"This is an active national monument," said the skipper, Cmdr. Bradley Roberson. "It says we will stay, we will persevere and we will be around to make sure the mission gets done."
Former Cole crew member Master Chief Paul Abney, who lost friends when the guided missile destroyer was bombed, said it's the right thing for the ship to return to the Middle East.
"It sends a message in and of itself that we can be hurt but not broken," Abney, 49, said in a phone interview Tuesday.
In honor of her shipping back out, I put together this little bit of verse:
Mending Cole
Something there is that makes us love the Cole,
That sends the rolling sea-swell under it,
And spills the newbies’ breakfasts o’er the side;
And makes hearts beat proudly neath the breast.
The work of sailors is another thing:
I have come after them and held them dear
For they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have al Qaeda out of hiding,
To save the frightened souls. The gap, I mean,
So many saw it made and heard it made,
And at Spring mending-time we found it there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the shore
And watch her sail out from port once again.
We keep the Cole in service as we should
To keep on spreading freedom overseas.
And some are tough and some have lots of balls
We have to say a pray’r to keep them living:
“Stay as you are! With you our land’s secured!”
We wear our hankies out with twisting them.
Oh, just another grey old navy tub,
One on our side. It sails for distant ports:
There where it is we surely need the Cole:
Children may pine and wives are weeping sorely.
AlQaedas bombs must never get across
And harm the ones who live free, we promise.
We have to say, “Good sailors make good navies.”
Fool is the leftist in some, and they wonder
If they could put a notion in our heads:
“Why do they build such navies? Isn’t it
To stop the bombs? But here there are no bombs.
Before I set asail I’d ask to know
What I was killing off or why they hate us so
And to whom I was like to give offence.”
Something there is that makes us love the Cole
That wants it strong. I could say “Faith” to them,
But it’s not faith exactly, and I’d rather
Sail on her myself. I picture her
Coming back home with bin Laden in the brig
Al Qaeda gone to old-bone ash and dust.
She moves in sunlight as it seems to me,
Not of steel only and the green of seas.
She will not fail to meet her nation’s calling,
And we like having seen her sail so well,
We say again, “Good sailors make good navies.”
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