USS Cole

Why it matters

On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole pulled into Aden, Yemen, for a routine refueling stop. A small fiberglass boat piloted by two al-Qaeda operatives pulled alongside and detonated roughly 400 to 700 pounds of shaped explosives against the port side of the hull. The blast tore a hole 40 feet wide and 60 feet high in the destroyer's side. Seventeen sailors were killed. Thirty-seven were injured. Most of the dead were in the galley, eating lunch.

The crew's response was extraordinary. The ship was flooding, without power, listing, and on fire. Sailors formed bucket brigades, shored up bulkheads with mattresses and wooden shores, and kept the Cole from sinking through three days of round-the-clock damage control. They saved the ship with training, grit, and improvisation. The Navy later said the crew's performance was one of the finest displays of damage control in the service's history.

The Cole bombing was a direct precursor to September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda planned and executed both. The mastermind of the Cole attack, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was later captured and held at Guantanamo Bay. Osama bin Laden referenced the Cole attack in recruitment videos. The attack demonstrated that a billion-dollar warship with the most advanced combat system in the world could be crippled by two men in a fishing boat with homemade explosives. It was asymmetric warfare made real.

The Navy transported Cole home on the heavy-lift ship MV Blue Marlin, a surreal image of a destroyer riding piggyback across the Atlantic. Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula repaired her over 14 months. She returned to the fleet in 2002 and has deployed multiple times since. The 17 sailors who died are memorialized on the ship and at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Cole changed how the Navy thinks about force protection. Port visits in hostile regions now involve layered security, armed watch teams, and barriers. The days of a warship sitting unprotected in a foreign harbor are over. Seventeen people died for that lesson.

What it was like

An Arleigh Burke destroyer is a sophisticated weapons platform, but the crew spaces are still cramped. Enlisted sailors sleep in stacked racks in berthing compartments, six high in some cases. The ship hums constantly from the gas turbines and electronics. Climate control fights a losing battle against the heat of the Arabian Peninsula.

When the bomb detonated, the ship lurched sideways. The lights went out. In the galley and the engineering spaces nearest the blast, the concussion was instantly lethal. Sailors who survived the initial explosion found themselves in darkness, knee-deep in rising water, with no power and no communications. They organized themselves without orders from the bridge, because the bridge had its own problems. Junior sailors, some of them teenagers on their first deployment, made decisions that kept the ship afloat.

The three days between the attack and the arrival of outside help were a test of everything the crew had ever been trained for. They worked in shifts, barely sleeping, rotating between damage control stations. They treated their own wounded. They recovered their own dead. Some of them were 19 years old.

The crew

Patina notes

The Cole bears a scar you can't see from the outside. Ingalls Shipbuilding cut out the damaged section, fabricated 550 tons of new steel, and rebuilt the ship from the keel up in the blast zone.

The repair was so thorough that the hull shows no visible evidence of the attack. But the crew knows where it happened. There's a memorial plaque on the mess deck near the point of impact.

The ship has been repainted, overhauled, and upgraded multiple times since 2000. She looks like every other Burke-class destroyer in the fleet. The damage is carried by the people, not the steel.

Preservation reality

The Cole is still in active service with the US Navy, homeported in Norfolk, Virginia. She's not a museum ship and won't be for years, if ever. The Navy has a long backlog of decommissioned ships waiting for museum status, and Burke-class destroyers are still in high demand.

A memorial to the 17 killed stands at Norfolk Naval Station. Individual memorials exist at Arlington National Cemetery. The most powerful artifact of the attack is the photograph of Cole on the deck of the Blue Marlin, riding home with a hole in her side. That image is in every naval history textbook published since 2001.

Where to see one

• • USS Cole Memorial, Norfolk Naval Station, Virginia
• • Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, DC (individual memorials)

Preservation organizations

• • USS Cole Memorial Foundation
• • Navy League of the United States