A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (25 page)

The seal around the starboard propeller shaft in Auxiliary Machinery Room #2 began to give way, and water was flowing into the space faster than the pumps could evict it. The sound of a bulkhead giving way could be heard, and it was evident they were not going to be able to save Aux #2. All that could be done was to remove the dewatering equipment and drop the hatches, sealing off the space to prevent the water from advancing any farther.

But pressure was now building on the adjacent main engine room. The day before, Chris Regal and Michael Hayes had reinforced the seal around the starboard propeller shaft. For two hours they had pounded wooden wedges and fibrous oakum into the seal to prevent the passage of water. But now the makeshift seal was succumbing to the pressures of the water in Aux #2, and the water was now pouring into Main Engine Room #2 at a furious rate.

To accommodate the powerful gas turbine engines that serve as the source of propulsion for these modern ships, the engine rooms need to be very large. Too many spaces had been flooded already, and if that huge space succumbed as well, the battle would be over. So much added water surely would take
Cole
to the bottom.

Portable pumps are a wonderful invention, and they had done much to help save the ship. But in Main #2, the distance from the engine room up to
the main deck and then over the side was too great; these small pumps did not have enough power to lift the water such a distance. Lining them up in tandem did not work, and all other attempted solutions had failed. The situation was becoming desperate. The water was winning, and time was running out.

And then, a desperate plan was put into effect. Recognizing that the only way the pumps could work would be to shorten the vertical distance the water had to travel, someone suggested cutting a hole in the side of the ship, just above the waterline. Through this hole could be passed a discharge hose and then the water would not have to travel all the way up to the main deck before it could be returned to the harbor. It was a good plan except for one frightening fact. Because so much fuel had been spilled in the catastrophe, there was great concern that the sparks from a cutting torch might ignite it. They might be jumping from the proverbial frying pan into a very real fire.

Despite the frightening possibilities, five brave Sailors descended into Main #2 armed with a cutting torch. Damage Controlman First Class Robert Morger, Machinery Repairman Second Class Rick Harrison, and Damage Controlman Third Class William Merchen joined Michael Hayes and Chris Regal to make the dangerous foray. They waded through four feet of water coated with fuel as they made their way to the starboard side of the engine room. With the help of the others, Regal climbed up the listing bulkhead and, bracing himself against an angle iron, lit the cutting torch. There were some tense moments as he began cutting into the hull and sparks danced about like fireflies on a summer's night.

But their luck held. No fire started, and soon Regal had cut a four-inch hole into the hull, large enough to pass a fire hose through. Before long, water was being discharged out of Main #2 and back into Aden harbor, from which it had come.

The crew's ordeal was far from over, but this seemed to be the pivotal point; by Sunday, it seemed certain that
Cole
was going to survive. It would be a full week before all the bodies could be removed from the wreckage—the crew chose to leave
Cole
's soot-covered ensign flying day and night until the last shipmate was recovered.

It would be two weeks before the ship left Aden's harbor under tow to be loaded onto a heavy-lift ship for the long trip home. During that time, twelve of
Cole
's Sailors reenlisted in the Navy.

After an extended yard period, the destroyer came back to the fleet, fully repaired and ready for the challenges that lay ahead. By then, the whole nation—wakened by the attacks on 9/11—knew what
Cole
's Sailors already understood: the nation was at war.

Hull Maintenance Technician Second Class (SW) Christopher Regal and several of his shipmates helped save
Cole
by cutting a hole in her side.
U.S. Navy Photo. Courtesy of
All Hands
magazine

Cole
was able to come back to fight another day because her crew refused to give up their ship. In the aftermath of that cataclysmic day, the ship's executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Chris Peterschmidt, told an
All Hands
journalist that when he and the captain “found our spirits lagging, we looked around at all these other Sailors who were very undeterred by what was happening. And that in itself gave us strength.”

Master Chief Parlier reinforced his executive officer's words by paying his shipmates the ultimate compliment when he said, “I'm really proud of these Sailors—I'd go anywhere with them.”

In just a few hours, Parlier, Moser, Sanchez, and “Baby Doc” Campbell had seen things most hospital corpsmen never see in an entire career. They had treated terrible injuries and had done so in blazing heat, with limited facilities, and not knowing if more attacks were on the way. With the experience behind her, Campbell later spoke the words common to those who have seen death and destruction up close: “Nothing can surprise me now,” she said.

Despite the terrible things he had experienced and the great challenges he had faced, Michael Hayes summed up the experience by saying, “It's a privilege to serve our country and a privilege to serve God.”

As images of the gaping hole in
Cole
's side flashed around the world, most who saw it were shocked, although some of America's enemies certainly rejoiced. As Americans back home began hearing the news that an American warship had been attacked, most were outraged, many were saddened, and some were frightened. But few understood that this ship was literally in danger of being lost; that, were it not for her determined crew who refused to give up, a U.S. warship would have gone to the bottom.

It seems somewhat inappropriate to ponder such things as politics and world image in the context of death and injury to our fellow human beings. But in the grand scheme of things, they do matter. Images of a damaged naval vessel were bad enough, but a sunken ship would have been far worse, encouraging America's enemies all the more and possibly shaking the faith of some who looked to the United States for strength and encouragement.

Most strategists believe that the outcome of the War on Terrorism will be determined by many things, but chief among them will be which side has the greater will to prevail. If
Cole
's Sailors are any indication of the American will, the outcome is not in doubt.

Unless one consulted a nautical chart, it would be difficult to tell that “Yankee Station” was a place. It looked pretty much like many other pieces of ocean in many parts of the world when the aircraft carrier USS
Forrestal
arrived there in July 1967. Blue water stretched to three horizons and, on clear days when the frequent squalls did not get in the way, a distant coastline was visible to the west.

But it was a place nonetheless—a place in the Gulf of Tonkin, west of the South China Sea, where U.S. warships went to strike at enemy targets in North Vietnam. A place where aviation ordnancemen hefted live bombs and rockets to the wings and underbellies of attack aircraft, where enemy surface-to-air missiles were just over the horizon, where aviators too often did not return from sorties.

When
Forrestal
joined the carriers
Oriskany
and
Bonhomme Richard
on Yankee Station, U.S. forces had been fighting the war in Vietnam for two years. Sailors were by then conducting “brown-water” operations in the rivers and along the coasts of South Vietnam; hospital corpsmen were in the Central Highlands alongside their Marine brothers; SeaBees were building naval bases in key tactical positions; SEALs were conducting covert operations; and naval advisors of all rates and ranks were all over the war-torn country helping to build the South Vietnamese navy out of the remnants left behind by the defeated French.

At the time of her arrival for her first combat tour,
Forrestal
was one of the largest ships in the world. Manned by five thousand Sailors, she was more than 1,000 feet long, as tall as a twenty-five-story building, and displaced more than eighty thousand tons. At four acres, her flight deck was longer than three football fields laid end-to-end, and she was 252 feet wide at her broadest point.

Yet she was a tiny airfield. All those impressive measurements meant little to Gerald Farrier and the other aircraft handlers who constantly struggled to move nearly one hundred big airplanes around on the crowded flight deck. With so many aircraft on board, it was an ongoing challenge to position the planes so they could be launched, recovered, refueled, rearmed, repaired, and otherwise maintained. Moving about
Forrestal
's flight and hangar decks, one felt not her vastness, but her confinement.

Farrier had left his home in Batesville, Arkansas, fourteen years before to serve in the U.S. Navy. His career had so far been a successful one. He had risen steadily as an aviation boatswain's mate and, at the age of thirty-one, he was a chief petty officer with serious responsibilities. Among his many duties in
Forrestal,
he was in charge of Repair Eight, the highly trained team of Sailors who would respond in case of a plane crash, a fire, or some other emergency on the flight deck. He was responsible not only for multi-million-dollar aircraft but for the lives of his shipmates as well. On 29 July, just five days after
Forrestal
's arrival on Yankee Station, that responsibility was about to become very real.

Preparing for a major strike against targets in North Vietnam, many fully fueled and armed aircraft had been crowded into position on
Forrestal
's flight deck. Strapped into one of those aircraft, an A-4 Skyhawk, was a young lieutenant, John McCain—a future U.S. senator and presidential candidate.

Not far away, wearing the blue shirt that identified him as a plane handler, Gary Shaver sat aboard one of the small tractors that scurried about the flight deck, positioning aircraft and starting their engines when it was time for them to prepare to launch. Suffering from a broken hand, he had been assigned lighter duty than usual.

At 1052, stray voltage from an electrical charge used to start the engine of an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck ignited a Zuni rocket attached to the fighter's port wing. The rocket roared across the flight deck and struck the belly fuel tank of McCain's A-4. It tore open the fuel tank, spilling and igniting two hundred gallons of aviation gasoline that quickly spread across the flight deck. Two bombs that had been attached to McCain's aircraft also fell to the deck.

In an instant, an inferno had erupted, engulfing McCain's plane and spreading rapidly across the flight deck. McCain scrambled out of the cockpit
and onto the plane's nose. Crawling out along the refueling probe, he leaped ten feet to the burning deck below, then rolled through a wall of flames as his flight suit caught fire. He quickly put out the flames and then, shaking from adrenaline, he went to help another pilot whose flight suit had also burst into flames.

Shaver grabbed a fire extinguisher from his tractor and, struggling with his broken hand, began spraying the spreading flames. An instant later, he saw Chief Farrier grab another portable fire extinguisher and run headlong into the conflagration, fighting back the flames as he tried to get to the trapped pilots. The chief began spraying one of the 1,000-pound bombs that had dropped from McCain's aircraft onto the flight deck and was now engulfed in flames. As Shaver's small extinguisher ran out, he watched in awe from twenty feet away as Farrier ignored the danger around him and tried to prevent the bomb from detonating. As Shaver remembered it, Farrier “looked at me and waved his arm as if to say ‘get the hell out of here.' Before I could move, there was an explosion and Chief Farrier was gone.”