JT, thanks so much for your thoughts and words on this topic.
I posted the below note on IAP 11 years ago. I still think of the events each day even though I'm long out of the warfight now. God bless and protect those that are our nation's "sheepdogs"...the defenders of the defenseless.
"Interesting topic. I've retired twice. Once as a federal agent. On 9-11, I was five years into my second career as a fed, this time as the Director of Emergency Services for a very large and diverse federal facility on the east coast. That morning I had just finished a meeting concerning security requirements for a facility that had weapons grade nuclear materiels within. I walked out of the meeting and was pulled aside by a member of my intel section who told me about the first plane. I returned to my office and turned on the TV. My secretary stood there with me as we watched the second tower get hit. She teared up and said she just didn't understand why someone would do what we watched. A few minutes later my boss (roughly equivalent to a town mayor ) came to my office. As we talked I brought senior staff (police chief, fire chief, etc) into the office. It was clear our nation was under attack and we were now players. As a federal facility, we shut down roads, air traffic, boat traffic (we had waterfront property) and nothing moved without approval. An absolute nightmare for the 10s of thousands of people that lived and work on our facility. Not to mention we were on the glide path between NY and DC and had things that if hit by a plane would have impacted the whole mid Atlantic region. Lots of sleepless nights for me for a while, but had been blessed with more than 600 cops, firefighters, EMTs, 911 dispatchers and support staff that really stepped to the plate. Our lives and the way we had done things changed forever that day. I attended a fairly high level meeting in DC a few days latter with federal counterparts. Some of us were sent to NYC the next week. One of my most prized possessions is small glass vial that contains debris from Ground Zero. It will forever remind me of those that were lost and those that gave their lives trying to save others."
