Front Burner

THE HOUR BEFORE THAT CALL had been horrific and life changing. When I walked off the bridge into the darkness immediately after the explosion, we were without power and slowly sinking into Aden harbor. It would be up to my crew to save the ship and take care of the wounded—and we would have to work fast.

What I discovered as I walked through the ship were the horrific results of the detonation of hundreds of pounds of high explosive. In about one ten-thousandth of a second, a rapidly expanding ball of gases sent a massive shock wave, traveling at over 25,000 feet per second, outward from the suicide boat. The initial expanding bubble slammed into the water around the rapidly disintegrating boat and suicide bombers. An incompressible fluid, the water instantly translated the force of the explosion in all directions downward and outward from its source in the boat.

Later investigations would reconstruct the sequence of events. Below the waterline of the ship the hydraulic energy from the explosion slammed downward into the seabed to form a crater about twenty feet across and four feet deep, then reflecting upward as a wave of energy focused toward the bottom of the Cole and its keel. The wave bowed the ship directly over the reflected blast area, and the ship rose almost ten feet before settling sloppily back into the water, gyrating drunkenly from side to side and surging forward and backward next to the pier.

The mooring lines tied to the pier and the fore and aft mooring buoys strained under the pressure of keeping the 8,400-plus tons of warship from breaking free from its moorings. None of them broke, but the strain flattened and scored small sections of the Kevlar lines where they rubbed back and forth in the chocks and around the bitts tying them to the ship.

The wave of dynamic energy that had not reflected downward spread outward as an immense pressure wave that impacted the side of the ship. The force punched through the half-inch steel hull and continued to expand inward. In less than three milliseconds, the blast wave surged through the engine room at its widest point, a sixty-foot-wide section in the middle of Cole. Instantly, main engine room 1, the galley, general workshop, mess line, chief petty officers’ mess, and the port side passageway were transformed into unrecognizable and misshapen spaces of bent and jagged metal.

In moments, the general workshop disappeared. Energy from the blast pressure wave was transferred to sheet metal, a desk and computer, welding equipment, and steel storage racks as everything was blown through the air toward the quickly buckling bulkheads, which had separated the workshop from main engine room 1. A five-ton metal lathe for milling replacement parts sheared off its foundations and flew across the ship onto the starboard upper level of the engine room. Simultaneously, the pressure wave of expanding gases folded the steel walls up like wadded paper, leaving the engine room exposed to the brutal force of the explosion.

As the blast pressure wave crushed into the ship, the machinery in its path—the reverse osmosis water filters, local operating console and gas turbine modules for the 1A and 1B gas turbine engines, the number 1 high-pressure air compressor, and the starboard reduction gear that converts rapidly spinning gas turbine revolutions into turns of the propeller shaft—were all either sheared off their bases or twisted and crushed into almost unrecognizable, misshapen chunks of metal. A six-foot-long, four-inch section of pipe ripped away and became a deadly missile. Flying across the space and accelerated by the gases, it pierced the three-inch-thick reduction gear casing, stuck out for just a moment, then bent over to lie awkwardly twisted over on the top of the gear.

Outside, the ten-degree outward flare of the hull caused the blast pressure wave to radiate away from the ship for a split second before curling back over the top of the ship, causing overpressure damage to the superstructure and fittings topside. Each piece of equipment with a fiberglass dome or covering was damaged, including antennas for the AN/SLQ-32 Electronic Warfare set, the International Maritime Satellite dish, and the dome covering the forward MK-15 close-in weapons system (CIWS) antenna. The force of the blast pressure wave snapped an ultra-high frequency antenna off its mount and sent it arcing through the air to land with a metallic thud on the refueling pier.

By the time the explosion had run its course, main engine room 1 was destroyed and flooded. The galley directly above it was ripped into shreds and unrecognizable as floodwaters rushed into auxiliary machinery room 1, the supply office, and the reefer decks containing the refrigerator, freezer, and dry provisions storeroom. In auxiliary machinery room 1, water and fuel leaked through cracks in the bulkhead, while back aft, main engine room 2 was slowly flooding with an oily water and fuel mixture leaking from additional cracks in the bulkhead, as well as around the shaft seal for the starboard shaft, which had been damaged by the flexing of the ship.

After talking with the Yemeni port authorities, I knew I needed to get to the central control station, where damage control efforts should be well underway. Stepping off the bridge, my footsteps echoed loudly off the walls as, minutes after the explosion, I descended the “ladder,” the stairs on the starboard side to the passageway to my stateroom two decks below. The only lighting came from battery-powered emergency “battle lanterns.” My cabin was completely dark, but I ducked in and grabbed a Maglite flashlight from the top drawer of my desk. Then I went down two decks more to get to the control station.

Smoke and dust still hung in the stale, hot air. Looking aft through the starboard passageway that ran the entire length of the ship, I could see that normal lighting was working in the back third of the ship, from past the mess decks all the way back to the stern. Electricity was still available to the pumps in the engineering plant, which meant that the damage control teams should be able to control the inflow of seawater from the huge hole in our side.

I passed one of the damage control team members, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Martin Songer, who was surveying compartment after compartment and reporting what he found to the repair stations. He told me that repair teams were busy throughout the ship, and confirmed what I had seen from the main deck outside: the heaviest damage was in the area of main engine room 1. He quietly turned and went down the ladder toward auxiliary machinery room 1, the engineering compartment just forward of that engine room, to survey the damage with Machinery Repairman Second Class Rick Harrison, who was already in the space.

The farther back I went, the more sickened I was by what I saw. The thick bulkhead that formed the wall of the starboard side passageway bulged out of place. A little farther on, at the intersection of the passageway and the way to the mess line, the walls of Repair 5, one of the three main repair stations and the only one specifically outfitted with the material we needed to cope with damage to the engine room, had warped, its door jammed shut by the blast. To the left of the bent door and entrance, what was left of the mess line—the cafeteria counter where crew members were served their meals—appeared to be nothing more than a tangled and crushed mass of twisted metal. Along the mess line and in front of Repair 5, pools of blood collected on the deck. It was an absolutely heart-rending sight.

I continued aft in the starboard passageway and through the open watertight door. From the darkened passageway, I opened the door to the ship’s main medical treatment area. Inside, it too was completely dark, without lights or power. That meant the ship had no ability to treat wounded except for two small battle dressing stations near the remaining two repair lockers, Repair 2 up forward and Repair 3 under the flight deck and the fantail at the back of the ship. The back doors of the treatment area opened onto the mess decks and here, the area designated for mass triage—part of the mess decks, where the tables could also be used to examine and treat wounded sailors—was itself a battle casualty. In the darkness, my flashlight played across glints of broken glass, shattered plates, cracked serving trays, and knives, forks, and silvery spoons scattered in front of me. Food was everywhere. I walked carefully through the debris over to the port side passageway. The watertight doorframe just forward of the mess line was twisted, the door hanging at an awkward angle.

Just beyond the door was total devastation: the heavy metal deck, the floor of the mess line, where sailors had been sliding trays and getting servings of chicken fajita, had curled upward at about a sixty-degree angle, jamming into the overhead. I went back into the mess decks and sought another entrance from which I could step up into the mess line and the area that used to be the galley.

Halfway across the forward bulkhead of the mess decks was a small, unblocked passageway that contained the entrance down into the flooded supply office and auxiliary machinery room 2. Stepping through, I found myself standing at the edge of the blast hole itself. Sunlight came through the gaping hole in the side, and outside I could see the harbor water and floating pieces of debris. A jagged mass of metal, which must have been the steam tables and other fixtures, had crushed against Master Chief Parlier’s office next to the galley entrance and was jammed up against the bulkheads that formed the wall of Repair 5, almost sixty feet across the ship from the source of the explosion. From where I was standing, there was no way I could get in.

What had been the galley, the kitchen, was no longer recognizable, and the deck—the floor right above main engine room 1 and the general workshop—had violently fractured into four sections. One piece had been the one I had seen jutting up and cutting off the port side passageway. While I did not yet know it, this piece had also severed the eight-inch fire main that encircled the ship. A second shard of the deck had ripped forward and slammed into the chief petty officers’ mess, killing and injuring or trapping inside about two-thirds of my chief petty officers, the leading enlisted men on the ship, until rescue teams could succeed in cutting them out. A third piece of the deck had scooped up the galley equipment—ovens, griddles, sinks, and food preparation areas—and shoved everything violently toward the starboard side.

The fourth piece had peeled up and slammed back toward the forward bulkhead of the mess decks. That had crushed the stainless-steel serving line, where sailors were sliding trays and getting servings of chicken fajita for early lunch, and jammed the metal upward into the overhead. Now, in the devastation, I could smell an overpowering odor of fuel coming from what was left of the engine room, immediately below. Thousands of gallons of fuel had continued pumping into the ship at 2,000 gallons per minute for at least five to seven minutes after the attack, and it was now freely flowing into the gaping area left by the explosion and out into the harbor. And I could hear, down in the blast hole, in the middle of the thousands of gallons of fuel, the popping and crackling of live electrical wires. Great, I thought. Not only have we suffered a devastating explosion, now the ship could have a major fire on its hands. I had to get to CCS, and fast.

I turned back to the mess decks and walked by the scullery, and then back into the starboard passageway, where two sailors stood staring down at the deck. Between us lay the bloody and shattered remains of Signalman Seaman Cherone Gunn. Gunn was an eager and hardworking sailor with a sharp intellect who loved being in the fresh air and near the bridge when underway. When his time for a three-month rotation as a food service attendant came up, his professional demeanor and easy smile landed him in the wardroom, where the officers took their meals. He was well liked and clearly enjoyed the ability to exercise discretion with the sometimes unrestrained banter among the officers. Now he was lying there, the blue tablecloth haphazardly tossed over him only partially covering his body.

I snapped the fingers of my right hand at head level to grab his two shipmates’ attention and, pointing with two fingers at my eyes to get them to look at me, told them, “Hey guys, focus. There is nothing we can do for him. I’m sorry, but he’s dead.” They shook off the daze they had been in and looked directly at me. I asked them where their emergency (general quarters) stations were, and both named them and started hurrying off. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I told the second sailor. “Before you go to your general quarters station, I need you to do something for me. Go down to one of the aft berthing compartments and get a couple of blankets. Bring them back up here and let’s get our shipmate covered and moved out of the passageway. Can you do that for me?” Calmly, he answered, “Yes sir, I can,” and left.

As the sailor walked away to find blankets, the impact of that earlier decision to have the security teams push the crew back inside the skin of the ship because of the unknown security situation topside lay spread before me on the deck. Wounded crew members were haphazardly spread in random order on the deck as far as I could see. Some of the wounded were in the engineering office just off the passageway, and even more were scattered along the aft-most passageway that ran across the back of the ship.

Injuries were typical for an explosion of this magnitude: broken bones, shrapnel, cuts, scrapes, bruises, shock. The crew feverishly sought to stabilize and calm their wounded shipmates. Fortunately, there was no sense of panic, no uncontrolled fear. The crew before me so far had been amazingly calm and efficient as they moved along the passageway, doing what needed to be done to save their ship and shipmates. Even here among the wounded, I heard no raised voices.

As the executive officer, and not knowing my status, Chris got to CCS before I did. Communication with the crew was critical in these first few minutes. He picked up the microphone to make an announcement on the 1MC public address system, but it did not work. The back-up system was down as well. One by one, he attempted every method possible to try to communicate with the crew and the repair lockers. Nothing worked. Every circuit seemed to have been damaged or destroyed by the explosion.

By now people who had organized into small damage control parties were beginning to survey the damage. One by one, each group would come back into the engineering control station to report that USS Cole had a massive hole on the port side. The most telling description was when some said that it looked like a giant had taken his fist and punched through the ship. No one had ever seen this much damage to a ship before. For many it was almost incomprehensible.

A wave of debris had been blown from one side of the ship to the other, almost coming out the opposite side. This created a great divide inside the ship, making the port side impassable. Initially, even portions of the starboard passageway on the other side seemed blocked, and in order to go forward of the damaged area, personnel had to go up to the main deck, cross it above the damage, and then go back down inside. As time progressed, Chris continued to have a lot of trouble communicating to the crew members that were on the other side of this damage.

When I reached the central control station, I found Engineer Officer Debbie Courtney and her engineers to my left, reviewing the status of the only operating gas turbine generator, number 3. They were discussing the kilowatt power load on the generator, the number and types of pumps still running, and what other equipment they needed to get back online and operating in order to save the ship. The flat screen plasma displays and indication panels that normally showed the status of the alarms throughout the ship were just continuously scrolling data and no one could make any sense of the readouts.

To my right, the damage control assistant, Sean Dubbs, a brand new ensign who had finished specialized training a few weeks earlier and had been flown out to the ship while we were operating in the Adriatic less than two weeks before the explosion, was calmly plotting the damage control status reports. That team, working under Chris, was taking in information, analyzing what they knew against what needed to be done, and making decisions that could well determine whether we stayed afloat or sank at the refueling pier.

Standing there in CCS watching the messengers delivering vital information to each of the two teams at work, I watched as Chris and Debbie continued to develop a better picture of the status of the ship. After silently watching what was going on for about thirty to forty-five seconds, I finally said, “Engineer, XO, when you two are ready, tell me what we’ve got.” Seconds later, both were standing in front of me.

Chris then updated me on the damage to the ship as messengers from the repair lockers continued to report it. He reported that they had initially been unable to establish normal communications via the ship’s internal voice communications system (IVCS). Falling back on the standard for shipboard communications since World War II, they had gone to the secondary system of sound-powered phones. This phone system requires only the power of a sailor’s voice to vibrate a diaphragm, which transmits those vibrations through a drive rod to an armature centered in a wire coil, creating an electric current that is transmitted to a receiver, where the process is reversed and the voice can be heard. Even though this system is extremely reliable, they were only able to communicate with Repair 3; apparently the sound-powered phone system to Repair 2 was not working.

In an attempt to overcome this obstacle, Chris had ordered emergency communications wires, also known as salt and pepper lines, to be strung from the central control station to Repair 2. A team had been busy doing this when I walked in. Within a few minutes of my arrival, however, sound-powered communications were established and maintained with both repair lockers. While standing there taking reports, messengers from the repair lockers ran in and out of CCS with messages. Even with communications established, the most reliable form of communication, a sailor from a repair locker would be used for the near term to guarantee the flow of information.

The battery backup system—the alarm systems for the ship to sound general quarters and other emergencies—which was tied to the 1MC system, even the alarm indicator systems that could have shown the engineers in the command center where the ship might be experiencing flooding, fire, or smoke—all had failed. Without these systems, the crew did not have the benefit of anyone or anything to tell them what to do or what had happened to the ship. But they did not let that stop them from doing what they could see obviously had to be done.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion the engineers had determined that none of the alarms could be relied on to provide accurate data, and they quickly came to ignore them. Every few seconds as I stood there, alarm indicator lights would start flashing and their associated aural annunciators would start ringing from random signals in the system. Each time, someone would reach out and immediately press a button to acknowledge and silence them without even bothering to determine their origin or cause. It was controlled pandemonium as everyone was trying to figure out what happened.

Debbie briefed me on the status of the engineering plant, including the generator and what pumps were online. Next she told me about the lack of firemain pressure, which would make it impossible to fight a serious fire if one broke out. Everyone in the central control station was on edge knowing that thousands of gallons of fuel had leaked into the area beneath the smashed galley and into the destroyed main engine room 1. If those areas could not be quickly and completely electrically isolated and the fuel flashed to a major conflagration, the ship would have almost no chance of staying afloat. She also reported that one of the two still functioning gas turbine electricity generators had shut down, for unknown reasons, and that power was out in the forward two-thirds of the ship. Chris confirmed that main engine room 1, the general workshop, and the fuel lab, which controlled the flow of fuel into the tanks during refueling, had all been destroyed and flooded. Two members of the crew who had been working in the lab with “Drew” Triplett at the time of the explosion, Gas Turbine Systems Technician-Electrical Second Class Robert McTureous and Gas Turbine Systems Technician-Mechanical First Class Kathy Lopez, had survived the blast, though severely injured, and had escaped by swimming out of the hole in the side of the ship into the harbor, where shipmates fished them out to safety. Triplett was still missing.

I already knew the galley had been destroyed, and now learned that water pouring into the ship had flooded auxiliary machinery room 2 just aft of main engine room 1, the supply office and supply support, as well as the reefer deck, where all the ship’s canned and packaged food was stored. The refrigeration machinery and the computers that tracked maintenance records and personnel watch qualifications had also been inundated. Water was also seeping into main engine room 2, the largest single space on the ship, with the gas turbine engines that powered the port propeller shaft and other vital equipment. All around the starboard shaft where it passed through the bulkhead separating this engine room from auxiliary machinery room 2 and the flooded spaces forward, water was spraying in at high pressure.

“No, we are not going to sink,” I said after only a brief pause. “If those are the only spaces we’ve lost, we are not going to sink.” On Arleigh Burke–class destroyers like this one, it was possible to sustain flooding damage to all four of the main engineering spaces and remain afloat, if just barely. Cole had as yet lost only two of these spaces to flooding. “Let’s get the flooding and shoring teams down there,” I ordered, and the mood immediately changed. The sense of relief was almost palpable.

But bad news kept coming in. The repair lockers were reporting no firefighting water pressure, and Debbie and her engineers had shut down the pumps that pressurized the system. The ship would be in grave danger if fire broke out. Chris and Debbie were both aware of the live-wire problem in the ruined engine room and the galley, now full of water and fuel, and Chris had ordered aqueous film-forming foam liquid poured in to try to prevent ignition. Teams of sailors had dragged blue five-gallon jugs of it to the galley area and were pouring it down into the blast hole. Soon the repair locker teams were able to isolate and bypass the part of the firemain that had been severed. The fire pumps were restarted and, with the pressure successfully raised to the required 150-psi mark, damage control teams began spraying fire-fighting foam around the entire area damaged by the explosion. The imminent danger, it seemed, was past. The rescue and triage of wounded crew members and their treatment in hospitals was the next priority.