Free Front Burner by Kirk S. Lippold Page A

knowledge and clearance. The headquarters staff was apparently very concerned about how the command was perceived, and the admiral wanted to ensure that all operations under his command appeared well orchestrated and that his staff was seen as being well in control of every U.S. Navy ship, aircraft, and submarine movement in theater. Communication was clearly filtered, to eliminate even the hint that anything adverse could be happening in theater. We would be briefed in depth on operations, intelligence, and logistics only after we completed the refueling and arrived in Bahrain on October 17, not before.
    While I did not press Fifth Fleet or my chain of command, my apprehension increased as we entered an area of the world known for terrorist attacks. The odd nonchalance by Fifth Fleet and the new battle group commander, even with only generic terrorist threats that remained the same day after day in the message traffic, seemed strangely out of place. We would be essentially blind for seven days before pulling into Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain for our in-depth regional intelligence briefings and updates. We would later learn of the clearest example of leaving USS Cole blind to a potential threat. Upon our arrival, the staff had planned to share the retransmitted message originally sent to only Sixth Fleet units in the Mediterranean regarding the al Qaeda small-boat threat to Navy ships operating in the Fifth Fleet area of operations. In the context of importance within the Fifth Fleet area of operations, we never received it prior to pulling into Aden.

    Fortunately for the George Washington battle group, all the ships had been outfitted with a very basic e-mail capability used by the crew to correspond with home as well as effective communication between ships. At a speed of only 56 kbps (kilobits per second) and just one communications channel per ship, it was slow to say the least. I knew I could not take the ship blindly into my first Threat Condition Bravo port visit without some additional information. Although not officially sanctioned, I had been in contact with my good friend and squadron-mate the commanding officer of USS Donald Cook , Commander Matt Sharpe, who had arrived in the region two months before us. He was very sensitive to the fact that he was not supposed to tell me anything about how ships operated in the region until we had arrived in Bahrain for in-processing briefs from Naval Forces Central Command. He did, however, share unofficial information about the port and how we might expect to conduct the upcoming brief stop for fuel.
    While Cole was in transit down the Red Sea, Matt and I exchanged e-mails. In his replies, he told me that I could expect to be berthed at a refueling “dolphin”—a pier out in the middle of the harbor in the northeast part of the bay, accessible from the city or from shore only by boat. Additionally, he told me that he had experienced a refueling rate of between 300 and 500 gallons per minute, which since we had requested 220,000 gallons would mean a long day before the ship was ready to go.
    During the Donald Cook ’s refueling, which had been done in August 2000, Matt told me, he had submitted the routine logistics request for a brief stop for fuel in Aden and encountered the same lack of information in advance. Nonetheless, he had pulled into port and then adjusted his routine to fit the circumstances, including his force protection posture. All had gone well.
    On the evening of October 11, we passed through the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, rounded the corner of the southwest tip of the Arabian peninsula, and by 0200 on October 12, we were off the coast of Yemen, ready to enter port in the morning. We had to stay at least twelve nautical miles offshore, in international waters, until we got diplomatic clearance
to enter port. During the night, we slowly steamed the ship back and forth in a small five-by-five-mile box and let the crew rest for the night. We