1. From Tragedy to Triumph We ought not fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever. -john adams1 A Stop for Coffee all i wanted was a cup of hot coffee. A café latte was being brewed for me at the Cosi coffee shop at the corner of 3rd and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. A few blocks from the United States Capitol, I had arrived early to take my newest employee, Beverly, to the offices of the House of Representative and Senate intelligence committees. It was a clear, warm morning and Beverly was excited to be working for a small anti- terrorism firm in its secretive offices in a Georgetown neighborhood. We had arrived early and had planned to discuss her duties as chief of staff for the small offi ce with its ten employees and interns.

The Special Readiness Services Interna­tional really had one mission and one contract: to analyze and educate the Special Operations Forces in the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the al- Qaeda or ga ni za tion. It was 8:30 a.m. when the cashier handed me my change and two cups of coffee. The television on a wall near the counter was on CNN that morning. The café had added it for the congressional staffers to watch the votes in the House and the Senate on C-SPAN. Above the din I heard the quiet murmur­ing of the anchorman, but something was wrong with the words as they reached my ears: ". no one knows what kind of aircraft it was that hit the building .

" These words were all wrong for TV news. I looked to the right and saw the smoking tower of the World Trade Center complex. The air was clear in NYC-a bright sunny morning with fantastic visibility. How could a small airplane hit that building? Was it a sightseeing helicop ter or a light airplane? From the ground view it was hard to know how bad the fire atop the building was. I said to Beverly, "You know a B-24 hit the Empire State Building in 1945?" We watched for a few minutes and listened to the news announcers specu­late on the crash. It seemed like a small disaster until I heard the words "the FAA is reporting an aircraft has been hijacked." That piqued my attention. Just a few months earlier I was a subject matter expert on terrorist hijacking of aircraft.

At my last military posting we ran hijacking and terrorism sur­vival courses and simulations as the shadowy terrorist group in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda. It was difficult to hijack an aircraft in the United States, I thought. A moment later I would be proven wrong. The aircraft came in from the right of the screen and struck the building. That instant I could not speak. I knew who was flying this. My first conscious thought was, You did it . you said you would take it down and you've done it.

I instinctively made one calculated gesture . I struck the "5" speed key on my cell phone and called navy Petty Offi cer Brad Michaels, my former dep­uty at the SERE's Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival School in Coronado. Brad was in bed and, after having received excited calls about terrorist attacks from me over the years, he had learned to put the phone on answering machine. The year before it was the USS Cole attack at 3:00 a.m. He never forgave me for waking his wife and son. The answering machine came on as the fireball at the WTC tower billowed outward, rain­ing sparkles of flame, debris, and the remains of humanity. I let the machine beep and then screamed into the phone for him to get up.

He snatched the phone up and asked what was wrong. I could not tell him. I was stunned. All I could do was shout, "CNN! CNN! CNN!" He held on and a second later shouted back into the phone, "What the hell is happening!" I told him what I knew the instant the airplane appeared: "It's al-Qaeda . it's a restrike of the WTC!" He hung up and went to his offi ce at the North Island Naval Air Station, where we would call each other in coordination. One of the first things to know about a terrorist attack is that one needs a line of communications, a lifeline far from the incident to maintain perspective and collect intelligence. Dozens of us stood transfixed at the café watching the macabre spectacle. Minutes later cell phones and beepers went off all around us.

The Capitol staff s were simultaneously being recalled to the Hill by the sergeant of arms. The staff members quickly started flowing out of the shop and back up Pennsylvania to the congressional office buildings like great swarms of geese. I told Beverly we needed to move. "Where?" she said. I replied, "New York City, of course. This is the greatest act of terrorism in history and we are going to help." We drove rapidly down past the Washington Monument. Most of the world had not responded to the attack and tourists were still strolling on the beautiful morning.

I put on National Public Radio. They were reporting on the response to the attack in NYC and the reports of hijacked aircraft. I stopped at the intersection of Inde pen dence Avenue next to the Lincoln Me­morial. As I listened I saw a silver airplane coming from the west near the Sheraton at the Navy Annex. It was descending in a smooth glide path as it passed south of Arlington Cemetery. I casually told Beverly it looked like they were rerouting airplanes away from the Potomac and over northern Virginia. Then the aircraft descended in a smooth line down past the rim of the Pen­tagon and exploded. As it did, I thought of a navy expression I remembered from a battle I once experienced with an Iranian patrol boat: "Cruise Missile Inbound.

" The aircraft was a human- guided weapon, and once the fl ames rolled over the top of the building it created a huge black cloud. Beverly saw it but did not recognize what had happened. "What's that?" she asked calmly. "We are under attack! A nationwide attack! That's the Pentagon! It just got hit!" I shot the car forward and spiraled onto Memorial Brid≥ within sixty seconds we rolled to a stop in front of a police car a few hundred yards away from the furiously burning Pentagon crash site. I gave Beverly the keys and told her to go back to Georgetown and call me every thirty minutes. She drove off and I ran into the fray, checking victims as they emerged. I ended up following the orders of a feisty army combat nurse who had survived the attack and accidentally found herself thrust into command of the medical evacuation effort at the crash site. Until the northern Virginia fire depart­ments and disaster teams arrived and organized themselves, the few hundred civilians, servicemen and -women, and first responders in a lone ambulance were the rescue party at what we dubbed the Battle of the Pentagon.

I spent hours in and out of the building, moving the provisional field hospital we set up and prepared for more victims. Once the fire had consumed the building to the point where a section collapsed, even they had diffi culty entering. We then organized the stretcher teams to evacuate the numerous bodies we ex­pected to be found. I received calls from all around the world while working; my former SERE school commanding officer called and wanted a status report for the United States Commander of the Naval Fleet in San Diego, Beverly called to tell me that the WTC complex had collapsed, but I refused to be­lieve it, and Brad called to give me a count of the hijacked aircraft. We were missing one, but a few minutes later we would be informed it had crashed. All the while as I danced with chaos it was clear to me who had perpetrated this attacks. This airplane-turned-suicide-cruise-missile was specifi c revenge for the 1998 cruise missile attack on a terrorist camp in the Afghanistan Pakistan mountains, Zawar Kili-the famous al- Badr camp that had been built during the Afghanistan war against the Soviets for the Arab mujahi­deen. The group running the al- Badr terrorist center was called al-Qaeda and its leader was a radical Saudi Arabian dissident named Osama bin Laden.

Thus the begins the story of the vector of an ideological plague. This plague was violently injected into the bloodstream of America by nineteen men who hijacked four airliners and struck deep into the American psyche. Their mission had consumed the hearts of the men who did it and was calcu­lated to consume all of America and poison the well of the billion innocent Muslims. I ended that day of days feeling the burning pain in my heart. My family had spent nearly a century defending America, and the massive fail­ure made the pain insufferable. My nation had been attacked. Thousands of innocent civilians were dead. Hundreds of rescuers were engulfed in fl ame and steel.

Now the reckoning must come. The men who had planned this mission had only one option left for them no matter how long it would take. This battle was a blood fi ght to the death. Bin Laden would die at our hands and quickly. Or so we all thought. Al- Qaeda's Ideology of Terror Unleashed by 2002 aq's operational terrorist forces in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were executing a post-9/11 strategy to keep the pressure on the West and to incite a pan- Islamic jihad. A Mania of revenge and fear was permeating America and Europe, and AQ bet that it was as good a time as ever to keep feeding the beast that lashed out wildly at Muslims. Around the world the AQ and its ideological affiliates started to strike regularly in a series of suicide at­tacks at major cities and tourist destinations.

First terrorists in Bali, Indonesia, struck Western tourists and left 202 dead; then the Madrid subway system was devastated, with 191 dead; then attacks in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi 1A.