The Day After 9/11 Post

You know it occurred to me yesterday while watching the news and seeing all the coverage of events honoring the 7th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington DC and Shanksville, PA that I have spent roughly one third of my military career in a state of war.

I can distinctly remember the day it happened. I was in a classroom. I was going to school to learn how the new digital Army was supposed to work. Being assigned to the 4th Infantry at the time, the division was participating in something known as the digital warfighting experiment. As such soldiers had to learn the new systems that were being installed to make our lives easier (read: living hell) during the upcoming maneuvers. I was sitting in this class and one of the instructors came in and announced that a plane has just struck the World Trade Center. We all thought not having seen any of it, that it must have been a small civil airplane or someone either suicidal or really screwed up. Then the guy came back and said a second plane had hit, class was canceled and we were to report back to our units.

I didn't leave my BDE until around 2100 that night. In the time between I heard discussions on opening the arms room and issuing troops their weapons and live ammo (which it was ultimately decided too dangerous) and load plans for many different type deployment scenarios, to where nobody knew but they damn sure were going to start planning. By the time I left work, there were M-1 Abrams tanks stationed at the gates with their main gun oriented right down the road. At that time there were no gates to speak of on FT Hood, so they improvised check points, the tanks being a main feature. The next morning it took me 4 hours to get to work as they were doing a 100% search on every vehicle that came on post. I recall while sitting in that line thinking we were going to be a war for a long time and this wasn't going to be easy.

Little did I know how right I would be. So, here we are faced with a lot of people who are essentially quitters, whiners who were the exact same people who were complaining on 12 SEP 2001, that the President didn't do enough to stop this from happening. Nice to see some things never change, they were wrong then and they are wrong now. At least they are consistent.