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To oppose tyranny and fight for the rights our Creator bestowed us in the United States
Constitution, we are the Prepper Broadcasting Network. Daily Audio Cash, because it is September 11th. Hmm.
Yep, September 11th.
We had some kind of a threat to the schools in our area,
so I got a day off from school.
Of course, Maria's working my butt off, the warden.
And I got so much to do.
Anyway, that's not why I'm doing this daily audio cache.
I wanted to remember September 11th.
I started teaching it to the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders yesterday,
knowing that I would see the rest of them today, but it didn't happen. But we're going to go over it.
I told them, I gave them a homework assignment.
I said, anyone over the age of 25, talk to them about
where they were when 9-11 happened.
And then I told them my story. about where they were when 9-11 happened.
And then I told them my story.
I was in Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency as a watch officer.
Yeah.
People would ask me, what do you watch?
I said, well, mostly CNN and the Weather Channel,
which was true.
We had like eight big screen projection screen TVs.
One of them was on CNN and one was on the Weather Channel.
And two people were on duty 24-7 in that emergency operations center.
But this day was a day shift and it was my eighth day on the job.
It was my eighth day on the job.
And we were getting reports about a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, one of the towers.
And they said it was a big jetliner.
And I'm like, oh, that can't be right.
They have warnings.
They have pilots that can see that thing for miles.
There's no way a big jetliner flew into one of the World Trade Center. They must have been mistaken. Maybe it was a small engine plane
take off and the guy had a heart attack and it just
kept flying until it hit one of the towers.
Well, as we're watching
this, because it's on CNN, and we're watching the tower burn, we can see the next plane come right in and hit the second tower.
And for what seemed like a half hour, which I know was only a fraction of a second,
there was silence, total silence in that room.
There were like eight or nine of us in there.
It was a day shift. The supervisor was looking over the report that we produce, you know,
over the incidents for the past 24 hours in the state of Pennsylvania.
There was dead silence.
And then all of a sudden,
give me the governor!
Give me the lieutenant governor!
We have to activate!
Everybody knew when that second plane hit,
we were under attack.
And we were activating. We activated the
Emergency Operations Center. We brought in all the heads of the
agencies, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation,
Corrections, the state troopers, and I
had a list of people to call. And on
my list was the Secret Service. See, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
there's a federal building and the federal agencies are all there. You know, the federal
courthouse, the FBI, they're all there. So I called this guy and I said, hey, we're activating.
And I said, man, isn't this crazy? He said, yeah, I know.
Then he said, hey, I got to let you go.
My boss is calling me and his office is in the World Trade Center.
Yeah.
Now, I don't know if he died.
I don't know anything.
I just know that that's what he said.
And then we heard the Pentagon had been hit.
And everybody was probably in the same boat as me.
What is next? And at my
console came a call from Somerset County.
And the lady on the other end said,
Hi, I'm so-and-so.
I'm the dispatch supervisor for Somerset County 911.
We have a guy that's on a cell phone,
and he's calling us to say his plane's being hijacked.
What do we tell him?
And before any kind of an answer could be formulated,
she said, never mind.
We have smoke on the ground.
Reports that the plane crashed.
And of course, today we know that was Flight 93.
This was
my experience of 9-11. Something I'll never forget.
And I was born and
raised in Somerset County. And my cousins
are all still there. All my relatives are in Somerset County.
I mean that's where I go for the reunion.
And one of them was a volunteer fireman in Shanksville,
of all places.
And his brother was over visiting that day.
They didn't have the TV on,
but they heard and saw an explosion.
They said it shook the windows in their house.
And they, you know, because of the coal mining,
they thought it was a mining accident.
But they jumped in the pickup truck
and they drove over there
and he recounted to me what he could see.
Just debris everywhere.
A big black hole.
There was no fire left.
It had burned out already.
But there was, you know, different things.
Like there was meat hanging from a tree
or a driver's license sitting there.
And then just a suitcase, like someone had just placed it right there.
It was strange.
And he said within a few minutes, federal agents showed up and told them to leave.
They don't need any volunteer firemen.
That, you know, it's a crime scene investigation. So they left.
And I impress upon my
class how everything changed that
day for the United States. That there were no locks
on the cockpit door.
It almost seems absurd that they were the same lock that you had on the bathroom door.
Anybody could go through there and, hey, how you doing?
Are you flying a plane?
So many things changed that day.
So many things changed that day. So many things.
And for my life, it changed in ways I couldn't even imagine.
The events of 9-11 put me on a trajectory that was totally opposite of where I was going.
Because six months later,
the Army recalled me to active duty.
And for the next 22 continuous months,
I traveled to 16 different countries doing anti-terrorism force protection surveys.
But that's not what changed.
I met my wife in Amman, Jordan.
Yeah.
Yep.
I had given up hope of ever having children.
I just figured it wasn't my lot in life to have kids.
You know, some people can, some people can't.
I was 50 years old when my first child was born
and 55 when my second one was born.
So the events of 9-11 will always, always be with me
when I look at my wife, my kids,
and where I am today.
PBN family, take a moment.
Take time to recall where you were and tell someone.
where you were, and tell someone.
My second anniversary,
I mean my first anniversary of 9-11,
I was in Qatar in a hotel when I was on active duty,
and we all sat there at the table
and just went around the table
and told each other where we were and what we were doing for 9-11.
One of those days that's burned into your memory,
and I can only imagine the memories that the kids I'm teaching right now, what will be burned into their memory?
The space shuttle Challenger accident.
And I go all the way back to the JFK assassination.
You know, I was in first or second grade and a teacher came into our room.
She didn't even knock. She just came in and she went over and whispered something in our teacher's
ear. And our teacher just started crying right there. And we're like, whoa, why would our teacher cry? And it wasn't much longer after that,
the principal said, we're dismissing for the day. Well, in Somerset County, you only get out of
school for snow, and it was not snowing. And I remember walking to the bus to go home and seeing the flag at half-staff.
And I wondered why they didn't pull it up the whole way.
Anyway, PB and family, I just thought I'd share these memories.
Take care and prep on.