It is startling for us middle-aged and older people to realize that young adults, even up to the age of 30, were either not yet born on 9/11 or were too young to remember that day. Young people probably see 9/11 as people my age (born in 1970) see the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — as ancient history, behind that invisible line marking “before I was born.”
Everyone remembers exactly where they on 9/11, and most of us thought it was the start of World War III. I remember being glad my grandmother, who had died six months earlier, had not lived to see it. I asked her once where she’d been when she heard about Pearl Harbor, and she said she was sitting in a diner with my grandfather. When the news came on the radio, the whole place fell silent in horror, and everyone left. (My other grandmother was still in the hospital after giving birth to my dad on Dec. 7, 1941.)
On Sept. 11, 2001, my husband and I were living in his hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota. He was stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, where he was the flight surgeon for a squadron of refueling planes.
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I was feeding my 18-month-old son breakfast in his high chair, and my husband was at work at the base. I grabbed the baby, ran downstairs to the TV room and turned on the news, thinking, like everyone else, that it had to be a freakish plane crash. As I watched the second plane hit, I realized, like everyone else, that it was a terrorist attack.
I called my husband on his office line and asked him if he heard there was a massive terrorist attack in New York City. He was like, “Um, yes? I’m on an Air Force base!” He told me he didn’t know when or if he could come home and said he would let me know as soon as he knew anything.
All day on Sept. 11, everyone thought wherever they were living might be the next target. In North Dakota, there are nuclear missile silos. The base went into lockdown. All the squadron wives started calling each other, trying to find out if anyone knew anything. There was a rumor that Air Force One might come to the Grand Forks base as the president was moved around throughout the day. Someone heard the president was at Offut Air Force Base, in Nebraska, and someone else heard he was in Idaho.
My husband came home late that night. A few days later, the squadron was activated, and everyone was told to get ready to deploy. My husband had already deployed to the Middle East that year and spent several months in Saudi Arabia. He’d written his will, had weapons training and gotten every vaccine known to humankind — including anthrax, which raised an oozy welt the size of a golf ball on his arm.
At that time, prior to the 9/11 attacks, Saudi was considered to be a cushy deployment, where people lay around the pool in the sun on their days off. On his birthday, my husband and some friends played golf outside Riyadh, at a course with no grass aside from the tee box and the putting greens; the “green” and the rough were all sand. His group, which traveled in armored vehicles, had to radio into the base every 15 minutes to confirm they were safe.
Looking back, Saudi Arabia was a dangerous place to be in January 2001, but maybe no one knew how dangerous. Two British soldiers at the same base found a carton of milk on the hood of their vehicle; one of them went to brush it off, and it detonated, killing both. Also during that deployment, the planes had to take off at very steep angles to stay out of range of possible hostiles with rocket launchers around the base.
Ten days after the 9/11 attacks, my husband’s squadron, the 905th Refueling, mobilized for a destination we knew only as “Base X.” Families could write letters to an Army Post Office address that didn’t reveal where they were, and there were no emails or phone calls. I remember looking at the globe, wondering where the 905th could be. All we knew was that our refuelers were sent to refuel the bombers bombing Afghanistan.
Most of the pilots in the squadron had young families. We had all been through other deployments and everyone was used to it, but obviously, this was different. We were all scared. But military people are not whiners. They don’t complain. It’s what you sign up for, and especially in this case, everyone was proud to serve.
That deployment was very hard on my husband’s parents, who were already elderly. My father-in-law was a tough, stoic Scandinavian who lived in pain every day of his life as a result of a broken back he received in the Battle of the Bulge. I never saw him get upset over anything, but it made him crazy that he couldn’t find out where his son was stationed.
“I’m going to write to my congressman,” I remember him saying. But before he could, about two months later, the 905th was back. We finally found out where they had been: Bahrain, an island off the coast of Saudi Arabia, the site of an abandoned Navy base.
Bahrain is known as the Vegas of the Middle East. Apparently, people come from Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is illegal and women once had to be veiled, to pull off their veils, pull out the booze and party for the weekend.
The squadron deployed so fast that when they reached Bahrain, there was nothing but a dirt runway and Navy personnel with flashlights on the ground, directing the huge refueling planes. From Bahrain, the refuelers flew over Afghanistan to meet up with the bombers. My husband, as a crew member, went along on several missions. At one point, one of the crew pointed out the window at what looked like fireworks in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan but was actually Taliban anti-aircraft fire. (No one was particularly worried about it, however, as they were using old Soviet anti-aircraft weapons.)
When the squadron got home, safe and sound, we had no idea when they would deploy again. About six months later, the squadron had a mass baby shower, and in July 2002, our 9/11 baby was born, along with about 15 other new members of the 905th … possibly one of the only good things to come out of one of the worst days in American history.