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COPYRIGHT 2001 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
Deborah Courtney wanted to sail on a warship after she graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1990. It took a while: Courtney had to bide her time as an admiral's aide until the rules barring women from combat duty were changed in 1994. Finally given the duty she longed for, she was steadily promoted and became the chief engineering officer aboard the USS Cole, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. Her baptism by fire began when she was blown out of her chair in her stateroom by a terrorist bomb on the morning of Oct. 12, 2000, as the ship refueled in the port of Aden, Yemen.
The bomb almost cut the Cole in half. Flammable fuel oil showered down on the deck and sprayed through the flooded compartments of the ship. Torn electrical cables arced and sparked, threatening to torch a conflagration. Most of the ship was plunged into darkness. Pulling on an oxygen mask, Lt. Cmdr. Deborah Courtney headed through the smoke and murk for her battle station. An athletic woman with a pleasant but no-nonsense manner, Courtney says she "loves her engineers." She had carefully trained them for emergencies. Before shipping out, she had gone to her local Home Depot and bought--at her own expense--80 Maglite flashlights, one for each of her crew. During the desperate hours ahead, as her engineers crawled through the wreckage in search of wounded sailors, shutting off circuit breakers to avert an inferno and laying cable to restore power, those flashlights would come in handy.
Such small acts of preparation and leadership spared the Cole from being remembered as the first major American ship to be sunk by enemy action since the Pacific War in 1945. Various official inquiries have focused on who is to blame for failing to prevent the terrorist attack on the Cole that killed 17 sailors and wounded 42. The muddy verdict: everyone and no one up and down...
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