Remembering the Cole

           “So, what’s next, sir?” Petty Officer Moore asked me.  We were sitting on the mess decks along with Petty Officer Maloney.  I only had two weeks left on the Cowpens, dry-docked “in the yards” at the time, and four total weeks left in the navy.  It was after a maintenance brief.

    “I’m going back to school, up in Canada.”
    “To study what?

    “It’s a master’s program.  In Middle Eastern studies.”
    “What’s that involve?”  

    I wasn’t completely sure at the time, but it involved the Arabic language, some Islam, Middle East history, literature, and other courses.

    “Why Arabic?  Why do you want to study the Middle East?”  Moore’s tone had become slightly more intense.

“That’s what I studied in college and--"

“Those people tried to kill me,” Moore interjected.  

I didn’t reply.  Nor did Maloney.  But, I knew what he was talking about.

“Yeah, those people tried to kill me,” he said again.     

    Moore was a sailor, a young damage controlman in fact, on the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole when it was attacked in the port of Aden, Yemen on October 12, 2000.  Militants on a small boat outfitted with explosives approached the Cole, which was refueling in the port, and blew themselves up, ripping a hole in the ship’s port side.  Seventeen sailors died, thirty-nine were injured, and the crew, including Moore, worked tirelessly for three days straight to save the ship.  Al Qaeda claimed responsibility. I was a fourth-class (freshman) midshipman at the time, studying and going to football games in northern Indiana.    

Moore was the second Cole survivor I had met in my time in the navy.  He was squared away: he knew his equipment; he trained other sailors well on that equipment; his uniform was sharp; he was a committed family man; he certainly had no behavior or personnel issues; he was reliable, good-humored, and universally liked.  Everyone on the Cowpens knew that he was the only one of the nearly four hundred of us who’d actually seen war, of a sort.  Not a blue-lit-room, push-missile-button-from-thousands-of-miles-away warrior, like some others on the ship.  He had seen it up and close.  He lost friends and shipmates.  We never asked him about it.  But, we all knew it: “Shit, in these fire drills, in the real thing, you want to have Moore.”  

“Those people tried to kill me.”  

Did “those people” try to kill him?  His line hung and still hangs with me.  Yes, those people on that boat, and those who trained, planned, and funded them did try to kill Moore.  They did kill seventeen of his shipmates.  They did it with the moral support from some corners of the Middle East.  Moore’s anger and pain was (and I presume still is) real. 

Did “those people” try to kill him?  At the same time, no.  Certainly the whole of the Muslim and/or Arab and/or Middle Eastern world did not.  Moore’s broad sweep was untrue and unfair. 

In the moment, I thought Moore was wrong, but I neither honored his pain nor challenged his generalization.  Instead, I awkwardly ignored his truth, and we went back to small talk. 

“Why do you feel that way?”  

It’s a question I could have or should have asked Moore.  But, the answer probably would have made me feel uncomfortable, on multiple levels.  Seventeen people killed that day, the details of which were gruesome and harrowing.  More so, the answer would have acutely reminded me that evil does exist in the world, that people do commit evil acts, and that they can’t always be explained away by history and sociology.  

    “Why do ‘they’ hate ‘us’?”

It’s a question Time magazine and the country asked shortly after 9/11--a question apropos to the Cole, too.  We asked the question, but we didn’t want to know the answers, for they would have made us feel uncomfortable.  To begin: unconditional support and weapons to Israel in its occupation of Palestine.  Support for corrupt dictators in the region: the Shah in Iran (after we overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh but before the Shah himself was overthrown); Mubarak in Egypt; Qaddafi in Libya (and then later not Qaddafi but then later again tacit support of Qaddafi); Hussein in Iraq and then later not Hussein with the Persian Gulf War and sanctions in the 1990s; the corrupt House of Saud in Saudi Arabia and American bases too close to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; Saleh in Yemen; Ben Ali in Tunisia; the Assads in Syria (but then later not the Assads); King Abdullah of Jordan, to name a few.  And, the many collaterally-damaged brown, Muslim bodies in the wake of our pursuit of our geopolitical interests.  In a phrase: U.S. political, military, economic, social, and cultural hegemony over the Middle East.  In a word: empire.

And so, in the port of Aden that day, that guided-missile cruiser happened to represent the empire, and seventeen sailors were caught in the “blowback,” to use a CIA term.

Sad, insecure men--more like boys--with their own identity crises--often poor but not always--latch onto these legitimate--if not always consistent--political grievances.  Intoxicated by messianic-millenarian visions, by false hero-martyr worship, they commit these perverse acts.

No, history or sociology can’t explain everything.  Even if we were to dry up every cause of their political grievances, even if we were to eradicate poverty (two big ifs), insecure boys and men (Muslim or otherwise) who can’t seem to bear or transform their own pain are bound to transmit that pain and make others pay.  See Timothy McVeigh, see Nikolas Cruz, see Dylann Roof, see MS-13, see neo-Nazis. Evil acts will still occur.  But, context still matters.  It might not lessen victims’ righteous pain or anger.  But, if we’re interested in fewer Coles in the future, history does matter.

On October 12, 2000, those particular people did try to kill Moore.  That is the truth Moore knew and knows, personally.  Thankfully, I have not had to know that truth personally, but it is one I should honor and maybe haven’t fully yet.

    How do we parse out the truth from angry, even righteously angry, un-truths?  Understand why they did it without justifying what they did?  Listen with full heart and yet not necessarily agree?   Pursue perpetrators of international crime without getting ourselves mired into a seventeen-year-and-running war, which might create more hatred?  Not “become the evil we deplore” as the lone dissenter Barbara Lee probed on the House floor in September of 2001?  And, extricate ourselves from this never-ending war? 

How do we hold the tension of these seemingly opposed truths: Moore’s personal pain and our political reckoning?  How do we accept not having all the answers and be content with gray areas in between?  And, when we’re ready, how do we have sympathy for the (sad) attackers on the Cole, or for the sad McVeigh, Roof, or any other hate-ridden killer?  I don’t know if I’m ready, but that seems to be the human task, perhaps only possible in our more divine moments.  That is the task of healing and reconciliation, of really listening.  That is the task of re-membering, of putting it all back together.