Remembering

[Bret4207]

5 years ago today I was enroute to NYC for the 9/11 attack response. I was on Wall St in front of the Stock Exchange by 10:00 the next morning. We were there for months after. The little bit of the replays I've seen today bring back the taste and smell of the dust at the site, the sounds and some of the emotions I later felt. God rest the souls we lost in NYC, Washington, PA, and the ensuing wars that followed. Never forgive, never forget.

[bruce drake]

I was coming back from Morning PT with my unit in the 101st Airborne at Ft. Campbell when I heard in on the radio. We locked the post down and prepped for deployment. 36 hours later, I was with my platoon guarding a facility vital to national security and hearing about my fellow Division Members preparing to go to Afghanistan.

Nine months later I was in Aberdeen Maryland preparing to go back to war in Iraq.
Spent some time there and am now in Ft Drum with the 10th Mountain Division getting ready to do it again.

Never forget that we fight them there so that we don't have to fight them here.

Support your local LEOs, they are fighting the current war here to protect us against the ones that do slip in.

Bruce

[9.3X62AL]

9/11 has the same riveted memories for me that I have for President Kennedy's assassination--I will always remember where I was and who was with me at the time I learned about this cowardly attack. My sergeant and I watched on TV in the staff room at the station as the second plane hit the Towers, and a few seconds later he said, "Suit everybody up, it probably won't effect us, but it looks like a long day ahead." He was from NYC, and was clearly pretty rattled.

I went back to our bureau, and being early in the day not many detectives were at work yet. I sent an E-mail directing all of us into uniform, with a briefing about 3 hours later (at 9 A.M.). By then, some sense of what was happening might have developed. Within a few minutes the decision was made to keep graveyard deputies in the field and for day shift patrol deps to field units ASAP. Detectives would staff the station in uniform, as a reserve force in event of need. I suited up and grabbed the AR-15 out of my plain car's trunk, and kept it near at hand at my desk as people came into work and learned what had happened in NYC. Not that a semi-auto 223 could do much good if some freak dressed like Yasser Arafat flew an aircraft or drove a car-bomb into the building, but it still felt good to have the rifle nearby.

I helped with the briefing, putting out what little good info existed at the time. Most of the day consisted of waiting around, seeing what happened next--and no significant terror-related activity occurred. Crime was practically non-existent--very few calls for service, I think even the crooks were looking for more missiles from the sky. I was only 7 when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, but the same pit-of-your-intestines dread was prevalent that I felt even at that young age.

About 3:30 P.M. the graveyard deps came in after a LONG shift extension, and the detectives got into their patrol cars and went afield. When swing shift came on at 5 P.M., their numbers emptied the parking lot of marked patrol cars. Most of the day, we just drove around looking for something to do, and getting flagged down by a whole lot of very nervous and shaken citizens who had been glued to their TV sets watching news coverage. EVERYBODY wanted reassuring that "it would be all right", and by 4 P.M. it started to look like the worst of it was likely past. As the afternoon went on, working guys and gals started to fill the bars--not drinking very much, just not wanting to go home until spouses were going to be there, not wanting to be alone. By 6 P.M., even the gridlock was emptying out on the freeways--people wanted to be HOME, with LOVED ONES. The bars emptied out as if on cue, a lot of businesses closed early, people were hunkering down.

The detectives in patrol cars were relieved by the graveyard troops who came on at 2 A.M., their shift altered so they could sleep. We worked two 12-hour shifts for 2 weeks after that, all time off cancelled. I doubled back to the 6 A.M.-6 P.M. shift, catching about 3 hours' sleep in my cubicle before returning to duty, after showering myself awake. A few more days of pushing the black-and-white around Rubidoux, then back to plainclothes and caseload. Days off re-started soon thereafter.