At Bragg, we took off for the short flight that would carry us over Sicily Drop Zone. In my career I’d probably jumped seventy-five or more times on Sicily’s large, sandy expanse, but none would be like this. Inside the airplane, we listened as the jumpmasters barked out their well-worn recitations. “Stand up!” We stood and faced the back of the plane.
Atta’s men had their own recitations to say to themselves, silently, as they too prepared to get up from their seats in their plane. “When you board the airplane,” he had advised them, “proceed with the invocations, and consider this is a raid on a path.” If all was going to plan, they too were standing now and repeating the commands to themselves.
After the jumpers had stood up, we “hooked up,” snapping our static lines onto the anchor line cable. Starting at the back of the plane, each paratrooper gave a firm tap on the shoulder of the man in front of him, cascading down the plane until the man at the front felt his shoulder tapped.
“All okay, jumpmaster,” first jumper Dan McNeill yelled, indicating that the “stick” of jumpers was ready. The loadmaster turned a steel handle and slid the aircraft door up until it was fully open.
“Each of you is to hold the shoulder of his brother.” Atta and his men had since moved into the cabin of their plane, which now crossed the sky at more than four hundred miles per hour, pointed toward Manhattan’s southern tip. Hold your brother’s shoulders, he said, in “the plane, and the cabin, reminding him that this action is for the sake of God.”
As the warm wind blew into the open door of our aircraft, the air force loadmaster leaned close to my boss. I overheard him say that an airplane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. I had a few seconds to ponder the obviously terrible accident. Then the green light came on. We jumped.
We’d left Pope that morning with America enjoying an imperfect but relatively stable era of peace; our feet landed on a nation at war. Soon after retrieving my parachute, my driver informed me that a second aircraft had hit the other tower and, mistakenly, that a bomb had gone off at the Pentagon.
“I think this changes everything,” he said presciently.
I didn’t immediately respond. I was lost in thought, trying to process the information, as we drove back to headquarters. We went directly to the office, where my secretary had the unfolding events on television. We watched together, helplessly, as one, then the other, tower collapsed. Only a year earlier I’d seen those towers every morning as I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge. Now the iconic structures were piles of smoke and wreckage, shrouding almost three thousand perished souls. Much later, as accounts captured the horror of the morning and the courage of common people and the fallen and their families, I felt the sadness of loss. But that Tuesday, like most Americans, I felt the urgent need to do something. My first reaction, as it had been after the Pope accident, was to get organized.
Dan McNeill was an unflappable leader, which was good, because barely controlled bedlam ruled Bragg the first days and weeks after 9/11. We instituted security procedures that had been planned but insufficiently tested. The morning of September 12, lines of cars attempting to enter the base found checkpoints quickly overwhelmed with the volume. On some roads, the wait extended to hours; many people simply turned around and went home. Nurses and doctors were considered essential personnel during high-threat periods, but child-care specialists were not. Many with kids couldn’t come to work. At higher levels, Army Forces Command, headquartered in Atlanta, hosted hourslong video teleconferences that simulated effective coordination more than they actually achieved such synergy. Everyone meant well, but like all of America, we were navigating uncharted waters.
Reactions that now seem ridiculous felt prudent at the time. Someone called in a potentially serious threat of an anthrax attack on the area of Bragg where we processed the flood of reservists called to duty to meet a variety of requirements—some of the fifty thousand reserve troops President Bush activated three days after 9/11. Military police did indeed find suspicious white powder on the floor of one of the World War II–era buildings we still used but quickly determined its origin: a nearby box of doughnuts.