Powell, a 1975 Centerville High School graduate, was a 44-year-old Navy officer on Sept. 11. He was watching President George W. Bush's early reaction to the World Trade Center attacks on television when a Boeing 757 flew into the building at more than 300 mph.
He was sitting uncomfortably close to the crash, just to the right of the destruction in the building.
“I actually felt the energy waves pass through me before the building rocked,” Powell said. “I knew it was an explosion. When you were in the building, the whole building rattled.”
Nothing was confirmed until he and others rushed downstairs. “There were plane parts and body parts. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”
He credits military training for turning what might have been chaos into organized rescue work. He saw a similar mindset at work among civilians in New York City.
“There wasn’t any sort of yelling or screaming,” Powell said. “If you didn’t know what you were doing, you asked.”
At 6-5 and 250 pounds, the former rugby player was soon catching people who jumped from upper floors. He worked with others to form a human chain to remove debris so trapped workers could escape.
As searing as that day was, it meant a new way of life for soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines. Service members were away from home more, and families had to cope.
Said Powell, “Moms carry just a tremendous burden. It’s just an incredible cost.”
Larry James was a colonel in the U.S. Army serving as the chief psychologist for the Northeast Region at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He did not have a TV in his office and was initially oblivious to news of the attacks.
James had a clear understanding with his employees that he was not to be disturbed while seeing patients. But for some reason that morning, his receptionist insisted on knocking on his door and ringing his desk phone. He said his receptionist “knew the rules: Don’t bother the colonel unless the building is on fire.”
“Well, the building was on fire,” said James, now the dean of the Wright State University School of Professional Psychology. “It was the Pentagon, not Walter Reed.”
In a few minutes, James was “sprinting” to his command group office. “We were under attack,” he said. “Everyone, the whole compound at Walter Reed, there was no lollygagging. This is what we trained for — to defend this great nation.”
By noon, he had orders to set up three 24-7 mental health clinics in and around the Pentagon by 3 a.m. the next day. With some 200 staffers, he was to serve Pentagon workers as well as crews and family members.
The clinics went from seeing up to 5,000 patients a month early to a far smaller number shortly before the end of 2001. Patients were counseled in parking lots, hallways, wherever they were comfortable.
James has no doubt that life has been altered forever for men and women in uniform. And the war on terror, with its imperative to prepare for surprise domestic attacks, has been markedly different from the enduring superpower standoff of the Cold War.
Being in the military means being “poised all the time,” James said. He went to work on the morning of Sept. 11 in his normal green Army uniform. By Sept. 12, he was wearing his battle dress uniform.
He does not expect any feeling of normalcy to return soon.
“Metaphorically, Pearl Harbor was not the symbol of our nation’s strength,” James said. “The Pentagon was and is.”
Bob Dawson, 35, today is an Air Force captain and an engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
But 10 years ago, he was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, a young husband and father contemplating a career in the Navy.
Dawson remembers Sept. 11, as a day when he did not have classes scheduled and was planning to tackle homework. His alarm went off to a radio station, and eventually Dawson heard the words, “possibly the worst attacks on American soil since Pearl Harbor.”
At that, Dawson sat upright in bed.
He didn’t get any homework done that day.
“It certainly strengthened my desire to serve in the armed forces,” the Clinton, Utah, native said.
By winter semester 2002, just a few months after the attacks, he had decided on a career in the Air Force, and walked over to the campus Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps office to, in his words, “find out what I had to do.”
By June 2003, he was commissioned. He served the first half of 2006 in Iraq. “There were a handful of mortars that came over the fence, but I wasn’t in any real danger.”
But like thousands of other uniformed men and women, he wears his battle dress uniform, his fatigues, four days a week, even at the base. He calls wearing the uniform of frontline troops “a bond.”
Said Dawson, “I feel it and I think about it often enough.”
So does Casey Asher, 24, who works at the base's B-1 Directorate as an executive officer for his unit. He was a homeschooled 14-year-old a decade ago, living in Amanda, Ohio, but the events felt close enough. Asher recalls that on that afternoon, when no planes were supposed to be flying, his family saw what they thought were the contrails of Air Force One and accompanying jets flying overhead.
“It was pretty eerie,” Asher said.
His mom did not usually answer the phone when she taught, but that day, the phone rang off the hook. She learned of the attacks, and the family moved to the TV in time to see the second tower collapse in a cloud of ash and debris.
He crafted a pole on which to raise a flag at half-staff and went on to ROTC training at Arizona State University. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did not deter him.
“It was just the kind of thing where you wanted to do your part,” Asher said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2390 or tgnau @DaytonDailyNews.com.
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