USS Cole Commander Kirk Lippold, has written a book about the bombing of the Cole.
It is titled “Front Burner: Al Qaeda’s Attack on the USS Cole” and will be released April 10.
The Daily Caller published part of an interview in it's article. This is a snippet.
“At the moment of the explosion, the entire ship is lifted up into the air, and within seconds I knew we’d been attacked,”
“I was sitting in my cabin working at my desk. I went back and opened the safe where I kept the keys to the missiles and the torpedoes and the guns, and I pulled out a 9mm pistol, took a deep breath and went outside on the ship.”
“I didn’t know if we were going to be boarded. … All I knew was I had chambered a round, I had two clips of ammunition. … The only thing I could think of [was] I might be facing my destiny, but I’m not leaving a single round in the chamber. The only two things that mattered to me in the moment were protecting my crew and protecting my ship.”
...
“There was no announcing system to tell them what had happened because it had failed. There were no alarm systems on the ship because the system had failed. So without anyone telling the crew what to do, what had happened, where to go, they fell back on their training and immediately set about saving the ship and saving their shipmates,” he said. “We got the ship stable within a couple hours, to where it wasn’t sinking. To tell you how well the crew did in saving their shipmates —that first day we evacuated 33 wounded off the ship, in 99 minutes, and of those 33, 32 would survive.”
http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/06/twelve-years-later-uss-cole-commander-recalls-deadly-attack/