9/11

Today is the Ten Year Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on my country.

Ten years ago today, I was just finishing up a pretty grueling training cycle. Two straight weeks of 18-22 hour days separated only by 3 or 4 hours of sleep at a time. Everything on the ship (USS HEWITT DD 966) was placed in simulation mode. Back then (and still sometimes now) the ship had no radio or television -we were just getting email -and those were intermittent and unreliable. Only the top people had Internet access, but even that was intermittent. It was normal to not know what day it was (or even if it was day or night outside -everything works on Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time). On the last day of this mission, we were getting excited and ready to pull in when the CO came across the 1MC announcing system and told us about what had happened. We really thought it was another drill. So, we followed through and set our PPR's (preplanned responses) and assumed duties on the mission called Western Picket. We were out for another 3 weeks before we saw land again. Those that had family in the area were allowed to send message via Naval Message Traffic and Bat phones. I have no idea how the bat phones worked because we didn't have satellites for them. Even then, it took hours just to get a message off ship. I felt really bad for them. Some of them had to wait for days just to get a status. And, even longer to get them to their families.
That is when it really hit me the importance of what we do.