10/12/2000: Date of Tragedy – USS Cole’s Bombing

Published: March 05, 2001

To Save the Cole Sailors topside raced to get below decks.

Shipmates below fought to get out.

They all worked to save their ship.

By William H. McMichael Times staff writer

The refueling stop was going smoothly. At the rate things were progressing, it wouldn't be long before the USS Cole pulled out of the Port of Aden to continue its journey to the Persian Gulf.

Estimated maximum time in port, from start to finish: About six hours.

Some of the 294 crew members were lining up outside the mess decks to grab a quick lunch; others continued their watch-standing chores.

Up in the filter-cleaning shop, one level above the main deck on the ship's port side, Ensign Sean Dubbs and four sailors were talking Terrorists triggered an explosion that business. ripped a gaping hole in the Cole’s port side. See full-size graphic. — Suddenly, the ship rocked.

"We heard this loud rumble," Dubbs recalled. Without warning, all five were thrown into the air. Light bulbs shattered, plunging the shop and much of the rest of the ship into darkness. Dubbs was knocked unconscious.

Back aft on the Cole's flight deck, sailors standing in the hot sun were knocked off their feet and showered with oil and soot as the ship bucked and rolled.

Down in the sick bay, on the starboard side of the main deck, Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Tayinikia Campbell saw the doors to the space fly open "like someone kicked them in."

A monstrous explosion had torn a 40-by-40-foot hole in the port side of the ship, crushing bulkheads, peeling back the deck and instantly killing or wounding dozens of crew members.

Screams of agony and fright wafted through the twisted ruins of the passageway outside the mess decks, close to where the explosive was set off.

It was 11:18 a.m. local time, Oct. 12, 2000. Two terrorists had steered their bomb-filled boat along the port side of the as the $1 billion warship was refueling at a floating pier in the port in . A seemingly endless number of stories have dissected the attack that killed 17 sailors and wounded 42. Questions linger over whether the Cole's skipper, Cmdr. , did all that could be done to protect the ship against such attacks.

Little has been written in any detail about the Cole crew members, from seaman to skipper, who saved the ship and their shipmates after the attack.

This is that story.

Plunged into madness

Thick smoke filled darkened passageways. Water poured into the gaping hole in the ship's port side, causing an immediate list. Sparks flew from torn, dangling electrical cables. Thousands of gallons of diesel marine fuel gushed from broken fuel tanks, coating everything.

For an instant, the survivors froze in place, stunned.

Then every able-bodied sailor and officer started running - to safety, or to perform one of the only three jobs that now mattered: corpsman, security guard and damage controlman.

No one knew what had hit them. No one knew they would spend the next four days in an around-the- clock battle to save their ship.

The Cole had suffered a crippling blow. Key leaders were dead or wounded. Internal communications were knocked out; except for undamaged handheld units, shipwide communications were impossible.

Sailors on the weatherdecks raced inside the ship. Frantic sailors trapped below scrambled to escape.

"It was chaotic," said Lt. Cmdr. Chris Peterschmidt, the Cole's executive officer.

But in the midst of the chaos, individual sailors and officers isolated from their chain of command began taking charge.

In the darkened sick bay, Campbell heard shouts of alarm and desperation: "Get out! Get out!" and "We need Doc! We need Doc!"

"I'm right here," Campbell yelled back. She and her striker, Seaman Eben Sanchez, dashed toward what was left of the mess decks and the galley and set up a makeshift aid station in the passageway.

Everywhere there were bloodied faces and bodies - some under pots, pans and heavy cooking equipment, others trapped by shredded decks and bulkheads.

Sailors were suffering: broken legs and jaws, deep gashes, crushed limbs and worse.

Some uninjured sailors began carrying the wounded to the corpsmen; others, Campbell said, "were just sitting there, freaking out." She calmed them down by sending them to fetch supplies.

Within minutes, Master Chief Hospital Corpsman (SW) James Parlier, the Cole's senior enlisted leader, arrived and relieved Campbell. She and Sanchez scrambled around the corner to the starboard passageway, where the injured were being lined up. The passageway became the triage station; the mess decks, where mass casualties normally would have been treated, were destroyed. 'There's people in here!'

For Hull Maintenance Technician 2nd Class (SW) Chris Regal, standing in an aft passageway near the flight deck, the refueling operation, the thunderous noise and the sight of sailors covered with oil spelled one grim possibility: Fire.

He found Damage Controlman 1st Class (SW) Ernesto Garcia, the Cole's leading petty officer for damage control. Strapping on portable breathing devices, they ran into the smoke billowing down the port side passageway of the main deck.

What they saw near the mess decks made them stop in their tracks. The watertight door that should have been there was blown away.

"Holy --!," Regal gasped. "There's nothing there."

What he saw was a gaping hole in the ship, filled with harbor water.

The two picked their way into the mess decks and through the debris to a doorway. Opening it, they found Parlier treating injured sailors amid the devastation.

Garcia began to help; Regal decided to check the other side of the damaged area.

An on-the-spot rescue party formed: Regal, Damage Controlman 3rd Class William Merchen, Fireman Daniel Sullivan and Master Chief Technician (SW) Paul Abney. Hustling down the starboard passageway and back across the ship, they heard screams and voices from inside the chiefs' mess, just forward of the galley and close to the explosion's center point.

"There's people in here!" someone yelled. Using their hands, feet and whatever they could grab, the sailors tore down the thin bulkhead and fought their way inside to a room that had been turned upside down. Bodies were everywhere.

Immediately, they had to make life-or-death choices. If an injured sailor didn't respond, they moved to the next, searching for the living, carrying them back to where Campbell and Sanchez were working.

Close by, on the other side of what was left of the galley, Garcia, Hull Maintenance Technician 1st Class (SW) Michael Hayes, Damage Controlman Fireman Sean Powell and Ensign Kyle Turner were doing the same thing.

"We moved a body that was there," Garcia said. "And as soon as I picked him up, I knew he was gone."

Most of the injured initially removed had been standing in the passageway, waiting in line for lunch. The more difficult casualties to get out were in the chiefs' mess and galley, where many victims were pinned by strewn equipment.

Senior Chief Storekeeper (SW) Goffery Pelly wedged himself between the wreckage of sinks and ovens to get to an injured sailor screaming in pain. Crew members freed the sailor using a mechanical "jaws of life" device.

One deck below the chief's mess, the blast had torn open the oil laboratory and cut the space off from the rest of the ship. Water streamed in through a jagged hole in the hull. Despite serious burns over 20 percent of her body, Gas Turbine System Technician Mechanical 1st Class (SW) Margaret Lopez waded through waist-deep water and fuel and guided one of her sailors through the hole and into the gulf waters. There was no other way out.

She then turned and swam back into the ship, searching for Ensign Andrew Triplett, who also had been in the lab. Unable to find him in the wreckage, Lopez waded back out into the gulf and then swam alongside the ship. Sailors on the main deck eventually hoisted Lopez and the other sailor aboard.

Later, it was discovered that Triplett, who had worked his way from the enlisted ranks to the officer corps, had been killed in the blast.

Getting the wounded topside

Peterschmidt, the executive officer, was coordinating the effort to save the ship out of Damage Control Central, in the aft portion of the ship, which still had lights. He grabbed a hand-held radio and reached Lippold, the Cole's commanding captain, who was organizing security teams.

The radios were in short supply; to communicate with most of the rest of the ship, the leaders in DCC turned to written messages and runners.

Assuming the ship was still under attack, Lippold and Peterschmidt decided to keep the casualties inside while armed security teams fanned out to guard the ship.

Treatment continued in the damaged areas, the starboard passageway and down in the aft battle dressing station, where Chief Hospital Corpsman (SW) Clifford Moser, the ship's independent duty corpsman, worked on other injured sailors.

Chief Engineer Lt. Deborah Courtney and the now-conscious Dubbs, who had been the ship's damage control assistant for all of one week, arrived in damage control. Along with Garcia, they began assisting Peterschmidt.

At the same time, all the ship's small arms were issued to the security teams, who quickly fanned out.

Roughly 20 minutes after the explosion, Lippold and Peterschmidt decided that the ship was secure enough to move the casualties topside. It was hotter than 100 degrees outside, but the interior of the ship was even hotter and filled with smoke. Two triage areas were set up: on the midships quarterdeck, where Moser would treat casualties from the forward part of the ship, and on the flight deck, where Parlier would care for the rest.

In both areas, sailors set up makeshift sun shelters to protect the injured; for the first few hours, they held the covers up by hand.

The heat wasn't the only problem. The ship now had no fresh water. Some sailors scurried to the wardroom to scoop up ice; others broke into the ship's store to grab the limited supply of bottled water.

Lippold reached port authorities and asked for small boats to take casualties ashore. Peterschmidt remained focused on the ship - which still was taking on fuel.

Damage control put to the test

"We stopped listing at 2½ degrees," Peterschmidt said. "We had a rough idea of what the damage was. We knew we had no fires. But a number of big fuel tanks blew, we were still taking on fuel - 2,000 gallons a minute - and we had a lot of live cables. So we knew we were close to sparking that fuel." Worse still, the ship had no fire main pressure. Some sailors also realized this and, without prompting, began pouring buckets full of thick, amber-colored firefighting foam concentrate on the ship's decks, creating a barrier between the fuel vapor and the cables.

Others began the dangerous job of making their way below decks to shore up leaks. In Main Engine Room 2, Regal and Merchen struggled to drive wedging material into holes already submerged and barely visible.

Sailors were working nearly autonomously and well beyond their normal levels of responsibility: Many of the leaders in engineering, including repair-locker leaders, had been in the chief's mess and were injured or killed. Damage controlmen also were handicapped by a lack of ready access to supplies: Repair Locker 5, the largest and best-stocked on the ship, was destroyed in the explosion.

"The forward and aft damage control crews were sort of on their own," Peterschmidt said. "Some of these kids made command-level decisions. Life-saving decisions."

In some instances, he said, junior sailors actually were leading seniors, "just by the force of their personality and their background."

"It just comes down to basic damage control," Regal said. "You gotta know how to dewater. You gotta know how to shore, and how to do it quickly. You gotta know how to don a [self-contained breathing apparatus]. Like that," he said snapping his fingers.

Reaching the outside world

Without power, the Cole could not communicate with U.S. officials. Fifth Fleet, which oversees Navy operations in the Middle East, initially had no inkling of what had happened. But the U.S. defense attaché, Army Lt. Col. Robert Newman, had heard the explosion in Aden. Knowing the Cole was in port, he hurriedly called the embassy on his cell phone and made his way to the waterfront.

Newman, who speaks Arabic, convinced a Yemeni boat operator to take him out to the ship. A half- hour later, standing on the fuel pier, Newman tossed the phone up to Lippold, who used it to file his initial report.

The decision was made: Move the wounded ashore. But the Yemenis had not responded to Lippold's initial call for help. The defense attaché contacted the port authority, and the local boats were soon on their way.

The boats were ordered to give the Cole a wide berth, circle around and approach from the fueling-pier side, to starboard. Any deviation, they were told, would draw fire. Still, the Cole's leaders worried about their skittish sailors on the security watch.

"Don't shoot at the boats," Peterschmidt ordered. It took "some doing" to convince the sailors not to shoot, he said.

But the Cole still had no way to get the injured down to the pier; the brief fuel stop did not require setting a brow in place.

Chief Boatswain's Mate (SW) Eric Kafka, who helped evacuate survivors from the chiefs' mess despite suffering torn leg ligaments and lung damage, took charge, getting sailors to haul the large aluminum brow stowed on the starboard side.

"He organized about 50 sailors to manhandle this thing," Peterschmidt said. "Normally, it takes a crane to lift it off the ship." The sailors got one end over the side, dropped it down and secured it. The angle was precariously steep - perhaps 60 degrees - but the sailors were able to move the stretchers, using ropes to guide them down.

"The ingenuity of the sailors doing all this rigging was just amazing," Peterschmidt said.

In 99 minutes, the 33 most seriously injured crew members were off the ship, headed for hospitals in Yemen and Djibouti. They were joined by another 40 sailors who volunteered to go ashore to act as "walking blood banks" - a necessity, given concerns about the condition of Yemeni blood supplies.

But until those 40 returned that evening, the ship was left to fend for itself with barely two-thirds of its crew.

Troubles far from over

The ship and crew were in a desperate situation. The flooding had been contained because Lippold ordered all below-deck hatches closed and dogged before coming into port, but the ship had taken on a large amount of water, and the pressure from that water threatened the ship's structural integrity.

Only the aft third of the ship had light, power and air conditioning, all supplied by the one remaining working gas turbine generator. All cabling running fore and aft was severed.

The ship had no fresh water and no toilets - everyone shared the one commode on the fuel pier. No food of any substance remained, as the explosion destroyed the ship's galley and dry stores. Lunch and dinner consisted of candy bars, potato chips and Gatorade from the ship's store. Embassy personnel ashore bought bottled water in town and ferried it to the Cole.

The nearest U.S. ships were two days away.

As the casualties were moved off the ship, the crew continued plugging leaks and dewatering flooded spaces. Fire, flooding and shoring watches were set. Within a half- day, custom-rigging efforts produced emergency communication lines and more internal lighting.

That night, the exhausted crew tried to sleep on the flight deck. But just before midnight, the seal around the starboard propeller shaft in auxiliary machine room No. 2 started giving way, and water began leaking in.

The weary crew again went to general quarters. Down in "Aux 2," Hayes and Regal hammered wooden wedges and sticky, fibrous oakum into the seal. After two hours of steady labor, they stemmed the tide.

The next morning, about 24 hours after the attack, the first U.S. reinforcements arrived: a Marine Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team that assumed many of the ship's security watches, allowing more sailors to contribute to the damage control effort. The Marines would stay aboard for two weeks.

Later that day, the embassy arranged for the delivery of meals produced in town. But, Peterschmidt said, "A lot of the crew wouldn't eat it, because you couldn't verify that no one had put anything in it."

The frustrated crew spent the better part of the next two days subsisting on junk food and bottled water.

Some didn't eat a meal for more than 48 hours, until small boats from the just-arrived destroyer Donald Cook and the supply ship Camden delivered pots of "chili mac" for the crew.

"That was the best damn food they ever had in their whole life," Peterschmidt said he was told. The meal was a brief respite from the ship's troubles. What the crew came to call "the long night" was fast approaching - the third night after the attack, when, Peterschmidt said, "we were most worried about losing the ship."

Part of the problem was political. The Yemenis would not allow any other allied ships into the harbor, which severely limited the amount of support available to the Cole. Another part lay with the remaining generator, the ship's sole source of power. Since the ship's electronic systems were lost, there was no way to monitor the fuel level in the generator's tank. And the crew unknowingly was underestimating what it needed.

Most critical, however, was the shored-up seal in Aux 2. For more than two days, the Cole's damage teams had been patiently trying to pump out all the water that had accumulated there.

But close to 11 p.m. the third night, the repairs started to give way and the water level began to rise. Rapidly. The crew was unable to pump out the water fast enough, even with six portable P- 100 pumps running.

The ship sounded general quarters and the burned-out crew again manned the repair lockers. Regal climbed down an escape trunk to see where the water was coming in.

Then, above decks, everyone heard a bulkhead give way. Torrents of water poured into Aux 2.

"At that point, we realized we weren't going to save that space," Peterschmidt said. "So we pulled out the dewatering equipment, and we dropped the hatches."

But now, the water pressure was building on the seal in Main 2, adjacent to Aux 2, dislodging the wedging material Hayes and Regal had pounded into place two days before. Main 2 contained the Cole's only working engine. If the leak were not stopped, it could flood Main 2 and the engine, killing any chance of ever getting the crippled ship under way.

Worse, flooding in that space meant the ship was in serious danger of sinking.

"You'd have two of the biggest spaces on the ship filled with water," Dubbs said. "And it just would have went."

About the same time, the generator ran out of fuel.

The ship was plunged into total darkness. Permanent dewatering equipment was rendered inoperable as water poured into Main 2 at about 15 gallons a minute, slowly filling the huge space.

This was the low point. The Cole was darkened and dead in the water in a hot, hostile environment. The ship was alone because the U.S. ships Hawes, Hayler and Donald Cook had left to refuel with the oiler Camden, 12 miles offshore.

Most of the batteries for portable lamps were dead. The leftover chili mac had started to rot in the oppressive heat. Shipmates' bodies were still pinned inside the ship. Everything was still coated with the scent of the explosive. Everyone was exhausted and filthy.

"It was like being in hell," Peterschmidt said. "This is what I imagine sailors in World War II had to go through - out in the Pacific, your ship's been hit, and you're the only people there to help you."

And after three days of it, the crew's frustration was peaking. "The captain and I both started not to ... I don't think we felt defeated, but we were getting to that edge, that boundary," Peterschmidt said. "It was a big realization that we might lose the ship."

'Our last choice'

Working by the flickering light cast by emergency lamps in Main 2, sailors were trying to dewater the space with the P-100s, but they weren't powerful enough to push the water all the way up through the fire hoses and over the side.

The ship's damage control team huddled. The only way to get the water out of the space was to shorten the distance the water had to travel. The only way to do that was to cut a hole to the outside of the ship.

It was a huge risk. The waist- deep water in Main 2 was coated with fuel, and flying sparks could ignite it.

"That was our last choice," Peterschmidt said.

Accompanied by Merchen, Hayes, Damage Controlman 1st Class (SW) Robert Morger and Machinery Repairman 2nd Class Rick Harrison, Regal worked his way up the listing bulkhead on the ship's starboard side. Bracing himself against an angle iron, he ignited a cutting torch and, with sparks flying, cut a hole big enough for a fire hose in the hull at a point about five feet above the fuel-covered water.

By 11 a.m. Sunday, 72 hours after the attack, the P-100s were pumping out water about as fast as it was coming into Main 2, keeping the flooding at bay. Soon afterward, the Hawes and the Cook arrived, having been called back from the refueling trip. Hawes sent over portable, pneumatic pumps. The Yemenis supplied an air compressor. The Cole crew members linked them all together and started de-watering Main 2.

The crew also discovered that the ship's generator had run out of fuel, and they tapped into the fuel pier to refill it. But it needed a blast of air to get the generator's engine going, and what they had on hand wasn't powerful enough.

The Cole's crew had an ace in the hole: divers - experts with air connections. The ship had brought along some commercial emergency breathing devices, like those used by firefighters, and these came with portable charging stations. Over the next 12 hours, the divers came up with a way to link the stations to the air flask on the main engine and charge it up.

"We had enough air for two engine starts," Peterschmidt said. "And it worked. We got the generator up, power restored."

"From then on, we never looked back," Peterschmidt said. "Everything started to improve from that day on. By midnight Sunday, we knew we were out of danger."

It took the rest of the week to remove all the bodies of those killed. And it would be another two weeks before the Cole would be loaded onto a salvage vessel and ferried back to the United States, like a casualty on a stretcher.

In early December, the crew was flown home to a hero's welcome in Norfolk.

The Navy hopes the Cole will be repaired and back in action this fall.

The sailors 'knew what to do' Members of Cole's crew are generous in their praise for their shipmates' efforts to save the ship.

In the eyes of the ship's senior officers, the sailors deserve all the credit.

"Every time that either the captain and I, or other senior leadership, were getting fatigued or - I don't want to say dejected - when we found our own spirits lagging," Peterschmidt said, "we looked around at all these other sailors, who were very undeterred by what was happening. And that in itself gave us strength."

The sailors, Peterschmidt said, "didn't wait for guidance. They knew what to do."

And their performance, Peterschmidt said, answers critics who say that modern sailors don't measure up to those of yesteryear.

"For a ship that was on the verge of the 21st century, in a lot of ways, we went back and did a lot of the things that our grandfathers did in World War II," Peterschmidt said.

"And for all those people who say, well, maybe we lack something that the other generation had - I didn't see it."

William H. McMichael is the Hampton Roads correspondent for Navy Times.