“Billy Fish,” says I to the Chief of Bashkai, “what’s the difficulty here?”
– THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING,
RUDYARD KIPLING
We awoke inside a large white and yellow striped circus tent on September 11, 2001, our Delta squadron having been deployed to a foreign country to sharpen our joint war-fighting skills. It would be another day of prepping our equipment for the upcoming mission, scrubbing vehicle and helicopter loads, reviewing contingency plans and scouting and studying intelligence reports and recent satellite photos.
A few discreet operators, trained in the delicate skill of close urban reconnaissance, were already in place near the target area. To help us refine the assault plan they would send back to us via small satellite radios digital photos of key breach points-roofs, doors, and windows. In different corners of the tent, the staff sergeants and sergeants first class were talking about the type of explosive charges needed for this door or that window.
That practice mission remains classified, but the real mission might certainly happen within the next few years. Typically, once these training exercises are complete, they are put “on the shelf,” filed away but ready to roll in an emergency. Should some terrorist organization or criminal gang execute their end of the action at that site, Delta would trigger a response that had already been planned down to the last detail.
Super D, our squadron operations officer who never let stress or a crisis overtly raise his heartbeat above normal, and I also were up early that day, hard at work in the guarded hideaway located at an obscure end of an old European military air base taxiway. We had to put our plan for the upcoming mission before the commander for his approval soon, and were finishing the briefing slides. Eyes fixed on the laptop screen and forefinger ready on the mouse to make any minor adjustments, Super D asked, “What do you think?”
“Looks great. Let’s get past this briefing and get out there and execute this thing,” I answered.
“Yeah, good enough,” Super D said. “I’ll get the boss over here and run through it and make any changes so we can brief the general this afternoon.”
Bart, the squadron operations sergeant, walked in from another tent about fifty meters away to relay some information from our squadron sergeant major. Then he casually commented, “Hey, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.”
We looked up at Bart, curious. “No shit?” said Super D.
I added, “No shit?”
Bart was a muscular, strong guy, a master at jujitsu and a championcaliber boxer, but he also was friendly and had a unique sense of humor. Was he joking? “Can you believe that shit? They think it was a small private plane. Geez, there you are checking out the new secretary near the watercooler and a plane comes crashing through the boss’s window.”
That day, September 11, 2001, may have started like any other, but within an hour of first call, the events taking place in America, several time zones away, would change our lives forever. They would change the lives of almost everyone in America.
Bart walked away across the grass infield, back to the other tent. Super D and I jaw-jacked a little. We gave little real thought to the airplane crash in New York, subconsciously chalking it up to mechanical failure or perhaps a heart attack overcoming the pilot above bustling lower Manhattan. We remembered that the World Trade Center had been the target of Islamic terrorists back in 1993, but no one was considering that terrorists might also be behind this new situation. Anyway, we were deep in our own business.
A few minutes later, Bart was back, moving much quicker this time, his eyebrows raised and a look of disbelief on his face. “Hey, get this. Another plane just crashed into the other Trade Center building. Now they think it’s terrorists!”
Super D and I were dumbfounded, afraid to believe it was true. We knew how hard it would be for a terrorist to crash just one plane into a skyscraper, but two different planes hitting the side-by-side Twin Towers within fifteen minutes of each other was more than astonishing. What pilot would ever freely fly into a building if he knew the action would likely kill hundreds of people more than just his passengers? We tried to put ourselves in the mental state of the pilot, wanting to believe that, even with a gun to our heads, we certainly would let the bullet rip through our skulls before knowingly killing more innocent people.
I remarked, “If it’s terrorists, I wouldn’t doubt it if they cancel this training exercise immediately.”
Super D nodded agreed. “Yeah, kind of makes what we’re doing here a lot less important than it was a few minutes ago. Let’s get over to the head shed and see if they have the news on.”
The Tactical Operations Center, or TOC, was wall to wall that morning with concerned soldiers, staff officers, commanders, Rangers, army helicopter pilots, air force officers, and a few Delta operators. All eyes were glued to the CNN reports as we tried to make heads or tails out of what was happening back in our country, thousands of miles away.
Everybody thought not only of their own family’s safety, but also the families of the reportedly tens of thousands of people who were believed to have been killed after both Trade Towers collapsed, on live television. As the death toll grew, we were back inside our circus tent, and intelligence analysts were posting hourly pen-and-ink updates. What we were reading was beyond belief:
American F-15 fighter jet deliberately downs American Airlines flight 1089 over the Atlantic Ocean.
American F-16 shadowing United Airlines flight 283, believed heading toward Washington D.C., not responding, lethal force authorized if plane reaches U.S. airspace.
F-15 downs Delta Airlines flight 766 over northwest Virginia. U.S. Capitol and White House struck by jumbo jets. Both on fire.
The enormity of what we read jerked us into action. Retrieving our weapons from the metal storage containers, we upgraded our perimeter security. One thing was for certain: We weren’t going to be surprise victims of a terrorist truck bomb or a rocket attack without returning the violence in spades.
The father of one of our mates worked in the Pentagon and was there during the attacks. Sergeant First Class Brandon Floyd called his mother to make sure his dad was okay, but she had not heard from him either. We were all worried for Brandon and tried to keep his spirits up, silently praying and hoping his dad was at a coffee shop downtown or still stuck in traffic-anywhere but at his desk that morning. As darkness fell, another call home turned up good news. Thankfully, the former army colonel was okay, but was knee-deep in the twisted steel and burning rubble at the Pentagon, helping the injured and recovering the dead.
By the morning of September 12, twenty-four hours after the attacks, the makeshift scoreboard in the tent tallied thirteen jets hijacked, with four deliberately engaged and blown out of the sky by American fighter pilots over American soil or waters. The other nine successfully struck targets in New York and Washington, D.C. What in the world was happening? How could this be? Who could coordinate such a complex operation like this? Is this war?
It was the second day, September 13, before we learned the actual toll from that horrible day of infamy. An uncanny phenomenon of the crisis business dictates that a first report is always suspect. Miscommunication, manifested in multiple reports by various news agencies of the same event, the jammed telephone lines and cell towers bulging from maximum usage, and the fact we were on the other side of the world had contributed to the fantastic and inaccurate reports.
It didn’t matter, though. Whether it had been thirteen or only four hijacked jets, to a man we wanted to pull those target folders off the shelf, kit up, lock and load, and hop a plane to wherever we might execute some quick and pure revenge for this unparalleled attack on our homeland. Whether we were at war seemed largely irrelevant.
Even years later, it is hard to imagine any Americans not having the fireball images or the dual collapsing of the Trade Towers ineradicably engraved in their minds. Over and over again, for days on end, television ensured that caustic morning would be remembered as vividly as the jumpy black-and-white footage of the Hindenburg disaster or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The attack had taken one hour and twenty-four minutes from the first strike on the North Tower to the crash of an airliner in a Pennsylvania field. Nowhere near the time it takes Mom to prepare a typical Thanksgiving meal, and less time than it takes to trim the hooves and shoe a couple of stubborn horses.
Although what had actually happened inside America remained cloudy to us, one thing was absolutely clear. It was time for America to stand up and be counted. Somebody would pay; Americans would accept nothing less than old-fashioned vigilante justice on this one.
The feeling we had at the time is indescribable as I sit here now with my pen, so many years after the event. But in that awful moment of national uncertainty and irrefutable vulnerability, one thing was a given: This was a good time to be in Delta-and we knew it.