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Front Burner: Al Qaeda's Attack on the USS Cole Commander Kirk S. Lippold, U.S. Navy (Retired). New York: Public Affairs, 2012. 416 pp. Illus. Notes. $27.99. Reviewed by J. Furman Daniel III
On 12 October 2000, the USS Cole (DDG-67) was attacked by an explosive-laden boat in the Yemeni port of Aden. In an instant, a routine refueling stop became the single most deadly suicide attack on an American warship since World War II. The incident killed 17 sailors, wounded 37 others, and could have been a warning to the dangers of al Qaeda, yet has been largely forgotten since 9/11. In Front Burner, the Cole's former commanding officer, Commander Kirk Lippold, directly addresses the causes, consequences, and controversies of this incident in an easy-to-follow first-person narrative.
From the first pages of the introduction, it is clear that Commander Lippold's book is unsettling. He generally avoids personal attacks, but repeatedly states that the events surrounding the Cole attack represented a series of systemic errors at every level of the defense and intelligence communities. These failures began before the ship embarked on her fateful mission, when the crew's training for in-port security focused primarily on land-based infiltration, with no mention of the possibility of suicide attacks...