Monday, September 10, 2001

Pensacola, FL - Monday, September 10, 2001

It was a bright sunny hot and humid day, just like every other late summer day in the Florida Panhandle. The kids were back in school, the baseball pennant races were heating up, and the buzz around town was high school and SEC football. The NFL had just opened their season with a full schedule. Most of the news was hardly newsworthy that day.

I was deeply involved in a time tested Naval rite of passage known as Chief Petty Officer (CPO) Initiation. Naval tradition calls for every E-6 (First Class Petty Officer) who is selected to E-7, or Chief Petty Officer, go through a subsantial learning process to handle the significantly increased responsibilities of the rank. In 2001, the process lasted approximately 8 grueling weeks of intense learning scenarios, team building and inner growth. It's a hell-packed time that tests the strongest of sailors but ultimately breeds the most able of leaders. On this day, I was embracing the last few days of Initiation before I promoted to the rank of "Chief" on September 15th. Reflection for what we had gone through and the final push of the last days of the initiation dominated my every thought.

Some of the things we took for granted that day was security, a feeling of invicibility, the knowledge that nobody was brazen enough to come to our backyard and mess with us. I could easily go through any gate on any base with hardly a nod or a challenge as to who I was and what I was doing. Sure, the USS Cole was a brazen attack on our Navy, but it was an isolated incident that happened overseas. No way could anybody do anything like that on our soil, and that was the furthest from our thoughts. Posting the names of crew members on websites was common. Ship schedules were readily available almost anywhere you had a connection with AOL. Ships were on a 12 or 14 watch section rotation, with barely enough people to adequately fight a fire inport if the need existed. I could walk onto any plane in any airport with hardly a passing glance. Families crowded busy terminals and waited for loved ones to walk on or off. Apathetic attitudes pervaded our society. We couldn't care less about what was going on in the Middle East. That was somebody elses problem. The only thing about that God-forsaken place we cared about was the cheap oil it brought us. We had never heard of Al-Qaida, couldn't tell you the difference between a burka and a Persian, and certainly couldn't tell you the difference between a Shi'ite and a Sunni. The Middle East was somebody elses problem and most of us just wished everyone there would just kill each other off so it wouldn't be our problem much longer. You know the joke....one nuclear blast and we have a glass parking lot...funny huh? Usama Bin Laden? Who was he again? The only guys we really thought we knew there was Saddam Hussein and that other crazy guy, Yasser Arafat who was mostly just a comical charicature of Arab life to most of us. That was about it for the place. The only military threat were those pesky SCUDS that even the most rudimentary Patriot missile could easily shoot down, provided the lousy things got within a zip code of their intended target, which was rare. The economy was floundering, President Bush was just getting a handle on the economic situation and a way to right the country. Folks in Florida were still in a buzz over the craziness of the past year and their election turmoil.

I got home a little early that night. I was able to have a nice dinner with my family for the first time in weeks. Almost every night for the past seven weeks I had come home barely long enough to take a shower and get three or four hours of sleep. The Initiation process had worn me out. Tonight I decided to take a little time for myself and watch a ballgame and relax. My beloved Dodgers had just finished a tough series with the Cardinals, but were still in the pennant race. They were on a travel day. I was getting settled in for the Yankees and Red Sox, but due to rain, got the Braves instead. That was okay, it was tall cold one, a ballgame and some peace and quiet. It was a night of serenity. Outside the crickets were chirping and a half moon cut the darkness of the night sky in half after the usual late afternoon monsoon-like downpour. I went to bed dreaming of what I would look like in my new khaki uniform and what I would do with that pay raise..........the night was peaceful...the last night of the world I had known....