Within weeks, I was placed in charge of the Navy’s “Deep Blue” innovation cell, a small elite team charged with coming up with strategic ideas and tactical operations to leverage the capabilities of the Navy in what would become known as the “Global War on Terror.” After a year in that role, I was sent back to sea as a Carrier Strike Group commander embarked in the nuclear carrier U.S.S Enterprise-conducting operations on the Horn of Africa and in both Afghanistan and Iraq. My Tomahawks had almost killed him, and now his attack nearly finished me. In what became known as “Operation Infinite Reach,” we had barely missed killing bin Laden as he escaped his camp, probably after being alerted to impending attack by the Pakistani intelligence services. As a destroyer squadron commodore, I had overseen the Tomahawk cruise missile strikes in August 1998 against bin Laden in Afghanistan, conducted in retaliation for Al Qaeda’s deadly bombings of two U.S. Yet it was there where I came the closest to being killed over the course of my 37-year career.Īnd I did not know it at the time, but the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington were also connected to a previous attack I had conducted several years earlier. The Pentagon is guarded by the strongest military on earth in the capital of the richest and most powerful country on the planet. All I could think of was the irony of the day for me: after decades in the military, I had seen my share of combat-yet I was almost killed in what we all believed was one of the safest buildings in the world. I was about 150 feet away on the fourth floor, and was spared.Īs the flames and smoke engulfed the section of Pentagon with my office, I stumbled down several flights of stairs out onto the grassy field below and tried to do what I could for the survivors and wounded until the first responders arrived. The nose of American Airlines flight 77 hit the Pentagon’s second floor. My office was on the outer “E-ring” of the Pentagon, and through the windows across the corridor, I glimpsed a Boeing 757 just before it struck the building. I was a freshly selected one-star admiral, the gold braid brand-new on the sleeves of my service dress blue uniform. The war in Afghanistan began on September 11, 2001.
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