Philip Robert

Eight years ago on September 11th 2001 I was the Leading Chief Sonar Technician onboard USS Curtis Wilbur DDG-54 homeported in Yokosuka, Japan.

Tuesday September 11th broke with a typhoon heading towards Tokyo Bay so our daily task was to secure the ship for the storm. Around noon someone made a decision to send everyone home except for the duty section. It was a quiet lazy afternoon at home waiting for the typhoon.

The naval station in Yokosuka is a tight harbor. It's securely protected from Tokyo bay by two pennisulas, and Tokyo bay is protected from the Pacific Ocean by the Chiba pennisula.

Typhoons almost never hit Yokosuka, and this one wasn't any different. We make all the preparations though for the excepting. It's better to be ready for a typhoon that never hits than not be ready for the typhoon that does hit.

That evening at 6pm we got the all clear. The typhoon had passed, and everything was safe. No of new about the typhoon that was about to change our world forever. It was 5am in New York.

At 10pm I checked my email on yahoo before going to bed, and there was a news report that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. Scanning the report I had the impression that some silly idiot in a Cessna had accidentally flown into one of the towers. I shut my computer down and went to bed.

The Officer of the Deck called my home about 4:30am the next morning. It was the Chief Gunner's Mate, and he told me that I should take the train into work because they weren't letting cars on the base. I asked him if they were running a security exercise on the base. He said "yeah, you could say that." I went back to sleep until 6am.

As I checked my email before going to the ship I was shocked by the headline on yahoo. "Twin Towers Destroyed. 10,000 Dead." What had happened? I thought some hacker had made a bad joke. A quick check of the New York Time's webpage confirmed that the World Trade Center's twin towers had collapsed after two passenger jets had flown into them.

Work on the ship was almost at a standstill that day. We spent a lot of time watching the news reports and the endless clips of the towers collapse. The Chiefs all got together under the direction of Command Master Chief Joe Campa and began reworking duty sections, beefing up security on the ship and the pier, and making preparations for the unscheduled deployment that we all knew was coming. We were forward deployed just for this reason. Because of the USS Cole we had heard of Al Queda, and the Taliban. We knew that we were headed for the Indian Ocean and Afghanistan. The only question was when would we weigh anchor? When would the battle group deploy?

For me September 11th was about securing my ship for a typhoon one minute and preparing to go to war the next.