refilling the stocks used by Repairs 2 and 3 in saving the ship, the rest of the parts, pieces, and equipment had been neatly staged on the flight deck near what had been the second triage area.

Rounding the corner, the odd-shaped splatters of a blood-stained deck in front of me reminded me again of our situation as I found myself staring into the Command Master Chief's office along the mess line. The walls had been pushed toward the starboard side, and the whole space appeared to be cocked at a ten-degree angle. The desk was shoved against the filing cabinet. Amazingly, a picture of Master Chief Parlier's daughter was still taped to the distorted and crushed wall adjoining the destroyed galley, covered in a film of fuel oil, explosive residue, and dust, but it seemed clear that if he had been in his office, he would have been killed. Without his skills as a medical corpsman, many injured sailors probably would not have been saved.

I found myself once again standing at the edge of the blast hole. Faint light flickered off the harbor waters, the smell of fuel still hanging thickly in the dank air. Exiting through the small vestibule and across the mess line, I peered into the darkness of the blocked port passageway and around the corner at the end of the mess line. As my flashlight slowly traced the overhead, where a piece of the deck had blown up and toward the back of the ship, my heart froze. Just down the passageway from where I was standing, crushed in the mangled metal, the remains of a sailor stuck out from the bent wreckage of the ship—part of a head, a broken arm, some of a leg, and, barely visible in a fold of metal, a cold, lifeless hand.

Farther back down the passageway there was even worse. The explosion had picked up a sailor whole and violently propelled his body off the deck. His head and upper body were pinned into the overhead, and his body hung there against the aft wall. I could almost recognize who it was, but dared not guess for fear of wrongly alarming an anxious family back home.

I was staggered by the sight. Why my ship? Why me? What had I done wrong? Why had God allowed this to happen to us? What about my crew? How are we going to get through this? What would happen next?

Anxiety and a feeling of being overwhelmed washed over me as I made my way back to the starboard passageway and continued toward the central control station. Walking into it at 0515, I smelled fresh brewed coffee, which was welcome to me, but as I looked at the coffee pot, I spotted possible trouble—the pot was hard-piped into the ship's fresh-water system, and there were no empty bottles of water around it. This could only mean the engineers had disobeyed one of our key health concerns—they were drinking unsanitized water directly from the pier. The crew saw what I was thinking and the room grew still. They looked at me sheepishly, until someone finally spoke up. “Captain, we're already on our third or fourth pot of the night . . . well, sir, no one has been doing the Yemeni two-step, so the coffee must be OK.”

Finally, I forced a weak smile and looked around the room. “Well, all right. Where's a cup for me?” Everyone laughed.

Somehow, we would get through this.

L
EAVING THE CENTRAL CONTROL STATION before dawn at about 0530 Friday, the day after the attack, I walked down the starboard passageway and out onto the flight deck. Everywhere I looked, I saw exhausted and dirty sailors sprawled on the deck of the ship. Some were out cold. Others had not been able to get to sleep, or had woken up and quietly spoke with friends and shipmates. Several looked up as I walked toward Chris and the Command Master Chief at the stern of the ship. Squatting down, I spoke quietly to not alarm either of them, “Hey, XO, good morning.” As he woke up, Chris sat up quickly and objected that I hadn't awakened him earlier. Somberly, I said, “Well, I wanted you to get some sleep. One of us needs to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to face the day.”

I told Chris and the master chief that during the night the engineers had restored the freshwater and plumbing in the aft part of the ship and that they should go get a shave and a shower, and then get the crew up at 0600 to give them the good news that they could do the same. That meant that I could keep the crew on board instead of having to berth them in local hotels. I viewed this as critical to our survival as a group. It was imperative that we all persevere through this ordeal together.

Learning of the attack on
Cole
the day before through their respective military channels, three ships had arrived during the night off the coast of Aden within hours of one another: first was HMS
Marlborough
of the Royal Navy, commanded by Commander Anthony Rix, followed by USS
Hawes
and USS
Donald Cook
, with which
Cole
had been scheduled to rendezvous this day for turnover of Fifth Fleet duties. None of these ships had yet received diplomatic clearance to enter Yemen's territorial waters. The Royal Navy chose to disregard this inconvenience and immediately had
Marlborough
proceed and offer whatever assistance we needed. South Yemen had at one time been a British colony, and they understood the culture well enough to anticipate that this action would command respect—as a show of determination, strength, and confidence in their ability to help and protect an ally. The U.S. Navy, on the other hand, took a much more rigid and bureaucratic approach to such things. Both
Hawes
and
Donald Cook
were obliged to wait until late morning for diplomatic approvals before crossing into territorial waters to offer assistance. Both commanding officers later told me they were frustrated by the bureaucratic red tape and were prepared to disobey instructions if we needed immediate help.