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Denise Woodfin suddenly walked up to me with a new problem. Behind her, under armed guard, was someone I had no idea was still aboard—the Yemeni husbanding agent who had arranged the supplies for the ship. He had been drinking coffee at the back of the ship with a young petty
officer escort when the attack came. Both were knocked to the deck, but as they recovered from the shock and word spread through the crew that we had been attacked, the escort became very nervous about the husbanding agent's presence and had one of the security teams take him into a loose form of custody.

As we were wrapping up the evacuation of the wounded, the agent had asked if he could leave, but he wanted to pick up the briefcase he had left with the quarterdeck watch amidships when he had come on board. When Denise came up to me with him, we didn't know who was responsible for the attack and I was not about to release the agent. His briefcase, left in the custody of the quarterdeck watch team, was clearly visible near what had been the quarterdeck watch area, leaning against the forward superstructure. We immediately cleared the area and told the agent that he would have to walk to the briefcase alone and empty it for us while everyone took cover. The escort security team drew their weapons, and the agent slowly walked forward, bent down, unlatched the flap, and gingerly emptied the contents onto the deck. Nothing but pens, paperwork, and his cell phone slid onto the deck. The collective sigh of relief was almost audible.

Seeing that his bag did not contain anything dangerous, the ship's master-at-arms or chief policeman, Master at Arms First Class Justin Crowe, took the bag and contents away for safekeeping and possible use as evidence. I told Denise that until American legal authorities arrived on board, I was going to continue to detain the agent and keep him separated from his bag, especially his cell phone.

By then it was shortly before 1300.

With the wounded evacuated from the ship, I went to the central control station to Debbie for a brief on how the engineers were doing to keep the ship from flooding further. Things were under control, though the only way the key decision makers and emergency teams could communicate with each other was through the emergency battery-powered radio walkie-talkies we had distributed after the power went out, and she was worried about the kilowatt load on the only operating generator, number 3. Then
she motioned to me that she had a private matter to raise with me. “Captain, I think we're doing OK, but your continuing to carry around that pistol is making everyone nervous. Would you mind letting the gunner's mates take custody of it for now? I think it will give everyone a sense of security to see that you are willing to part with it.” I hadn't thought about it, but reluctantly agreed, and soon the pistol and three clips were back in my stateroom desk drawer.

By the middle of the afternoon at 1530, a little over four hours after the attack, the damage control effort was still ongoing, but the flooding had been controlled and the bulkheads in auxiliary machinery room 1 and main engine room 2 had been braced against collapse from the tremendous water pressure from the flooded spaces on the other side of these walls. There were dozens of boxes of bottled drinking water stacked on the pier, but we at least had enough water for the crew. Most of the blood donors had returned to the ship. Only Ann and a few other crew members remained at the two hospitals to coordinate care for the sailors being treated there.

“XO, we need to get a muster [roll call],” I told Chris, “I don't care how long it takes—it has to be one hundred percent accurate first time out of the barrel. I don't want ‘I think I just saw,' ‘I just saw so-and-so with so-and-so,' or ‘I just saw him or her a few minutes ago.' I want khaki [officer or chief petty officer] eyes on every single crew member until we know everybody is accounted for.” And from this point on, I wanted a buddy system applying everywhere inside the ship—I didn't want anyone else killed or injured in an accident at this point.

It took forty-five minutes to complete the muster report. Ann also had one of the crew members bring to the ship a list of all those being treated in hospitals, and where they were.

In the end, we had the grim tally—four sailors confirmed killed in action, identified, tagged, and in body bags down on the pier; thirty-three sailors wounded and ashore in two Aden hospitals with Ann and a few crew members tracking their status; and—lastly—twelve sailors missing. I knew, because the explosion had blasted inward into the ship, that they were all almost certainly somewhere in the destruction of the mess line,
galley, the destroyed engine room, and surrounding spaces, their bodies trapped in the appalling wreckage.

The four confirmed and identified dead at that point were Electronics Technician Chief Richard Costelow, Seaman Craig Wibberley, Mess Specialist Seaman Lakiba Palmer, and Signalman Seaman Cherone Gunn. The missing were Ensign Andrew Triplett and eleven enlisted personnel: Engineman Second Class Marc Nieto, Electronic Warfare Technician Second Class Kevin Rux, Hull Technician Third Class Kenneth Clodfelter, Electronic Warfare Technician Third Class Ronald Owens, Mess Specialist Third Class Ronchester Santiago, Mess Specialist Seaman Lakeina Francis, Information Technology Seaman Timothy Gauna, Information Technology Seaman James McDaniels, Engineman Fireman Joshua Parlett, Fireman Patrick Roy, and Fireman Gary Swenchonis.

As the only officer among the missing, Drew was a real loss to the wardroom, and to me in particular. We had no idea where he might be, but Debbie suspected he was in either the destroyed engine room or the fuel lab. The four engineers, Nieto, Parlett, Roy, and Swenchonis, were presumed to be in the engine room, where they had been directed that morning to change out the filters on the ship's reverse osmosis water filtration system. Santiago, Francis, and McDaniels were last seen working in the galley area preparing and serving lunch to the crew. Clodfelter was last seen working at a computer near the doors to the general workshop just outside the entrance to the engine room and across from the fuel lab; that space no longer existed. Rux, Owens, and Gauna were presumed to be in the area of the mess line getting their lunch, and their remains were possibly trapped in the wreckage.

During the course of the afternoon, Ann, ashore with the wounded, provided a more detailed list that contained the full name of each of the injured, which medical facility they were located in for stabilization and treatment, and the ongoing treatment regimen for each sailor. Some crew had reported seeing bodies trapped in the wreckage of the blast area but couldn't identify them. I kept to myself, for the moment, my certainty that none would be found alive.

Unexpectedly, the injured sailors in the two hospitals in Aden soon got some much-appreciated help from one of our closest foreign allies—the French. A reporter from the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) in the center of town had heard the explosion in the harbor and seen the smoke rising from the ship. When he called in to his office in Sana'a, the capital, they contacted the French embassy and spoke with the French defense attaché, Lieutenant Colonel François Vial-Mir, who called the American embassy, which by that time had heard from Fifth Fleet what had happened and told him that some of the wounded would need greater medical expertise than Yemeni hospitals could offer. After reaching Bob Newman, Vial-Mir took matters into his own hands and contacted the Bouffard French military hospital in Djibouti, which he knew was the best medical facility closest to Aden and had access to a French military evacuation aircraft.

The French had operated through the area for decades, and were aware that hospitals in Aden were not in good shape. The French doctors in Djibouti formed a team and Vial-Mir got authorization for them to fly in. Arriving at the two hospitals, Al-Saber and Al Gamhouria, they linked up with Ann Chamberlain at the latter and began examining the injured sailors. In the end, eleven of them were determined to have injuries serious enough to be transported to Djibouti. When asked, Ann made the decision to go with these and leave the less seriously wounded in care of other sailors from the ship.

Within an hour, all eleven plus Ann were being gently loaded onto the French military aircraft and readied for the short trip. But one of the injured sailors, Timothy Saunders, the man who had told Master Chief Parlier, “I don't feel so good,” even after his severely cut leg had been bandaged, unexpectedly went into extreme distress before takeoff and succumbed to the internal injuries Parlier had hoped the hospital would be able to treat. In Djibouti, the remaining ten were prepared for surgery in the French military hospital, though two were in critical condition with a very guarded prognosis.

Far away in the United States, notifications to support a continuing medical evacuation were well under way. The Air Force was directed to prepare two Critical Care Air Transport Teams (CCATTs) to fly into Aden,
Yemen, and Djibouti to evacuate all wounded
Cole
sailors to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in Germany, as soon as possible.

At the same time, however, the Fifth Fleet Commander, with approval from the Central Command Commander General Tommy Franks, placed all naval forces in the region at Threat Condition Delta, to indicate that another attack might be imminent. Once learning about this shift in force protection requirements, the Air Force initially refused to fly aircraft into the region unless their security could be guaranteed. At this point, the security situation had many unknown factors and their safety could not be assured at any level.

Now the race against the clock to get
Cole
's crew members the urgent medical attention necessary to save their lives was in jeopardy once again, this time because the U.S. Air Force refused to risk their aircraft or crews. Finally, common sense prevailed at the national level, and the secretary of defense ordered the Air Force to fly into the region and get the wounded sailors out. On October 13, two C-9 aero-medical aircraft deployed from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to Djibouti and to Aden, Yemen.

During the return flights to Ramstein and the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the CCATTs had two critically injured patients who required constant monitoring to keep alive. At one point, one patient's blood pressure dropped dramatically during the flight and the CCATT had to perform emergency life-saving procedures on him. Although it was a long and challenging flight, thanks to the teams' superb efforts, not one of the patients died.

During all this time, Ann had been in almost constant contact with the U.S. embassy in Djibouti. She could have gone with the injured to Landstuhl, but she declined the opportunity and instead coordinated with the embassy to arrange a return flight to Aden and USS
Cole
. Two days later, Ann landed at Aden's airport and made her way back to the ship on a Yemeni boat. I was as proud as any commanding officer could be when she debarked from the boat, crossed the refueling pier, walked up the brow, and reported back aboard for duty. For everyone who knew what she had been through, her actions set a new benchmark for dedicated professionalism in caring for her shipmates.

Earlier, Petty Officer Crowe, standing on the wing of the bridge looking down at the crew working in the amidships triage area, was appalled to see that crew members, with the best of intentions, had taken out brooms and were beginning to sweep up the debris lying all over the exterior surfaces of the ship. He knew that the cleanup could result in the loss of critical forensic evidence that would be needed in the investigation to determine who had carried out the attack. Getting permission to leave his post, Crowe dashed down several stairways to the main deck, littered with small pieces of black fiberglass from the suicide boat, and started explaining why they needed to be preserved, and not to touch them unless they had to move them to treat wounded crew members. Then he went back to his office and grabbed a handful of evidence bags. His training had taught him that odd-shaped pieces would be the most revealing kind of evidence, and he began putting them into the bags, labeling each one with the date, time, and location in which they were found.

One piece momentarily gave him pause—a fin-shaped piece of metal he thought could be from a missile. “Sir, we need to get everybody away from the port side,” he told me. “Look at all those ships and piers across the harbor. Who knows where this shot might have come from?” But as we scanned the shore and other ships for a possible threat, and Chief Larson, who was still standing security watch in the amidships area, began to clear people away from the port side, Crowe realized that the fragment was more likely part of the outboard motor that had propelled the suicide boat. Over the next two hours, in addition to pieces of the boat and motor, he and others found pieces of wiring, and, pieces of flesh, bones, and teeth from the bombers themselves. All of this crucial evidence was taken to the quartermaster's chart room near the bridge and placed under constant watch by the bridge security team.

By Thursday late afternoon, Fifth Fleet had informed us via cell phone that they had dispatched a small team from Bahrain to help coordinate support for
Cole
. Working closely with the ship's leading personnelman, Chief Suzan Pearce, Chris secured the personnel records of all of the killed, wounded, or missing crew members and assembled a report that he was
able, with extra cell phone batteries and a charger also supplied by the defense attaché, to dictate to Fifth Fleet headquarters so that the Navy could begin notifying family members.

The assistance team from Bahrain arrived in Aden in early evening, about 1930. Led by Captain Jim Hanna, the commodore or senior officer of Destroyer Squadron Fifty, it included a master chief supply clerk, four Marines to form a small force protection unit, three Navy SEALs who had recently been training local forces in Yemen, a chaplain, and an investigator from NCIS. Arriving at the civilian/military airport in Aden dressed in civilian clothes to avoid offending Yemeni sensitivities, though heavily armed, they stepped out onto the tarmac in the still, hot, and humid night and saw the French medical team with their evacuation aircraft tending to the wounded in preparation for their flight to Djibouti. Hanna walked over and introduced himself to the French doctors and was impressed to find that the seriously injured sailors had been stabilized to the best possible extent, given clean bandages, and obviously provided with first-class medical care.