It was a beautiful day-sunny, crystal clear, a calm breeze. I had just left the base and pulled over on a side street so I could hear better. I left Commodore Jones and jumped in my car, still receiving a steady stream of phone calls. Air cover was already up with Navy jets out of Naval Air Station Oceana. The USNS Comfort was being prepared the USS Bataan and the USS Shreveport were available if needed. The USS George Washington and her battle group were already at sea conducting exercises, so Natter sent them north. Davids told me that Washington, the deputy mayor, had called Natter and asked for help. Natter, the commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet. My phone rang again, and it was Lieutenant Keith Davids, the flag lieutenant to Admiral Robert J. Then I remembered-my brother was to be in New York for a meeting with Cantor Fitzgerald at the top of the World Trade Center. Westlye told me to go they would catch up later. Master Chief Don Westlye and Master Chief Bill Murnane were with me in Norfolk. It was Lieutenant Commander Steve Estrada, yelling into the phone, “A plane just flew over me and hit the South Tower!” And I blurted, “Because we are being attacked!” It was the first time anyone in the room had verbalized what we all knew. After I hung up, Jones told me that if the Comfort was going to New York, I needed to be there, too. I need that hospital ship.” He was referring to the USNS Comfort, which he had toured a few months earlier during its port visit to NYC. When I said Norfolk, he said, “I need you here. It was Deputy Mayor Rudy Washington of New York City. Now, a moment after getting to the TV, my cell phone rang. Since Jones and I had worked together in New York City on the president’s Naval Review, he wanted me to support his command in Norfolk during my annual active duty. I had reported to the Norfolk naval base on September 10 to meet my two-week Naval Reserve obligation. My office coordinated the Navy’s major public events. I had been working for six years in the city as the director of fleet support for the Navy, a civilian position that works closely with the mayor’s office, New York police and fire departments, the FBI, FEMA, the Customs Service and the Coast Guard, as well as more than 60 federal, state and local law enforcement, regulatory and nonprofit agencies and 120 vendors throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. You could see both towers of the World Trade Center a few hundred yards away from my third-floor windows. The television images showed us just how terribly wrong things were.Ī few days before the attacks, I had been at my office in the Coast Guard building in Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan. We knew the traffic patterns to Newark, LaGuardia and JFK and how careful and strict the FAA is. The commodore and I had recently worked the joint forces fly-overs as part of the president’s International Naval Review held on the Hudson River on July 4, 2000. A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” We ran to the TV. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in the Norfolk, Virginia, office of Commodore Scott Jones when someone came in and said, “Hey, you’re from New York.
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