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9/11

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3 minutes ago, retrofade said:

9/12/01

Queen Elizabeth II ordered the US National Anthem to be played during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

 

OH SAY DOES THAT STAR SPANGLED BANNER YET +++++ING WAVE!

You’re damn right it does.

We’re all sitting in the dugout. Thinking we should pitch. How you gonna throw a shutout when all you do is bitch.

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This is a +++++ing amazing story... I posted the first few paragraphs, but do yourself a favor and read the rest of it. It came out back in 2011, but I can't recall ever having heard her story before. 

Quote

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything,   Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan.

Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.

“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/f-16-pilot-was-ready-to-give-her-life-on-sept-11/2015/09/06/7c8cddbc-d8ce-11e0-9dca-a4d231dfde50_story.html

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4 minutes ago, retrofade said:

This is a +++++ing amazing story... I posted the first few paragraphs, but do yourself a favor and read the rest of it. It came out back in 2011, but I can't recall ever having heard her story before. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/f-16-pilot-was-ready-to-give-her-life-on-sept-11/2015/09/06/7c8cddbc-d8ce-11e0-9dca-a4d231dfde50_story.html

Holy smokes! Never heard this one before. 

Raise a glass to flight 93 while we’re at it. America learned a lot of hard lessons that day, and the days since. Some we still haven’t learned. But that random collection of strangers taught us the first one. This generation of Americans will never let a plane be hijacked without a fight again.

Let’s roll.

We’re all sitting in the dugout. Thinking we should pitch. How you gonna throw a shutout when all you do is bitch.

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3 minutes ago, thelawlorfaithful said:

Holy smokes! Never heard this one before. 

Raise a glass to flight 93 while we’re at it. America learned a lot of hard lessons that day, and the days since. Some we still haven’t learned. But that random collection of strangers taught us the first one. This generation of Americans will never let a plane be hijacked without a fight again.

Let’s roll.

Todd Beamer, the "Let's Roll" dude, was actually a Fresno State baseball player until he suffered an injury that ended his hopes of playing professionally and transferred back to a school in Illinois to finish his degree.

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I watched it all unfold on TV before work. I went to work and did my job, I was writing test code for the F35 CNI system at the time. Nobody said much of anything. I think we were all sort of in shock. I went home, watched the news and surfed the web obsessively for about the next month. The next day, we lost a significant number of employees due to reserve call ups. 

I didn't make my first trip to Afghanistan until 2008,  just before the "surge".  I've been back eight times since. I leave for my tenth trip in a couple of weeks. All tolled, I've probably spent 2-3 years in country. Early on, I would attend the Ramp Ceremony's when fallen soldiers were being loaded for transport back home. The last few trips, thankfully, I haven't had to do this.  I never in a million years figured that my career would take me to such a place so often. I've also had the "pleasure" of visiting a few other garden spots in the region; Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan. I don't recommend any of these places.  I wish none of this had ever happened and these places remained as nothing more than names on the map to me.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

-Richard Feynman

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

-P.J. O’Rourke

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55 minutes ago, retrofade said:

Todd Beamer, the "Let's Roll" dude, was actually a Fresno State baseball player until he suffered an injury that ended his hopes of playing professionally and transferred back to a school in Illinois to finish his degree.

I think I’d heard that here before in one of these threads.

“I have not yet begun to fight.”

”Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

“Come on, you sons a bitches, do you wanna live forever.”

”Let’s roll.”

Spartan, but it fits.

We’re all sitting in the dugout. Thinking we should pitch. How you gonna throw a shutout when all you do is bitch.

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Neil Young did a song based on the Let's Roll.

 

I didn't follow the news at the time. I was in my own little bubble just dealing with the day to day. My morning commute was an hour and I had my radio tuned to Greg Kihn. I thought it was a joke. That he was doing a War of the Worlds kind of thing. Until I got to work and checked the news. It was all real. Surreal. 

 

My brother had gotten out of the Air Force and started working for Delta a year before. He went back active duty, he said he couldn't sit at home wondering what kind of world his 2 daughters would be living in.

And I always check the news in the mornings after that......

One of the Final Five..........

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And then there was Springsteen's The Rising. So many songs on that album take me back to that day but the title track really sticks out. The Rising, the 1st responders going up the stairs......and up to heaven.

 

 

 

One of the Final Five..........

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19 hours ago, thelawlorfaithful said:

Holy smokes! Never heard this one before. 

Raise a glass to flight 93 while we’re at it. America learned a lot of hard lessons that day, and the days since. Some we still haven’t learned. But that random collection of strangers taught us the first one. This generation of Americans will never let a plane be hijacked without a fight again.

Let’s roll.

I was on a flight to Central America the day after scheduled flights resumed. In the week preceding the flight, I felt a palpable degree of anxiety, mixed in along with the animosity, anger, sadness, etc., that everyone was feeling to some degree.

Then, about 3 nights before my flight, I had a dream that there in fact were hijackers on my flight. In my dream I stuck my BP pen into the jugular of one, and beat the other one unconscious. I woke up ready for my flight. I also realized I was likely not the only one to have such thoughts, and figured attempting to hijack another commercial flight with American pax on board was probably the dumbest f*cking thing a hijacker could attempt to do during that time frame.

St-Javelin-Sm.jpgChase.jpg 

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My wife called me at work after the first plane hit the first tower. My first thought was some dumb ass pilot either forgot how to fly or committed suicide. I turned on my monitor at work. When the second plane hit, it was pretty evident it was terrorism. It all seemed so surreal like watching a movie. I wondered what was going to happen next which was the Pentagon being hit and rumors of another plane heading toward another DC target crashing and burning. 

Like Pearl Harbor that event set in motion a variety of things that changed how we have lived our lives since then. The Patriot Act, formation of the Dept. of Homeland Security, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the TSA, security everywhere you go. Bin Laden accomplished exactly what he had hoped for. 

It still amazes me how that terrorism could be carried out without detection especially with so many involved. 

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It was the day the fun died.

I was in the 8th Grade. It was surreal, honestly. I remember within the next couple days in town, I was living in the Valley at the time, a Sikh guy got thrown in a canal and drowned because some yahoos thought he was an Arab. All of a sudden, the US didn't seem so freewheeling and it became a really dark, paranoid and angry place.

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7 hours ago, CV147 said:

Do you guys remember how they grounded all air traffic for like a week?

I worked in a call center which was located next to an airport during 9/11. The silence and lack of contrails in the air was so eerie.

For days everything everybody talked about was revenge.

One of my responsibilities at the UPS facility in Reno was air cargo. 

When air traffic got shut down we had to change our logistics immediately.  Had trailers set up in the parking lots for different hubs just to deliver air cargo. Next day, second day and third day air all were diverted to trailers. Drivers came in at all hours, cut short their vacations or time off. It was an amazing example of Americans working to ensure the country would get their parcels on time. It was extremely important to us all to keep the status quo.  In spite of the disaster. 

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I read the word "surreal" in a lot of posts and that about sums it up.

2 hours ago, Joe from WY said:

It was the day the fun died.

I was in the 8th Grade. It was surreal, honestly. I remember within the next couple days in town, I was living in the Valley at the time, a Sikh guy got thrown in a canal and drowned because some yahoos thought he was an Arab. All of a sudden, the US didn't seem so freewheeling and it became a really dark, paranoid and angry place.

A veritable Kingdom of Fear, if you will.

St-Javelin-Sm.jpgChase.jpg 

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Single-Rose.jpg

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Not one wide scale attack since. I hate almost all the things we did while understandably overreacting to what happened, but a tip of the cap should be given to the spooks and feds for that. Now, let’s take the things that work and peel all the stuff back that was overkill.

We’re all sitting in the dugout. Thinking we should pitch. How you gonna throw a shutout when all you do is bitch.

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8 minutes ago, thelawlorfaithful said:

Not one wide scale attack since. I hate almost all the things we did while understandably overreacting to what happened, but a tip of the cap should be given to the spooks and feds for that. Now, let’s take the things that work and peel all the stuff back that was overkill.

While I agree whole heartedly with your statement. ...we had our guard down...and learned from it. What would peel back that is overkill? 

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17 minutes ago, DestinFlPackfan said:

While I agree whole heartedly with your statement. ...we had our guard down...and learned from it. What would peel back that is overkill? 

He is talking about Iraq.  Personally, I don't have the energy to relitigate that anymore.

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The 00's wound up being a tough decade, and I would argue the defining decade of my generation.

Between the dotcom bust on the front end, then 9/11, the Iraq War, then Katrina, then the housing bust and Great Recession, there was a lot of bad shit packed in that ten years time.

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