- It's important to me as a Yellow Jacket
to share what I and other Yellow Jackets felt on that day
and it's important to me
as a former senior military officer.
For me, the day was like any other day.
I was a Colonel in the United States Air Force.
I had been selected and was serving in the Pentagon,
where I was the Senior Military Assistant
to the Secretary of the Air Force.
We were having a breakfast
with several congressional leaders
and the crazy thing is that the subject was terrorism.
In my office directly across the hall working head down
and in my office was a television,
but I never had it on because I was always too busy
to be distracted by the television.
And my staff comes flying into my office and said,
"Sir, sir, you gotta turn the TV on.
There's been a horrible accident in New York City."
I turn on the TV and I'm standing there
and I'm watching the replay of the first airplane
hit the building and I wrote a quick note
and I walked across the hall in to see the Secretary.
I bent down, handed him the note and said,
"Sir, we've had a horrible accident."
Then I walked back into my office.
I'm looking up at the TV and wham!
The second airplane hits the second tower.
My staff and I, we both agreed immediately.
This is not an accident.
I think we need to adjourn this breakfast.
I think we need to get our congressional leaders
back across to their building.
I believe we are under some sort of attack
and I explained to him that the second airplane had hit.
We were standing there, talking about standing up
the Air Force Crisis Action Team,
starting to organize ourselves,
when the whole Pentagon shook.
It wasn't a count of three or four
and this very rubbery tasting, acrid smoke,
thin smoke, entered the room.
Not deep, black smoke.
We were far away from the actual impact point.
Underneath my desk was a button
and that button was built for the Cold War,
the nuclear war scare days,
and that button summon the security forces
that were in charge of protecting
our Secretary and our Chief
and I just hit the button instinctively.
Then we start hearing screaming out in the hall.
"It's a bomb, it's a bomb, it's a bomb!"
And there was kind of craziness happening out in the hall.
Our task was to get to the bunker,
which was in the center of the building.
That's a flaw, I think because when we were under attack,
everybody's headed out of the building
and now we're fighting upstream to get to the bunker.
And probably the most poignant moment,
and I'm gonna make it through this
without getting goofed up.
I'm just gonna have to do it.
The most poignant moment of the whole day,
as we turn the corner to head in
and there's this mass of humanity coming at us, going out.
And then we hear from the end of the hall,
where we're actually headed,
we have to go almost to the center to go down.
We hear this scream.
"We have wounded, we have wounded!"
And I'm so proud of my uniform brothers and sisters
because almost everybody wearing a uniform turned around
and headed back towards the problem.
All airplanes were being forced down everywhere,
landing at any field and we were trying to get everybody
on the ground and it became apparent to us
that there was an airplane
that had turned towards Washington DC
that was still airborne and it was not answering.
And now, what we know is that we would've never been able
to make that intercept.
But for about 15 minutes, I watched the conversations
of the senior leadership of our nation
making a decision that they were gonna have to shoot down
an airplane full of Americans
to keep the bad guys from crashing it
into something in Washington DC.
And as you know, we never had to face that decision
because of the brave souls on that airplane
overpowered their hijackers
and they brought that airplane down.
When everything is going to crap, it's those people,
the first responders and the military,
that run toward the problem.
They don't run away from the problem
and we need to remember their sacrifice across those days
and there were yellow jackets that were in that business.
And the fact that the center of our military was attacked.
It stands out in us that we have to be ready.
We have to be wary.
We have to be prepared for it.
To bring this memory a little bit more to life
for those who didn't live it,
because this was a time altering piece of our history.
I have never seen America so united.
I've never seen us have such singular purpose,
as we were after that.
We have to never, never forget what happened.
(gentle, slow music)