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It was an emotionally charged day as the crew and families gathered to honor their shipmates, who had paid the ultimate price only a short year earlier. The official unveiling of the monument occurred precisely at 1118 as the names of all seventeen sailors were read aloud. There was not a dry eye in the crowd.

Immediately following the event, as everyone was spending some time visiting with each other, a young sailor and his family approached me alone. Engineman Third Class John Thompson humbly walked up to me and introduced me to his wife, Heidi.

Looking me in the eye, he started to choke up as he said, “Sir, I owe you an apology.” While somewhat surprised, I knew what he was talking about—the moment when he had confronted me in Aden and said I was going to get everybody killed because I wouldn't let them go home sooner—and immediately set about downplaying it. “No apology necessary. It was a unique time in our lives and you did a great job over there.” “Well, thank you, sir, but I still owe you an apology,” he continued. It was a self-conscious moment for both us before he quickly continued, “I never should have said what I did to you. It was disrespectful and, well, I guess what I'm
trying to say, sir, is that what I didn't realize then, but I do now, is that when we were over in Aden, you had more faith in us than we had in ourselves.”

For a moment, I couldn't think of the right words to say, and even if I had had them, I would not have been able to get them out. His words seemed to linger in the air before we finally exchanged a solid handshake, then paused before giving each other a big hug—again. I was honored beyond words.

While the memorial may have been dedicated, an uncertain wait continued for some of the families. An unforeseen consequence of the September 11 attacks was that the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology shifted their focus from
Cole
to the remains of those who had been killed in the Pentagon. The process of identifying the final fragmentary sets of
Cole
remains dragged on for over two months more, until finally the Institute informed the Navy on December 10 that the identifications were complete. The remains would be turned over to their families, and the fragmentary remains of the terrorists that had been found with them inside the ship were turned back over to the FBI.

When I learned that the identification of my sailors was complete, a new fear settled into my gut when the Navy decided to notify the families just before Christmas. It may not have been my place to do it, but I pleaded with the staff of the chief of naval operations to wait until after the holidays, so the families could at least get through one Christmas without the Navy disrupting it. My thought process was that it would be better for the families to be angry about a delay in being notified than to have their holiday spoiled once again with tragic news. As I would learn from September 11 families years later, thankfully my request was rebuffed and by mid-December, the casualty assistance calls officers were knocking on doors and asking the families to decide what they wanted to do with the remains. The sense of helping them achieve closure and deal with the knowledge that their loved ones had been finally identified was more important than any holiday.

The families, however, were not told that the Institute still retained a mass of genetic material that could not be identified because it was too
heavily contaminated by fuel, oil, salt water, and exposure to the elements during the transit back to the United States. There was no way to isolate individual DNA material based on current technology and these remains undoubtedly contained some of the remains of the bombers.

Since World War II, the Navy had followed a long-standing tradition of taking commingled, unidentifiable remains and burying them together in a common casket or urn at one gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. This pattern was consistently followed as remains were repatriated from excavation sites around the world. On September 12, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld presided over a burial service of unidentifiable remains from the Pentagon rubble at Arlington National Cemetery. In a single flag-draped casket, cremated remains from the Pentagon rubble that could not be identified, symbolically representing all 184 victims of the attack on the Pentagon, were buried with full military honors. After hymns, Scripture readings, and speeches from military leaders, relatives and friends paid their respects as the casket was carried by a horse-drawn caisson to a hill within view of the repaired Pentagon. A four-foot five-inch granite marker bearing the 184 names was eventually placed over the shared gravesite.
²

Meanwhile, the Navy could only discuss the issue of the similar remains from
Cole
. Later that month, a proposal slowly worked its way up the chain of command toward Secretary of the Navy Gordon England. Initially, the proposal called for a ceremony, similar to the one just completed at Arlington National Cemetery for the victims of the Pentagon attack. But the military leadership of the Navy became concerned about having to deal with additional negative publicity—about the attack on
Cole
, the delay, the lack of communication with the families, and the future cost of identifying the remains should it eventually become technologically feasible to do so. To avoid and resolve these prickly issues, the remains would be buried at sea.

It was two months later, in November of 2002, over two years after the attack on USS
Cole
, that the families of the victims of the attack were finally informed of these additional unidentified remains. None expressed
any reservations over the Navy's plan for their burial at sea, and on December 9, they were consigned to the deep.

Seventeen sailors ruthlessly killed, thirty-seven more injured and scarred in unimaginable ways, and one of the most modern twenty-first century destroyers crippled by a devastating terrorist attack costing $250 million to repair: October 12, 2000, irreversibly changed the way the Navy conducts its operations across the globe. While many view the attack on USS
Cole
as a professional embarrassment, something that should not have happened, the heroism of the crew speaks to how well they were prepared to face evil in its purest form and defeat it. The crew denied the terrorists the victory they sought. The crew of USS
Cole
saved their ship and their shipmates. All of them are my heroes.

D
URING MY VISITS IN EARLY 2001 with the families of the sailors killed in the attack, I was often asked why no one was being punished. Why, despite what President Clinton had promised the nation, did the government appear to be doing nothing to hold the terrorists accountable for killing their loved ones in a brutal suicide bombing? I tried as best I could to answer the questions; sometimes to their satisfaction and at other times to their great frustration, because there really were no clear-cut answers that would temper their anguish or relieve their utter sense of loss.

I was as troubled as they were. Why did the attack against USS
Cole
go unpunished?

Richard A. Clarke, the White House official in charge of counter-terrorism under presidents Clinton and Bush from 1998 to 2003, attempted to explain the inaction at the end of the Clinton administration by writing: “Neither CIA nor FBI would state the obvious: al Qaeda did it. We knew there was a large al Qaeda cell in Yemen. There was also a large cell of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, but that group had now announced its complete merger into al Qaeda, so what difference did it make which group did the attack?” In discussions with senior administration officials,
Clarke wrote, “It was difficult to gain support for a retaliatory strike when neither FBI nor CIA would say that al Qaeda did it.”
¹

Clarke's statement about the reasons senior officials did not order action was later confirmed by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the 9/11 Commission, in a report published in 2004: “Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration launched a military response for the
Cole
attack. Sandy Berger and other senior policymakers said that, while most counter-terrorism officials quickly pointed the finger at al Qaeda, they never received the sort of definitive judgment from the CIA or the FBI that al Qaeda was responsible that they would need before launching military operations.”
²

William S. Cohen, the Clinton administration's secretary of defense, said just before the Bush administration took over, “With respect to what action will be taken, we have to be very careful and deliberative and sure of identifying those who . . . were responsible for this act of terrorism, because any action that we take at that time must be responsible. And I think that you would be the first to be critical of the administration if we should simply lash out and say we have a number of suspects and then take measures that would inflict punishment upon them in addition to bringing them before the bars of justice if we, in fact, were not very prudent and responsible in making those determinations. So we'll have to wait for more factual analysis, more investigative work by the FBI. And then that will be the responsibility of the new administration to decide what action should be taken.”
³

But, as the 9/11 Commission staff later reported, “The new team at the Pentagon did not push for a response for the
Cole
, according to Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy. Wolfowitz told us that by the time the new administration was in place, the
Cole
incident was ‘stale.' The 1998 cruise missile strikes showed UBL and al Qaeda that they had nothing to fear from a U.S. response, Wolfowitz said. For his part, Rumsfeld also thought too much time had passed. He worked on the force protection recommendations developed in the aftermath of the USS
Cole
attack, not response options.”
⁴

Clarke, in his book, recalled watching limousines head back to the Pentagon, after a White House meeting on
Cole
just after the attack, with his State Department counterpart, Mike Sheehan. “What's it gonna take, Dick?” Sheehan demanded. “Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”
⁵

As I prepared to turn over command of
Cole
, the handwriting was clearly on the wall. President Clinton had been briefed on the
Cole
investigation on December 21, 2000, but unwilling to risk military action based mostly on their intelligence, the CIA would not definitively say it was bin Laden that was behind the attack, even though they had ample evidence to draw that conclusion. Ali Soufan and other FBI agents directly involved with the investigation in Aden, however, were quickly convinced that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the ship, but their leadership and the senior administration officials the FBI was reporting to remained unmoved by the growing body of evidence they were developing, paralyzed by fear of the political costs of either retaliatory action, or of its failure.
⁶
Other terrorist actions immediately after the attack, confirmed through various government intelligence channels, provided further proof of al Qaeda's complicity. Many in government were surprised that the President did nothing. An act of war had been committed and as the months went by, even with two ongoing investigations, the Clinton administration was interested only in wrapping up the enquiries. The Bush administration was just as dismissive toward the attack, taking a “we're forward-looking, not backward-acting” attitude. The standard of evidence required to take action kept getting raised and then sidestepped. No one appeared interested or eager to view this attack in the larger strategic context of what it might mean for U.S. national interests.

CIA Director Tenet later said he was surprised that Clinton did not think he had enough information, and that Sandy Berger never told him the President wanted more. It appeared to most that this was a situation in which they were trying to build a case that would stand up in a court of law, not meet a standard for a military strike. And nothing changed after the Bush administration took office, for all George Bush's tough talk during the election campaign about terrorism.

Not until September 11, 2001, that is, when al Qaeda got the attention of the President, the rest of the U.S. government, and the whole country. As I had told Charles Allen at the CIA headquarters in Langley the morning of that day of infamy, I feared it would take an attack that killed thousands of Americans to make us realize we were in a war with terrorism that would not end until we started striking back in a meaningful manner. Now it had happened, and soon we did strike back. But it would take almost ten years for Osama bin Laden to be finally brought to summary justice, and it would be even longer before Abdul Rahim al Nashiri, the on-scene coordinator of the
Cole
attack, would face a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay for his actions.

Back in the Pentagon immediately following the September 11 attacks, I focused on my work on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The United Nations and multilateral affairs office of the JCS that I was assigned to became the lead office for a new mission: detainee policy.

The nation, or at least the Pentagon, was definitely on a war footing, and the feeling around the building was one of dedicated and focused intensity as the military prepared to finally respond to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's attacks on the U.S. mainland. The USS
Enterprise
battle group, commanded by my former commanding officer, Rear Admiral John G. Morgan Jr., had recently concluded operations in the Middle East and was preparing to return to the United States when, on the day of the September 11 attacks, he took the unprecedented step of turning the battle group around and steaming at best speed toward the coast of Pakistan in preparation to go to war.