On the morning of October 12, 2000, USS Cole (DDG-67) was moored in the harbor at Aden, Yemen, taking on fuel during a routine stop. A small boat pulled alongside her port side. The two men in it stood and detonated the explosives packed into its hull. The blast tore a forty-foot hole in Cole’s side, flooded her engine room and auxiliary machinery spaces, and killed seventeen sailors. Thirty-nine more were wounded. The attack was the work of Al-Qaeda, and it was the deadliest terrorist strike on a United States military vessel in decades. Cole’s crew spent the next hours fighting to save their ship. They succeeded.
The Ship
USS Cole (DDG-67) is an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, commissioned on June 8, 1996, and named for Sergeant Darrell S. Cole, a Marine who was killed at Iwo Jima in 1945 and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. She was homeported at Norfolk, Virginia, and in October 2000 was transiting to the Persian Gulf to join the Fifth Fleet. The Arleigh Burke class was the most capable surface combatant in the world — a ship designed around the Aegis combat system, built to fight aircraft, missiles, and submarines simultaneously. She was not designed to fight a bomb in a small boat tied alongside in a friendly port.
The Attack
Cole had stopped in Aden for a routine refueling operation, standard practice for ships transiting the region. The port of Aden had been used by the Navy before, and there was no specific intelligence warning of an imminent attack at that time and place. As the refueling proceeded, a small fiberglass boat approached Cole on her port side. The two occupants appeared to be part of the local harbor services — the kind of small boats that moved around a working port. They came alongside near midship on the port side and detonated their payload.
The explosion was equivalent to several hundred pounds of C-4. It punched through Cole’s hull, destroying the ship’s two main engine rooms, flooding several compartments, and killing the sailors who were in the forward mess decks and nearby spaces at the moment of detonation. The ship listed to port. Fires broke out. Flooding began.
The Fight to Save the Ship
What followed was one of the most intense damage control evolutions in recent Naval history. Cole’s crew — many of them injured, all of them in shock — went to work immediately. They shored up bulkheads. They ran pumps against the flooding. They established triage areas for the wounded on the flight deck and the fantail. The ship’s medical personnel treated casualties in conditions that bore no resemblance to training scenarios. The engineers stabilized the ship’s list and prevented flooding from spreading to adjacent compartments.
Cole did not sink. By the time rescue assets arrived, the ship was hurt but intact — still floating, her crew still fighting. The survival of the ship is directly attributable to the training and decision-making of the sailors who were aboard that morning.
Recovery and Return
Cole was loaded onto the Norwegian heavy-lift vessel MV Blue Marlin and transported to Pascagoula, Mississippi, for repairs that cost approximately $250 million and took fourteen months. On April 19, 2002, she returned to fleet service. She has continued to serve in the U.S. Navy, deploying multiple times since the attack.
Life Aboard
The crew of Cole in October 2000 were doing the kind of unglamorous transiting work that fills most of a Navy deployment. The refueling stop in Aden was not a liberty port — it was a working call, a few hours alongside the pier, fuel flowing, sailors at their stations doing their jobs. The ones who died were in the mess decks during a meal break when the bomb went off. Their shipmates who survived spent the rest of that day doing the thing the Navy trains for: keeping the ship alive.
If you served in the surface Navy or want to honor the destroyermen who kept Cole afloat on October 12, 2000, browse The Ship’s Store for collections honoring the ships and crews of the United States Navy.
Legacy
The Cole bombing is remembered as a forewarning — an attack that, had it been fully understood at the time, might have altered the threat calculus before September 11, 2001. The investigation confirmed Al-Qaeda’s responsibility. The crew’s actions earned numerous commendations, including the Navy Unit Commendation. The ship’s survival is taught in damage control courses. The seventeen sailors who were killed — Kenneth Clodfelter, Richard Costelow, Lakeina Francis, Timothy Gauna, Cherone Gunn, James McDaniels, Marc Nieto, Ronald Owens, Lakiba Palmer, Joshua Parlett, Patrick Roy, Kevin Rux, Ronchester Santiago, Timothy Saunders, Gary Swenchonis Jr., Andrew Triplett, and Craig Wibberley — are why this ship is remembered.