came upon an unexpected Republic of Serbska police checkpoint near the zone of separation, or ZOS, a mile-wide curvy line drawn on the ground to separate Bosnian Christians from Bosnian Muslims.
It was too late to turn around, and we had no choice but to approach the checkpoint and hope for the best. Police officers signaled Jamie to stop, and he put on the brakes and rolled down the window. Just as three uniformed policemen approached, flanking the car, Jamie hit the gas and burned rubber out of there.
After a hundred meters, we saw the police flashers come on behind us and several squad cars begin to chase. Jamie immediately found a cutback road a few hundred meters after rounding a small bend. He killed the headlights and simultaneously stepped on the brake, pressed down the clutch, and snapped the steering wheel hard left. The front tires grabbed the asphalt while the rear wheels slid around in a 180-degree arc, a perfect high-speed evasive maneuver executed in complete darkness and without night vision goggles. It scared the shit out of me.
Jamie gassed it and the car sped back toward the oncoming police, but with no overt lighting on our vehicle, which made it momentarily invisible to them. Once again at the turn, Jamie went sharp right, onto hard dirt and eased up about thirty meters before stopping. A few seconds that seemed like a lifetime crawled by before the police cars with their flashing lights came along and drove right past us.
I could tell our young hell-for-leather driver from New Mexico had done this kind of thing before. We were both smiling. “Damn, Jamie, that was scary shit but some excellent driving,” I told him, trying to regulate my heartbeat and not advertise my inexperience.
“Yeah,” he replied, already thinking of any errors he might have to admit in a hot-wash debriefing. “I think I gave it too much brake and not enough torque on the wheel, but it worked.”
The moment emphasized for me the importance of the Delta selection process in choosing the right kind of guys for the Unit and giving them unique training and skills. Delta operators know how to work in small teams, miles and miles away from any friendly American military unit… even when a routine mission turns to crap.
3 Nine-Eleven
“Billy Fish,” says I to the Chief of Bashkai, “what’s the difficulty here?”
–
RUDYARD KIPLING
We awoke inside a large white and yellow striped circus tent on September 11, 2001, our Delta squadron having been deployed to a foreign country to sharpen our joint war-fighting skills. It would be another day of prepping our equipment for the upcoming mission, scrubbing vehicle and helicopter loads, reviewing contingency plans and scouting and studying intelligence reports and recent satellite photos.
A few discreet operators, trained in the delicate skill of close urban reconnaissance, were already in place near the target area. To help us refine the assault plan they would send back to us via small satellite radios digital photos of key breach points-roofs, doors, and windows. In different corners of the tent, the staff sergeants and sergeants first class were talking about the type of explosive charges needed for this door or that window.
That practice mission remains classified, but the real mission might certainly happen within the next few years. Typically, once these training exercises are complete, they are put “on the shelf,” filed away but ready to roll in an emergency. Should some terrorist organization or criminal gang execute their end of the action at that site, Delta would trigger a response that had already been planned down to the last detail.
Super D, our squadron operations officer who never let stress or a crisis overtly raise his heartbeat above normal, and I also were up early that day, hard at work in the guarded hideaway located at an obscure end of an old European military air base taxiway. We had to put our plan for the upcoming mission before the commander for his approval soon, and were finishing the briefing slides. Eyes fixed on the laptop screen and forefinger ready on the mouse to make any minor adjustments, Super D asked, “What do you think?”
“Looks great. Let’s get past this briefing and get out there and execute this thing,” I answered.
“Yeah, good enough,” Super D said. “I’ll get the boss over here and run through it and make any changes so we can brief the general this afternoon.”
Bart, the squadron operations sergeant, walked in from another tent about fifty meters away to relay some information from our squadron sergeant major. Then he casually commented, “Hey, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.”
We looked up at Bart, curious. “No shit?” said Super D.
I added, “No shit?”
Bart was a muscular, strong guy, a master at jujitsu and a championcaliber boxer, but he also was friendly and had a unique sense of humor. Was he joking? “Can you believe that shit? They think it was a small private plane. Geez, there you are checking out the new secretary near the watercooler and a plane comes crashing through the boss’s window.”
That day, September 11, 2001, may have started like any other, but within an hour of first call, the events taking place in America, several time zones away, would change our lives forever. They would change the lives of almost everyone in America.
Bart walked away across the grass infield, back to the other tent. Super D and I jaw-jacked a little. We gave little real thought to the airplane crash in New York, subconsciously chalking it up to mechanical failure or perhaps a heart attack overcoming the pilot above bustling lower Manhattan. We remembered that the World Trade Center had been the target of Islamic terrorists back in 1993, but no one was considering that terrorists might also be behind this new situation. Anyway, we were deep in our own business.
A few minutes later, Bart was back, moving much quicker this time, his eyebrows raised and a look of disbelief on his face. “Hey, get this. Another plane just crashed into the other Trade Center building. Now they think it’s terrorists!”
Super D and I were dumbfounded, afraid to believe it was true. We knew how hard it would be for a terrorist to crash just one plane into a skyscraper, but two different planes hitting the side-by-side Twin Towers within fifteen minutes of each other was more than astonishing. What pilot would ever freely fly into a building if he knew the action would likely kill hundreds of people more than just his passengers? We tried to put ourselves in the mental state of the pilot, wanting to believe that, even with a gun to our heads, we certainly would let the bullet rip through our skulls before knowingly killing more innocent people.
I remarked, “If it’s terrorists, I wouldn’t doubt it if they cancel this training exercise immediately.”
Super D nodded agreed. “Yeah, kind of makes what we’re doing here a lot less important than it was a few minutes ago. Let’s get over to the head shed and see if they have the news on.”
The Tactical Operations Center, or TOC, was wall to wall that morning with concerned soldiers, staff officers, commanders, Rangers, army helicopter pilots, air force officers, and a few Delta operators. All eyes were glued to the CNN reports as we tried to make heads or tails out of what was happening back in our country, thousands of miles away.
Everybody thought not only of their own family’s safety, but also the families of the reportedly tens of thousands of people who were believed to have been killed after both Trade Towers collapsed, on live television. As the death toll grew, we were back inside our circus tent, and intelligence analysts were posting hourly pen-and-ink updates. What we were reading was beyond belief:
The enormity of what we read jerked us into action. Retrieving our weapons from the metal storage containers, we upgraded our perimeter security. One thing was for certain: We weren’t going to be surprise victims of a
