Flanked by giant warships as gray as the sky above, President Clinton honored the USS Cole’s 17 dead and 39 injured sailors Wednesday as victims of terror who “rose to freedom’s challenge.”
At a somber ceremony in which some of the wounded watched as they lay in hospital gurneys, the president praised the victims’ patriotism and sacrifice and promised to track down those responsible.
“You will not have a safe harbor,” Clinton warned. “We will find you. Justice will prevail.”
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh provided the first sign that such talk may be more than bluster. In an interview televised by a Qatar satellite station, he said his investigators have found the rented house of two men “who carried out the crime” by steering a boat laden with explosives alongside the destroyer last Thursday.
In addition, Saleh said his investigators had found the car that transported the boat and the launcher that lowered it into the water, as well as the workshop that made the engine.
“This attack had been planned for a long time,” he said.
As the signs of a possible break in the probe appeared, Pier 12 of this sprawling Naval Base, home port of the $1 billion destroyer that lies crippled in the harbor of Aden, attracted hundreds of relatives and friends and an official Navy family stung by the attack.
The Navy’s power was on display. On one side of the pier was the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower, and on the other side were two guided-missile destroyers of the same size and class as the Cole, the USS Ross and the USS McFaul. The crews stood at attention in honor of the dead and wounded.
From the Pentagon’s top brass to the ordinary seaman, the sorrow and respect for those killed and injured contrasted with a simmering anger over the explosion aboard the mooring boat that ripped a gaping hole in the Cole.
“Those who perpetrated this act of terror should never forget that America’s memory is long and our reach is longer,” said Navy Secretary Richard Danzig.
Defense Secretary William Cohen called it “an act of pure evil.”
“They’re cowards,” said Sharon Pelly, whose husband is still on the ship in the Yemeni port as an investigation into the explosion by FBI and other U.S. and Yemeni government officials continues. “Our mentality and their mentality will never combine.”
While America honored its heroes, the Navy said the remains of two more of the 17 sailors who died in the blast have been recovered, bringing to 13 the number of bodies found. The Pentagon presumes that all are dead.
FBI Director Louis Freeh arrived in Yemen to take charge of the investigation. One bureau official said that evidence taken from the Cole has been shipped to the FBI crime laboratory in Washington.
In his interview, Yemeni President Saleh was asked about reports that the two men he believes were involved in the attack might have been Saudi citizens.
“One witness said the accent was a Saudi accent,” he said. “They had to be Arabs because witnesses said they were performing [Muslim] prayers. … They may be Yemenis or other Arabs.”
Though there have been claims of responsibility by some obscure groups, the U.S. is skeptical about them. Some U.S. officials suspect Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national living in exile in Afghanistan, had something to do with the attack. U.S. officials believe he was behind the bombings of two East African U.S. Embassies in 1998.
The attack on the Cole has led to other investigations, such as whether security practices of American ships should be improved, particularly when they go into ports for refueling.
Cohen is expected to announce that retired Adm. Harold Gehman and retired Gen. William Crouch will lead the investigation, according to The Associated Press.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.) has called a Thursday hearing to explore the Defense Department’s decision to use the port of Aden as a refueling point despite warnings about threats to U.S. interests in that part of the world.
Back at the memorial, the new reports out of Yemen gave Cole family members back home some hope that the culprits would be found.
Asked if she believed they would be caught, a tearful Virginia Brown, whose husband Jeffery is a crew member on the Cole, said at the ceremony, “Oh yeah, they are already on their way to doing it.”
The memorial offered some touching moments. As the crowd and sailors from the three nearby ships cheered, wounded sailors on hospital gurneys were taken out of six ambulances that brought them to the pier. Two were hooked to intravenous tubes. Several injured sailors came on crutches. Two of their wounded shipmates remained in Germany, not well enough to travel home.
Family members and friends of the sailors wore ribbons of differing hues to express their solidarity for the dead and wounded or to display the ship’s colors, blue and yellow.
Olivia Rux, the wife of a sailor still listed as missing, had dog tags with her husband’s name made especially for family members to wear at the memorial service. The tags said: “You’re always in our hearts,”
James Gauna, uncle of missing sailor Timothy Lee Gauna, wore a button with his nephew’s picture on it. The healing process has begun, he said. “The process began when we started praying,” he said.
Some family members told of their anxiety after hearing the news of the attack on television. But Loretha Bowe, holding her 6-week old son, said of her husband: “To tell you the truth, I really never did feel he was gone. I knew he was safe. I had my faith.”
After speaking to him by phone, and learning that he was bailing out water to save the ship, she added: “He says he’s OK, but I can tell he’s not. He’s lost his best friend. He’s scared.”
One spouse of a Cole crew member, who gave her name as Lisa, complained that the Navy was always saying things were all right on the ship, even when there were real dangers, such as when a loss of power caused severe flooding Sunday and forced crew members to man bucket brigades.
Vern Clark, chief of Navy operations, said those killed and wounded “remind us of what it means to go in harm’s way” and that being in the Navy may be important and exciting, “but it is also dangerous.”
This message of vulnerability was brought home once again by the memorial.
Ensign Kelly Rendina, a native of west suburban Wheaton who serves on a ship in Everett, Wash., came to the ceremony because her husband is a Navy aviator here and because she wanted to support the crew of the Cole. “We join the Navy and we know we are taking risks,” she said. “This serves as a reminder.”
During the memorial, Virginia Brown’s cellular phone rang. It was her husband in Yemen on the Cole, she said. “He wanted to be here,” she said. “He wanted to hear everything they were saying.”
