By Mark Waite

For Kirk Lippold, former commander of the USS Cole, the desire to run for the U.S. Congressional seat left vacant by U.S. Rep. Dean Heller came on Sept. 12, 2000 when he ran through the dark of his cabin, grabbed a 9 millimeter pistol and prepared to confront people boarding his ship after an explosion.

“After 26 years of service to the nation, a singular event defined what service could entail and that was the attack on the USS Cole. In that moment, watching those heroes save that ship and their shipmates, knowing what giving your life may mean to your country, I have a sense of service that became even wider and deeper than before,” Leppold said in a campaign visit to Nye County Republican Party headquarters on Friday.

Lippold is one of more than two dozen candidates vying to replace Heller, who was appointed to the U.S. Senate to replace John Ensign, who resigned after a scandal. A district judge will decide soon if it will be an open election, as Secretary of State Ross Miller envisions, or each party nominates one candidate, as the Nevada Republican Party wants.

Out of a crew of 294 men on the USS Cole, Lippold said 17 were killed and 37 wounded that day.

The ship’s office contracted for three barges to remove trash. The first two came and went without incident, the third followed the same path but detonated an explosive.

“I was sitting in my cabin when there was a thunderous explosion. You could feel all 505 feet and 8,400 tons of guided missile destroyer quickly thrust up and to the right before we came back down in the water with power failures throughout the ship. The announcing system to tell the crew what to do failed, the cables for the alarm systems — and both of those were design flaws — failed. And consequently without anyone telling the crew what to do or where to go, they fell back on their training and saved the ship and their shipmates,” Lippold said in what seemed like an often repeated account.

The commander knew the ship had been hit, because there was nothing on the left or port side of the ship except open water.

The USS Cole was heading to the Persian Gulf to enforce United Nations sanctions against Iraq, he recalled. There was no place to refuel at sea and two ports available: Djibouti, on the horn of Africa and Aden, Yemen, at the far southwest end of the Arabian Peninsula. The crew pulled into Aden harbor at 9:30 a.m., started refueling at 10:30 a.m. and expected to be there six to eight hours.

“We were operating under peacetime rules of engagement. So it would’ve meant that the people on that boat would’ve had to have aimed guns at us or actually started shooting at us before we were able to shoot at them. We didn’t have that opportunity,” Lippold said.

When he retrieved his gun from a safe where the crew kept the ship’s weapons, the missiles, the guns and the torpedoes, Lippold said, “I didn’t know if there would be another attack, but I knew that I was going to defend my crew, my ship and my nation and if it meant that I had to give my life, this was going to be defined. All I knew was I was going to empty that clip into whoever was coming on board. So I took that deep breath and went out. Fortunately we weren’t being boarded.”

Lippold said when he saw the huge hole, he went to the bridge, asked Yemeni port authorities for help and watched the crew work to save the ship. Within a couple of hours the ship was stable, he said. The crew evacuated 33 wounded shipmates off the ship in 99 minutes, of which 32 survived, Lippold said.

A thorough investigation determined there were failures in putting the USS Cole into port that day without the proper training, tools, intelligence or rules of engagement, he said.

Lippold’s face seems to evoke a sense of anger, with teeth clinched, as he describes the failures in intelligence that led to the attack. Al Qaeda had been operating at the port for 18 months, observing how Navy ships operated, Lippold said.

After the incident, he served with the joint chiefs of staff on issues dealing with detainees, where he was instrumental in creating the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. He joined a group called Military Families United, comprised of families who lost loved ones due to war. Lippold retired from the Navy in 2007.

“I found myself in February of 2009 at the White House with families of the USS Cole and 9/11 as this president tried to explain why closing Guantanamo Bay was in our national interest. I disagreed with him then, I disagree with him now,” Lippold said. At the time of the attack on the USS Cole, the nation was living in a pre-9/11 mindset, Lippold said. While the nation woke up with a different mentality a year later, on Sept. 12, 2001, he blamed former President Clinton for many of the errors in judgment.

“I know that a lot of people like to take a shot at President Bush and that $241 billion surplus that became a very, big deficit. The reality of it is when you look at the virtual non-response throughout his entire time in office, to World Trade Center I, Khobar Towers, the African Embassy bombings and the USS Cole, there’s probably a lot of families out there that wished that President Clinton had done more to act on terrorism,” Lippold said.

Obviously, he has a lot of views on the war on terror. On the domestic side, Lippold said as a conservative Republican he supports most of the positions Heller took. While Heller supported the Patriot Act, which Lippold said made America safer, it needs to be reviewed.

“It was a huge expansion and intrusion into American’s lives and we need to start asking the hard questions. . . . Can it in fact be shown that it was effective and is still effective in making us safe?”

Lippold said Nevada is facing huge issues with an unemployment rate still at 12.5 percent and the possibility of a double dip recession. Nevada leads the nation in foreclosures for the 55th straight week, he said.

“That is unacceptable and going back to Washington and getting either government to work or more important, getting government out of our way, is what we need to do,” Lippold said.

While other candidates can tout their legislative experience, Lippold said all that experience has brought is more government, more taxes and more debt.

“What I will offer to the people of Nevada is life experiences that I will bring to Washington with bold leadership to help solve some of our problems,” he said.

While the post World War II generation produced war heroes that became presidents, like General Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy’s experiences on PT 109, Lippold said,

“I don’t look at it as being a military hero. I was a commanding officer that was put in the wrong place at the wrong time, blessed with a great crew that did the right thing at the right time to save their ship and their shipmates. I’m no hero, I just did my job as best I could.”