Lessons from the Cole: 'We have to be ready all the time'

The suicide blast that ripped open an American warship during a fueling stop in Yemen did more than kill 17 sailors and change the lives of everyone on board that day.

The events of Oct. 12, 2000, also fundamentally changed the way the Navy operates around the world - how it assesses threats in foreign ports, trains recruits and prepares medical personnel for deployments.

In ways large and small, the lessons learned after the bombing resonate throughout the Navy. Sailors who joined in the past decade may not know it, but everything from the drills they endured at Great Lakes Naval Training Center to their daily routines aboard ships have been shaped by the attack on the Cole and its crew's response to widespread damage.

Perhaps the most obvious changes involve what the Navy calls anti-terrorism and force protection: keeping ships safe when they pull into ports from Norfolk to New York to Dar es Salaam.

Capt. Chris Peterschmidt has seen the changes first-hand. He was the executive officer, or second-in-command, on the Cole in 2000. Years later, he became commanding officer of the destroyer Pinckney, a newer version of the Cole.

After the bombing, he said, the Navy started using a buoy line to establish a clear boundary around warships in foreign ports. The line, suspended across the water by a cable, extends about 100 meters around the ship in all directions.

The ship has responsibility for securing the area inside the buoy line. Host nations are expected to be responsible for patrolling the waters outside the line.

When the Cole arrived in Aden in 2000, Yemeni authorities did not provide any guards, police boats or security. Under the new guidelines, that would put a port off-limits to U.S. Navy ships.

Crews are trained to treat breaches of the buoy line seriously.

"If you enter the zone, you get a lot of attention," said David Mitchell, a former SEAL who spent five years working for the Navy on maritime threat issues and now is a consultant in Seattle. It's not a free-fire zone, he said, and sailors patrolling the area have tools such as loudspeakers that deliver messages in local languages.

Boaters who stray into forbidden territory "are given every opportunity not to be stupid," Mitchell said. "But if they keep coming on a straight bearing at high speed, American ships are certainly within their rights to defend themselves."

Another big difference between the Cole's refueling stop in Yemen and the Pinckney's similar calls in Malaysia, Singapore and India was Peterschmidt's personal communication with Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents prior to arrival.

According to Peterschmidt and Capt. Sam McCormick, director for anti-terrorism/force protection for the Navy's Fleet Forces Command, NCIS now has more agents serving overseas who provide specific, timely analysis about what kind of threats await in foreign ports. They provide that intelligence directly to the ship.

"I had somebody I could talk to," Peterschmidt said.

Depending on the agents' input, he would modify specific procedures for docking or refueling.

Although attacking a U.S. warship is an act of war that will be met with severe consequences, ultimately, it's up to the captain and crew of each vessel to fend off attacks.

"Our enemies have called us out. They've specifically said they're targeting the Navy," McCormick said. "We have to be ready all the time."

The Cole bombing "really precipitated a mindset change. When a captain takes his ship into a foreign port, there's no doubt that they have to protect their ship."

And no captain takes that job lightly.

The Navy still requires ships to file detailed force protection plans days in advance of arrival in a foreign port, even if, like the Cole, they anchor hundreds of yards from the mainland to refuel.

"There are certain minimum standards that are clearly delineated and must be met," McCormick said.

Navy brass - especially those in charge of overseas operations - now scrutinize those plans more carefully. And if certain measures aren't met, they forbid a warship from pulling into port. That has happened multiple times since the Cole bombing, McCormick said, though he declined, for security reasons, to provide specifics of where and when.

Still, Navy officials know that it's highly unlikely another ship attack would mimic the Cole bombing, in which two men in a small boat packed with explosives pulled up next to the destroyer as it refueled. Instead, those wanting to cripple a vessel will look for a new vulnerability to exploit.

"What keeps me up at night is the fact that we're dealing with a highly adaptive enemy," McCormick said. "But what makes me feel good at night is that at the end of the day, our sailors figure it out. They innovate, they adapt, they overcome. They're the guys our force protection ultimately rests on."

Mitchell said the Navy has elevated force protection and anti-terrorism concerns "almost to a science," as have other branches of the military. But they can't be crippled by concern about terrorism: a primary task remains serving in dangerous places overseas.

"Are they doing enough? Yeah, they're doing enough. But let's not forget that's not the only thing that they do," he said. "You have to balance safety against accessibility."

The Navy has also increased emphasis on teaching recruits how to handle emergencies aboard a ship.

Every enlisted sailor goes through boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, near Chicago. And even though they don't set foot on an actual boat during the eight -week period, their training emphasizes the basic tenets of shipboard damage control, fire fighting and handling medical casualties.

Each class of recruits undergoes a sort of "final exam" at Great Lakes - an exercise called Battle Stations 21, held aboard a mockup of a destroyer similar to the Cole.

The Trayer is a 210-foot-long, 3/4-scale replica of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer housed inside a 157,000-square-foot building. It uses special effects to simulate disaster scenarios that recruits must battle for 12 hours, testing the skills and teamwork they've learned.

The Trayer - in use since mid-2007 - has lots of similarities to the Cole. The clock in the mess deck is set to 11:20, roughly the time of the blast that almost destroyed the Cole's galley, or kitchen, and cafeteria.

The Trayer's mess deck mimics the destruction on the Cole. Its fast-food style tables and chairs are overturned and canted at an angle; sheaths of blackened metal have peeled off the walls.

The scenario includes audio recordings of an explosion and the sounds of a ship under attack, special-effects lighting, the smell of sea water and diesel fuel, and 90,000 gallons of rushing water that pour through the set.

Since 1999, years before the Trayer was built, the Navy had put recruits through a lower-tech version of Battle Stations on a wooden mock-up of a ship.

Some of the youngest sailors aboard the Cole in 2000 had been through that training, and Peterschmidt said he thought they responded better in the real emergency than some of their older shipmates did.

"Recruits got exposed to what it's like to have their normal work environment severely damaged, with no light and a lot of danger of sharp edges and injured people. They had to crawl through mess decks into a maze of structures to get at casualties and get them out," he said.

"That young group stood out. Investigators talked to them and they said, 'We saw this before. It reduced our lag time in being able to respond.' "

Peterschmidt and retired Command Master Chief James Parlier - the highest-ranking enlisted sailor on the Cole that day - are glad that the Navy embraced Battle Stations 21.

"All sailors now who enter the Navy go through that trainer," Peterschmidt said. "All sailors in the Navy today have relived a portion of the Cole attack."

One specialized group of sailors has gotten upgraded training as a result of the lessons learned on the Cole: Navy corpsmen, the enlisted medical personnel who provide primary care and respond to traumas on the majority of Navy ships.

The Cole blast sidelined almost a fifth of the crew: 56 sailors were killed or injured in the blast. Many of the injured suffered major traumatic wounds: shattered bones, burns and crush injuries. It was immediately apparent to Cmdr. Kirk Lippold that the number and type of injuries went beyond the resources of the ship and its three corpsmen.

The primary medical response was triage: assess which injuries required immediate attention, which could wait, and which were so bad that a sailor's life couldn't be saved.

The leading corpsman, Chief Petty Officer Cliff Moser, and Petty Officer Tayanika Campbell were assisted by Parlier, himself a trained independent duty corpsman.

A 2002 report on the medical lessons learned from the Cole attack concluded that corpsmen need more mass-casualty triage training in both their basic and advanced schools.

Cmdr. Brett Sortor, officer in charge of the Navy's Undersea Medical Institute in Groton, Conn., said that since the Cole bombing, corpsmen assigned to surface ships and submarines undergo more direct trauma training, both in and out of school.

In addition to 58 weeks of intense training, submarine corpsmen now spend a week working alongside a trauma team at the Yale-New Haven Medical Center.

The sheer number of injuries aboard the Cole meant medical help was needed from crew members at large. Luckily, everyone assigned to the ship had gone through mandatory first aid training.

The Navy had long taught a first aid curriculum known as "Gitmo Eight," which concentrated on treating limb fractures, abdominal wounds, electrical shock, amputation, smoke inhalation, sucking chest wounds, jaw fractures and burns. The Cole validated the use of that instruction.

It proved that other measures were inadequate, however.

The body boards stored on ships to transport injured sailors proved inferior; they didn't provide enough stability to move patients. The crew instead relied on basket-type litters and search-and-rescue gear to move seriously injured sailors out of passageways to larger spaces.

In response, the body boards were removed from ships and replaced with full-length backboard litters. Other upgrades to medical departments included a larger supply of disposable gloves, which were quickly used up in the days after the explosion, and more anti-bacterial wipes.

The crew of the Cole had access to just one bathroom, and its supply of fresh water was limited. Days after the blast, more than 70 surviving crew members came down with diarrhea.

Other shortcomings: the lanterns used for emergency lighting after the ship lost power weren't adequate, so ships' medical departments are now stocked with battery-powered headlamps that help them work in dark environments.

And though it wasn't an emergency, Cole crew members discovered their supply of sunblock fell woefully short. The only lotion available was SPF 15, and there wasn't enough of it available for crew members working on the exposed flight deck under the Middle Eastern sun. Ships now stock a greater supply of SPF 30 lotion.

The recovery of remains took almost a week in temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees. That brought about a grisly supply issue: need for a bigger supply of oil of wintergreen and eugenol, both of which are used to mask the smell of decomposition.

The attack also highlighted the value of close relationships with allies.

Thirty-three crew members were evacuated off the destroyer to the mainland in the first 99 minutes after the blast. Only one of them died.

Some of that is thanks to the French military, which dispatched a team of doctors and a surgical operating unit from Djibouti just hours after the attack.

The team set up shop on the runway at the Aden airport, Peterschmidt said. They gathered 13 patients in the most dire conditions and moved them from the local hospitals to their clinic.

"The Yemeni doctors said, 'If they're moved, they'll die. The French responded, 'If they stay here, they'll die.' "

The French were right: All 13 survived.

That led to another recommendation from the group that studied the medical lessons learned from the Cole: Fleet commanders should expand their contacts with "allied medical personnel" in their respective parts of the world, to prepare for medical contingencies.

Peterschmidt said some of the simplest preparations for disaster might prove more useful than the latest high-tech gear.

When the Cole was taking on water and in danger of sinking in the days after the bombing, sailors used old-fashioned solutions to fill the holes: they used mallets and hammers to pack the holes with wood and oakum, a kind of hemp soaked in tar that's been in use since the earliest days of naval warfare.

The Navy instituted another low-tech solution to problems Cole sailors encountered when clearing sharp or twisted metal debris with their bare hands. About three days later, Peterschmidt said, many suffered from cuts to their hands that had become infected.

When he took command of the Pinckney, he was pleased to see a robust supply of leather gloves. The ship had more pairs of gloves than sailors.

Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com

Cole bombing investigation report