HONESDALE, PA — The USS Cole was attacked on October 12, 2000 by two suicide bombers—members of Al Qaeda. Seventeen crew members were killed and 37 wounded.

The bombing was a precursor to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. 

MC Gowan, a retired Navy captain, started with the Cole bombing and created a fictionalized account of what happened afterward.

Titled “Not On My Watch,” the book is published by Tactical 16.

An author talk and book signing will be held at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, January 16 in the all-purpose room at the Park Street Complex. See box at upper right.

Who is MC Gowan?

It’s a pseudonym for a man with local ties who served 26 years on active and reserve duty in the Navy. (Why a pseudonym? Keep reading.)

The book grew out of his experiences in the military.  

 “After college [at the Virginia Military Institute], I was deployed to the [Persian] Gulf,” he said. Gowan served in Desert Storm and was assigned as the mission commander of Task Group 53.8 for the first deployment of Naval Coastal Warfare (NCW) and its attached active-duty forces in the Gulf following the bombing of the Cole.

NCW is part of the Navy, provides force protection and works in anti-terrorism. 

Gowan worked in port security, anti-terrorism and more. He was recalled to the Mediterranean after 9/11. 

The memories of those times and the notes he kept formed the basis of the book. 

Why a pseudonym? 

The name “MC Gowan” reflects his family, the McGowans of Wayne County. It is also because the book is a blend of voices and personalities, Gowan said. It isn’t just that of the captain and retired Navy man writing the book, but the people he knew; all are woven in. 

In addition, “my ancestors are an influence,” he said. 

Gowan’s local ties matter too. Most of the book was written at the McGowan farm, he said, and the book had its opening at the American Legion here. 

“This area does mean a lot to me,” he said.

Creating a book

“As time kept going by, people would tell me I should write a book,” Gowan said. “Or ‘You’ll never write a book; you’re an engineer.’”

Actually, he experimented with poetry at first. Then plays. 

Why not? Consider Shakespeare’s history plays. “Do you know ‘Henry V?’” he asked. “The Battle of Agincourt. And that’s the source for [the phrase] ‘Band of brothers.’ ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’” he quoted. 

The speech continues with “For he to-day that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother”—a reminder that Henry was heading into battle on St. Crispin’s Day. 

But a novel won out.

It absorbed his experiences in the Middle East and the points he wanted to make. What he’d seen and heard. “All of this was boiling together,” Gowan said.

The book itself

“Not On My Watch” tells the story of a joint Navy/Coast Guard operation after the bombing; Navy and Coast Guard reservists were used to help in Dubai. 

That time after the Cole bombing, in both real life and fiction, was “very emotionally charged,” and the resources were needed to protect the ships, he said. 

“Not On My Watch” is bookended by the Cole bombing on one side and 9/11 on the other, and Gowan references terrorist incidents worldwide and the way the U.S. military stepped up to combat them. “I knew they were ramping up to protect ports,” he said.

An ops officer during that time, he talked about the way the Navy and Coast Guard mobilized, and how once in the Gulf they worked together. 

It’s about the importance of the Reserves and of the families back home who enabled the soldiers to do their jobs.

“The heart and soul [of the book] comes from that time,” he said.

That the Cole bombing happened in a port in Yemen—now the home of the Houthi movement, which has attacked shipping in the Gulf—and that war rages between Israel and Hamas, lends an immediacy to the topic.

A day ‘we hold close’

The book officially launched on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, last year. That day “is something we hold close,” Gowan said. 

Gowan will donate 67 percent—67 was the hull number of the Cole—of the profits of the book to U.S. Navy Relief and other charities. 

You can purchase “Not on My Watch” in hardcover or paperback from the publisher, Tactical 16, at www.t16books.com/product/not-on-my-watch.