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 destroyer as the $1 billion warship was refueling at a floating pier in the port in Yemen. 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. Kirk Lippold, 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 Sonar 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.