The blast killed seventeen American sailors and wounded thirty-seven more. Many of the dead were young enlisted personnel, some barely out of their teens, who happened to be gathered in the ship's galley at the worst possible moment. The explosion entered a mechanical space below the mess area and violently pushed the deck upward, giving them no chance. Injured survivors were evacuated first to a French military hospital in Djibouti for emergency surgery, then to the US Army's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany before finally returning home. The crew who survived fought flooding in the engineering spaces for three days straight, refusing to let their ship sink. Divers later confirmed the keel was intact -- the Cole would not go to the bottom of Aden harbor.

Al-Qaeda had tried this before. On January 3, 2000, operatives attempted to attack the USS The Sullivans during a port call in the same Aden harbor. That attempt failed almost comically: the boat was so overloaded with explosives that it sank before reaching its target. But the plotters learned from the failure. Planning for a second attempt was discussed at the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit in January 2000, attended by future September 11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. After the summit, Mihdhar traveled to San Diego, then returned to Yemen, where Yemeni officials later identified him as a key planner of the Cole attack. He would go on to participate in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The threads connecting Aden harbor to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were already being woven.

What followed the bombing was not swift retaliation but a long, frustrating investigation. Evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement remained officially inconclusive for months. By late November 2000, responsibility was still an "unproven assumption." The CIA issued only a "preliminary judgment" by December. When the Bush administration took office in January 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice described the intelligence as speculative. President Bush, according to Rice, decided he did not want to respond to al-Qaeda "one attack at a time" -- he was "tired of swatting flies." The administration began developing a broader strategy to eliminate the network. That strategy was still in development on the morning of September 11. For the families of the seventeen dead sailors, the delay was excruciating. The father of Kenneth Clodfelter, killed in the blast, later said simply: "It's about time something was done."

One detail from the attack haunted the survivors more than any other. Petty Officer John Washak recalled that immediately after the blast, with blood still on his face, a senior chief petty officer ordered him to turn an M-60 machine gun on Cole's fantail away from a second small boat that was approaching. The standing rules of engagement prohibited firing unless fired upon first. Petty Officer Jennifer Kudrick put it bluntly: the sentries would have faced more trouble for shooting two foreigners than for losing seventeen American sailors. The Cole bombing forced the Navy to fundamentally rethink force protection. Random Anti-Terrorism Measures replaced predictable security routines. In November 2001, the Navy opened an Anti-Terrorism and Force Protection Warfare Center in Virginia Beach. By 2004, a new Maritime Force Protection Command consolidated all expeditionary anti-terrorism units under a single authority. The Cole scenario itself became a centerpiece of Navy damage-control training, run aboard a destroyer mockup at Naval Station Great Lakes.

The pursuit of the Cole bombers stretched across two decades. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, considered the operation's mastermind, was captured in 2002 and held at Guantanamo Bay, where military prosecutors sought the death penalty. Jamal al-Badawi, convicted and sentenced to death by a Yemeni court, escaped prison in 2006, surrendered in 2007, was released by Yemeni authorities, and was finally killed in a US airstrike on January 1, 2019. Fahd al-Quso, another conspirator, died in a US drone strike in May 2012. The legal reckoning was equally protracted. Federal courts found both Sudan and Iran liable for supporting the attack. In 2020, Sudan agreed to pay $335 million in compensation as part of its effort to be removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. At Naval Station Norfolk, a memorial stands for the seventeen. Low stone markers represent the youth of the sailors whose lives ended that October morning. Three tall granite monoliths bear brass plaques for the three colors of the American flag. Twenty-eight black pine trees encircle the site -- one for each sailor killed and one for each of the eleven children they left behind.