The morning of September 11th, we were just starting a, we call it a rescue one course. And we
And we actually did all of our in-house training from rope rescue to confined space to collapsed
structure to shoring anything in that nature, we trained. We were just starting a class,
saw that a plane hit the building in New York City. When we found out that
the plane hit the actual Pentagon, we alerted and got everything together and were prepared
to move within an hour. And our mission was anything that would happen-
we were to go in and to do search and rescue and hopefully rescue of whoever the occupant
was wherever they were.
It was the evening of the 11th when we got to the Pentagon and
I remember the Pentagon still being on fire. A lot of the local fire departments had responded,
Arlington County, Alexandria, Fairfax, Fort Belvoir. The priority was putting the fire out.
A lot of, I mean, the plane hit fully loaded with fuel, so it took a little while
to get that under control.
We found the incident commander, told them of our capabilities,
let them know we're on the way and waited on our unit to show up. While we're waiting on
the rest of the unit, the main body, to show up we took, I took the first squad into the
building to do an initial search and rescue. This was after, ended up after, everybody that
was going to come out was able to come out of the building.
Sgt. Brown's mother-in-law
worked at the Pentagon in the area where it had been hit, and his kids, I remember
him talking to his kids, and them trying to find Grandma. And then at the same time,
Fort Belvoir's Sergeant Major, Sgt. Maj. Strickland, her husband worked in that area also, and
I remember her walking through looking for her husband, and her asking for help for us
to help find her husband. Those are the, those are the things that really stick with me
on the first night.
Well, training kicks in. I didn't think of anything except for making
sure that that my my guys were suited up correctly. We were supplied air apparatus, and
we went in and did the search.
I knew that my mother in law was in the building somewhere
but I didn't know exactly where she was in relationship
to the plane, where the plane went in. Just going through the motions, a lot of shock because
we're not used to seeing, you know, a foot and a half of water with fuel burning on top
of it, and what we saw inside there. So just just a lot of stuff going through the through my mind
that I can't recall now, but a lot of it was just training kicks in, and you're not a robot, but
you just let it work and you know make things happen. When we got there everybody wanted to go to
When we got there everybody wanted to go to work.
Nobody wanted to go to sleep. Myself included. I think most of us was up for the
first two or three days. Point blank because that's when, if you, if you was to find somebody,
that's when they're going to be alive. And it was it was all in. Nobody wanted to go
anywhere. Most of us slept there either on our humvees, or in our trucks or on the ground.
Well what we were feeling was a lot of disappointment, as you can imagine. You train really hard.
In most of our scenarios that we developed for training, we brought live people out.
And the realization that we probably were not going to find anybody alive was a little
bit stressful on us, because that's what we wanted to do, and as we were
finding more and more bodies, it was, it was getting a little bit harder to um you know to
excuse me it was getting a little bit harder to keep everybody motivated, but at the end of
the day, you know, search and recovery. So we switched into recovery mode only, and,
you know, we just dealt with it. It's, it's difficult knowing what your job is. And what
you want to do and it doesn't happen, you know. But at the end of the day we have another
job to do so we just dealt with it and kept everybody motivated as much as possible.
The unit did great. We stayed there for 10 days working 24-hour shifts 12 on 12 off.
But just the way that the men and women of this unit, of everyone that was there performed
was my biggest takeaway.
We had a mission to do, we had a job to do, and we went forward
we executed that job. I was on terminal leave. I couldn't imagine not being there. I had the
training. I had the knowledge. Twenty years ago I would have done the exact same thing that
I did on that day. I went straight back. Nobody needed to tell me to go back. This is an engineer
This is an engineer company
that was stand-alone in all of the Army, and after this, there's people knocking
down the door trying to get into this unit. And over the 20 years since 9/11, the unit
has grown leaps and bounds. They've acquired equipment that we only dreamed of. Their different
training that they're using. It's amazing to see how far they've come. And that's a
direct reflection of of what we did and how we performed.
The biggest thing that I'm proud of is
all of our training paid off. That the Soldiers that went in there performed their
duty. They did it well. They did it without any major injury, and they all came back
safe to their families. That's the biggest thing that I'm proud of.