Four Year Ago Today...
...I was standing Senior Supervisory Watch on PCU Jimmy Carter (SSN 23) at Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, CT. We had manned the watches for the first time on the boat the day before, and were just getting ready to start testing the primary systems in the Engine Room. The Captain came into Maneuvering and asked me for the 1MC (general announcing circuit) mike. He had an announcement to make...
Groton was pretty much the only military target between Boston and New York, and we knew by then that the planes had come from Boston. There was a big conference going on in town that day, and the Secretary of the Navy, NR, SubLant, and SubPac were there, as were most other bigwigs that had anything to do with submarines. When the THREATCON was elevated to the highest level in Groton, we wondered how they were going to get so many boats underway so quickly; at least one actually got underway, as I remember, before someone realized that they didn't really want the boats to actually head out to sea (even though that particular THREATCON had boats get underway without further order back then). I stayed on watch on the boat all day; eventually, we decided we weren't going to get any testing done, and I headed home. I had heard that "the towers had collapsed" but it didn't really hit me what that meant; I thought that maybe the top part had fallen off. When I got home, I saw the video of the collapse through the window as I was walking towards the house...
Check out Winds of Change for a roundup of 9/11 anniversary news and posts around the blogosphere. Mudville Gazette looks like they're posting powerful pictures of the attack throughout the day.
I will never forget...
posted by Bubblehead at 8:36 AM
1 Comments:
I was in the Arabian Sea - we'd left Bahrain a few days before and were on our way to the Suez Canal, the plan being to make a four-day stop in Crete and then head for home. We came up to PD about six hours after the towers collapsed, so we got the whole thing all at once - WTC in ruins, Pentagon damaged, fourth plane down in PA....
CSG 7 turned us around immediately, of course, and sent us back to the east. It was about a week before we saw the first few pictures (e-mailed to our nav), and another week after that before we rendezvoused with a skimmer for am unrep of sorts and were given a big stack of magazines and a copy of the CNN video.
And it was another couple weeks before we had a clue as to when we were going to go home.... (As it turned out, we were only three weeks late returning to home port.)
We shot in the first salvo against Afghanistan, and it was a very satisfying experience....
RM1(SS) (ret)
9/11/2005 11:07 AM
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