“I’ll do it,” I said. It was the only right thing to do.

I was grilled by fourteen senators, three hours under klieg lights (a lot of press was there), with no break (not even to piss). And I got hammered with questions.

Before I went in, I’d decided I would take full responsibility for this thing. I was the CINC and everything that happened in my AOR was my responsibility. If I didn’t, they’d dump it down on some poor son of a bitch like the captain of the ship. Somebody senior had to stand up. I remembered how hard they had hit General Peay for the Khobar Towers attack. When he tried to explain what happened during his testimony, they took it as waffling and not standing up to his responsibilities (which was far from the case). I was tired of admirals and generals trying to pass the buck. I was really upset with the chief of naval operations for trying to pin the blame on anybody else . . . it didn’t matter who. And I was enraged at the Washington blame game.

So I decided, “What the hell. The buck stops here.” And that’s what I said in my testimony: “I was the commander in chief who made the decision that we would refuel in there,” I told the senators. “I’m fine with that. If it was the wrong decision, you can hold me responsible for it.

“Now I’ll give you the circumstances, I’ll tell you what happened, and why I made the decision:

“Yes, it’s true that I wanted to improve relations with Yemen, but that was not the reason we chose to refuel in Yemen. We chose to refuel there for operational and not diplomatic or political reasons. It was the only practical port for our naval component to refuel their ships.

“The Navy has rules about fuel levels on their ships,” I explained. “In normal operations, they don’t let that level go below fifty-one percent.

“Ships traveling out of the Mediterranean could of course refuel in the Persian Gulf, but in many cases ships didn’t have enough capacity to get there without exceeding the fifty-one percent limit. That meant they had to find a refueling port between Suez and the Gulf. These were the possibilities: Djibouti, Eritrea, Jeddah, and Aden. That was it. Djibouti had been the Navy’s refueling port, but it was now a no-go. Eritrea was out because of the war with Ethiopia. Jeddah was out because we’d just had the bombings in Saudi Arabia. So there was no other choice.

“We looked hard at Aden. The Navy went in and vetted it, inspected it, and cleared it; and the Navy component for CENTCOM had the responsibility for security. We refueled twenty-eight ships during my tenure as CINC, and all without incident.