Front Burner (10 page)

I told Chris this was a great idea. He then left my cabin to go down to the quarterdeck to make the announcement, and said he would be in the classroom in the aft part of the ship holding a meeting of our welfare and recreation committee.

Around 1115, the sewage barge, shortly followed by the two trash boats, left the side of the ship and headed across the harbor to dump their waste. The quarterdeck watch and security personnel stationed topside had been told to expect the third boat to come out to the ship shortly to pick up any remaining material.

With the quiet hum of a ship at work in the background, I slid my chair up to the desk and turned back to the never-ending grind of paperwork in front of me. The smell of lunch being prepared for the wardroom wafted into my cabin and, despite the slight delay getting into port, the revised refueling schedule had buoyed everyone. Soon,
Cole
would be underway and back out at sea where we belonged and ships are safest.

S
UDDENLY, AT 1118, there was a thunderous explosion. Eight thousand four hundred tons of guided missile destroyer thrust quickly and violently upward and to the right. Tiles from the false ceiling in my cabin popped out and landed on the floor. The coffee and water on my small round table tipped over, spilling onto the dark blue carpet. Everything that was not bolted down lifted off my desk and seemed to float twelve inches in the air for a split second before slamming back down with a dull thud. Around me, it felt like we had just been speared like a giant fish as the ship rose up and flexed back and forth, so quickly and violently that I had to pull myself out of my chair, stand on the balls of my feet in a crouched position, and grab the underside of my desk to keep from being knocked over. The
Cole
seemed almost to float slowly in a counterclockwise direction before settling back down in the water. All the lights went out and the emergency lighting came on. Everything rolled from side to side as the ship surged forward and backward alongside the refueling pier in an odd three-dimensional circular motion.

As soon as I gained my footing, I turned left toward my cabin door and staggered to the opening, holding the doorframe on either side. One
emergency light from a battle lantern right above the door shone brightly towards the floor in front of me. Another, halfway down the passageway, glowed eerily in the dark, illuminating the path from the wardroom (the officers' mess) on the port side of the ship opposite my cabin.

Engineer Officer Debbie Courtney, who had been in her cabin working, came flying out of her stateroom, steel-toe boots untied, heading for the central control station to try to find out what had happened, looking wordlessly into my eyes as she ran by. A cloud of smoke and dust came rolling from the port side and down the passageway toward me. There was almost complete silence. No noise—not a fan, not an alarm, no announcements from the quarterdeck watch—just blaring silence. As the cloud washed over me, I could smell dust and the pungent odor of fuel, and something else—a repellent acrid and metallic tang that seemed to sink into my mouth and nose.

Lieutenant (junior grade) Jim Salter, the system test officer for the Aegis weapon system, came out of the stateroom immediately to my left and grabbed the doorframe. “What the fuck was that?” he asked me, and for a second he stared into the distance. Then he gasped “Fuel!” and took off down the passageway. He ran toward the refueling laboratory outside main engine room 1 to see if the fuel we were taking on had exploded during the refueling.

Instantly I knew that we had been attacked. How, by whom, and how badly we had been damaged I could not know. But as the ship was moored with the right side to the refueling pier, I knew that if fuel had exploded, either on the pier or inside the ship, we should have been shoved to the left. Instead,
Cole
had been violently thrust up and to the right. On the left side of the ship was the open harbor area around the pier. Something must have detonated on that side. I had to get down to that area of the ship and find out what had happened.

Quickly, I turned around and went back into my darkened cabin. In the small safe near the headboard of my bed, I kept the keys to all the weapons for the ship—missiles, five-inch gun, close-in weapons system, torpedoes, and so on, but also a personal weapon: a Sig Sauer P229 9 mm pistol and three thirteen-round clips of ammunition I had brought with me on deployment.
At that moment I didn't know if we had been boarded, or if we would come under sniper fire, or anything else. I took the pistol in my right hand, grabbed a magazine full of ammunition and shoved it into the butt, chambered a round and decocked the gun before heading out of my cabin, two spare magazines clicking against each other in my left front pocket.

One deck below, outside on the starboard side of the ship next to the refueling pier, I glanced around. Not a single person was anywhere in sight—no one. The area in front of me, where the quarterdeck watch had been positioned—the officer of the deck, petty officer of the watch, and messenger, the “front office” of the ship in port—was deserted. Manned by three experienced watch standers, Storekeeper First Class Rodney Jackson, Ship's Serviceman Second Class Craig Freeman, and Ship's Serviceman Third Class Paul Mena, I knew they would not have abandoned their watch unless absolutely necessary. Already the crew had raced out to find out what had happened.

The ceremonial wooden podium that served as a desk for the deck log and held routine paperwork used by the watch team lay splintered and scattered across the deck. Thick black wires, still attached to the crossbeam of the mast—all that was left of our high-frequency radio antennas—were draped across the deck. Dirty black water was dripping down off everything. Small pieces of blackened debris lay scattered all around.

I did not know if this attack would be just the first of many. I didn't know if we were going to be, or had already been, boarded by someone carrying out this attack and now wreaking havoc throughout the ship. I had to get to the port side.

Holding my pistol pointed upward and ready to use, I ran around the corner towards the epicenter of the explosion, ready to die to defend my ship, my crew, and my country. A memory flashed to mind. On July 6, 1977, I had stood in the center courtyard, Tecumseh Court, at the U.S. Naval Academy, sweat running down the middle of my back, my hair closely shorn and my crisply starched and freshly issued uniform beginning to smell of the sweat of the unknown. “What have I gotten myself into?” I wondered over and over as my classmates and I stood in the still of the late afternoon sun to enter the U.S. Navy. Moments later, I swore an oath
to my country, to support and defend our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I was now committed to giving my life to defend my country. Those words spoken over two decades before were now stark reality as I took a deep breath and steeled myself to face what might be my own death.

As I reached the middle of the port side amidships area, on the left side at
Cole
's midpoint, Gunner's Mate Chief Norm Larson ran up, wearing an open flak vest and a Kevlar helmet, its chinstrap dangling loosely down his cheek. He and I stopped and stood still for a second. Locking eyes, I made a quick, sweeping gesture with my hand as if silently asking about the devastation surrounding us. Clearly, this was the center point of the blast. The deck was littered with debris. Measuring back about twelve feet from the back of the port brake—a semi-enclosed shelter used by crew members working topside in bad weather—and five feet from the side of the ship, the central part of the deck bulged up about eight inches into a slight peak. Several of the fiberglass lifelines that had lined the port side had been snapped off by the force of the explosion and lay limp on the deck in front of us or hung over the side.

Chief Larson placed himself directly in front of me. “Captain, you need to get down or get back behind something,” he said, reaching out to try to tuck in the collar rank insignia on my coveralls. “Sir, you really need to take your khaki belt off and stop pointing at things. You could be a sniper target!”

“Chief, don't worry about me. I'm not a sniper target,” I told him. “These guys don't operate like that. Let's get the focus off me and back out on the harbor. We cannot allow anyone else to get alongside.”

The list to the port side was slowly increasing. The ship was flooding. Carefully, I leaned over the side of the ship and could see the top curve of what had to be a huge hole. Black and brown scorch marks sprayed out from the blast hole itself. Small pieces of black residue speckled the side of the ship. And the metal surrounding the hole was bent inwards in huge jagged shards from the force of the explosion.

Clearly, something had detonated alongside us. The ship's general workshop, the adjoining sixty-foot-wide main engine room 1, the galley
one deck above where the crew had just been taking their lunch, and the chief petty officers' mess, were all in the part of the ship where I was standing. In the engine room were the two gas turbine engines that powered the starboard propeller shaft, as well as the two reverse-osmosis water processing units that made fresh water out of 24,000 gallons per day of seawater. The explosion had been so powerful that I knew almost everything in these and immediately adjoining spaces must have been destroyed or severely damaged, crippling the ship and killing or severely wounding anyone who had been in these areas.

But what could have done this? With my mind racing to explain the devastation in front of me, I could see four orange rafts in the water along the length of the port side. Questions burst into my mind, “Could these have been the vehicle for a bomb?” “How did someone manage to get these rafts alongside the ship with no one seeing them?” They were evenly spaced, from directly below where I was looking into the blast hole to the area back by the flight deck at the stern of the ship. The first raft, in the area of the blast hole, was mostly sunk and in tatters. The next two were deflated, lying flat on the surface of the water. The fourth raft, however, was fully inflated and gently rubbing and bobbing against the ship back by the flight deck and fantail area. Based on the limited evidence I had before me, it seemed as though the raft nearest me must have been the one that detonated and blew the hole in the side of the ship. The force of the explosion must have damaged the detonators on the two deflated rafts and caused them not to go off. In my mind, the fourth raft alongside the flight deck area now posed the greatest danger to the ship. It had to be full of explosives ready to detonate and cripple the twin rudders and propellers for steering and driving the ship, and if that happened we could not get underway and out of port. At the same time, I could see the crew streaming out onto the flight deck area, peering over the edge of the port side. They could all be killed if the raft exploded. I had to do something, fast.

Meanwhile, Chief Larson had issued
Cole
's rapid response security team every weapon available: 9 mm pistols, M-14 rifles, twelve-gauge shotguns, M-79 grenade launchers, and ammunition. “Get everybody who
isn't part of the security team back inside the skin of the ship,” I barked out to him. He immediately passed the order to those on the flight deck, hollering, “We don't know what we've got out here.”

The security teams began rounding up the crew and shoving them back inside. One of the wounded being attended to by other crew members was Fireman Raymond Mooney, his face covered with blood. He was lying in the aft passageway near the exit onto the flight deck when he saw Chris Peterschmidt, the XO. Calling out and grabbing him by his coveralls, he pulled him close: “Sir! I saw what happened! I saw what happened!”

Mooney told Chris that he had been stationed near the forward refueling station, on the harbor side of the ship opposite from the refueling hose connection from the pier. His assignment had been to watch for a fuel spill into the harbor. He had seen the two garbage barges slowly make their approach to the ship, he said, but since they were expected—these were the first two, and there was to be a third—he saw no reason to be concerned. Once the crew had loaded the boats up with trash and debris, both headed together back to shore. He was watching them cross the harbor when he saw a third boat coming toward the ship at high speed.

Mooney wondered at first why it was coming toward
Cole
so fast, but as it got closer, it slowed to make a steady approach about forty-five degrees off the port bow. He could see it was white, about thirty feet long, with red on the interior. There was an open well in the boat with a center console for the controls and although it looked clean, almost new, it also didn't look so different from the previous two trash boats. The security team member who was watching its approach with him also seemed unconcerned, Mooney said. From when they first saw it, it took about thirty-five seconds to come alongside. The two men in the boat then looked up at Mooney, waved, and smiled. He was surprised, and hesitated before waving back. The boat bumped solidly into the side of the ship and drifted slightly away from the side.

Then, Armageddon.

A huge red fireball vaporized the boat and both of the men. Mooney's vision went black, and a quick flash of intense heat blew by him. He raised
his hands to his face and pulled them away, seeing what appeared to be only a few spots of blood.

Tearing off his headset, he jumped the eight feet down onto the deck from the refueling station. He ran across the front of the ship toward the starboard side and then down the starboard brake past the ship's small boats, past injured sailors lying on the deck, and back onto the flight deck. Two engineers he came across told him he looked in bad shape and should get to medical immediately.

Chris told two sailors to grab Mooney and get his wounds treated. Reaching a large medical box near the entrance to number 3 gas turbine generator room, they let Mooney sit down with a slump, and suddenly he was overcome with the most intense pain had ever felt in his life. His eyes were burning and he could barely see. The fireball from the explosion had caused flash burns to his face and eyes, now quickly swelling shut.