MMA graduate recalls bombing of USS Cole> Meeting about TV sets spared life of Navy officer

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HAMPDEN – Jason Grabelle might not be giving thanks for television, but he probably will never look at televisions, or at least purchasing them, the same way again. A question about buying new televisions saved his life aboard the USS Cole, the guided missile destroyer torn open by a suspected terrorist attack.

Grabelle, a 1998 Maine Maritime Academy graduate who is married to a Hampden Academy graduate, is a lieutenant junior grade in charge of auxiliaries – such as air conditioning, drinking water, and galley equipment – on the Cole. He is also the officer in charge of morale, welfare and recreation.

If it wasn’t for this secondary duty and the question of whether the ship needed new televisions, Grabelle, 24, said he might have died in the explosion that killed 17 and injured 39 crew members on Oct. 12.

“I probably would have been down in engineering,” Grabelle said during a Thanksgiving Day interview in the living room of his parents-in-law, Richard and Denise Hughes.

And the engineering section he would have been working in is right where a launch loaded with explosives blew a 40-by-40-foot hole in the Cole hull.

It was a busy morning, Grabelle said, the ship having been in the Yemeni port of Aden for just a few hours. He and the sailors under him had been hooking up water and sewage connections to the fuel pier the ship was moored alongside.

In a passageway Grabelle ran into the ship’s executive officer, the second in command, who said they could move a morning meeting about new TVs to the afternoon.

“I said that I wanted to sleep so I wanted to get the meeting done with in the morning,” Grabelle recounted.

The meeting started at about 11 a.m. in a classroom on the same level and same side of the ship but 150 feet aft of the engineering section.

A few minutes later, Grabelle and the executive officer were standing in the front of the room while a vote was being taken on whether to buy new TVs when “the loudest sound you can imagine” erupted, Grabelle said. “The whole floor shook. The TV in the room fell out of its holder onto the floor.”

“I thought the fuel pier we were alongside blew up,” he recalled.

He was very scared, but he and the other sailors raced to their general quarter stations, their battle stations.

Grabelle in such circumstances is in charge of a “repair locker,” a station with gear for combating fires, repairing damage and treating casualties in engineering.

At the locker he helped sailors into firefighting gear. “It was very smoky,” he said.

But the real problem was the hole at the waterline. “We were fighting flooding for four days,” he said.

During those first four days, Grabelle slept no more than three hours. Everyone was jumpy.

“I didn’t expect the ship to sink,” he said. “But you didn’t know who to trust. There were Yemeni officials. The only people you could trust were Americans. We didn’t know who blew us up.”

At 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 12, while asleep in their home in Norfolk, Va., the Cole homeport, Grabelle’s wife, Deanna, was awakened by a call from his sister. The sister-in-law had heard about the attack on the Cole from her mother, who in turn had heard about the explosion from Grabelle’s stepbrother, who had heard the news on the radio.

When she heard the news from her sister-in-law, Deanna said, “I was panicked.”

Deanna, 23, a 1995 graduate of Hampden Academy, who met Grabelle while he was attending Maine Maritime, turned on CNN to find out what was going on.

That morning, she rarely was off the phone, either calling relatives or talking to the wives of other sailors on the Cole – the Navy spread the news of the attack to kin through a telephone-tree of wives.

At noon that day, the Navy held a briefing in Norfolk. “I was really nervous,” Deanna said. “I was shaking. … I was really, really scared.”

The Navy didn’t tell the wives and relatives anything at that first briefing, she said. The Navy said they had to check and double-check on the missing and the casualties to make sure they didn’t give a family the wrong information.

She sat through all the briefings that afternoon, not going home until 5 p.m. In the meanwhile, the Navy had set up a toll-free number for relatives to call to check on the status of the Cole’ sailors. At about 7:30 p.m., almost exactly 12 hours after she first heard about the attack, Deanna got through to one of the people on the toll-free line and was told that Grabelle was not on either the injured, dead or missing lists.

After “the longest twelve hours of my life,” Deanna said she was able to relax a bit.

Grabelle lost four sailors under his command. They had been on regular duty in engineering when the ship was attacked.

One of his good friends also was killed.

Sitting in his parents-in-law’s living room Thursday, Grabelle said he had turbulent, mixed emotions. “I’m hurting inside, but I’m happy to still be here,” he said. “It’s hard to describe.”

Struggling to contain tears, Deanna said, “I think there are a lot of ifs on both our parts.

“Though I would never want to lose Jason,” she continued, now crying, “the friend we lost had children. It makes me wonder why it was us and not him who was OK.”

When sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner, Grabelle said he would pray “that everyone is OK and for all the support we got.”

“And we got so much support,” Deanna added. “I didn’t know how much support he was getting over there. He came back with a stack of e-mails. I work at a day care and parents of the children sent him e-mails. Friends sent him e-mails from across the country.”

And the vote about whether to buy new televisions? Grabelle said they voted against new ones. “We had good TVs; we didn’t need new ones.”