September 11th on Holloman Air Force Base, by Christopher Gstattenbauer

From MemoryArchive

Who: Christopher Gstattenbauer
What: September 11, 2001
When: 9/11
Where: Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico

During the events of September 11th 2001, I was serving in the Air Force and stationed at Holloman AFB, NM. I was 22 years old and just recently married to my wife Catherine. At the time, we were living on base and I was assigned to the 49MMSS Squadron. Sept 11th affected almost every aspect of my life. It changed how I viewed the world and my service to the military. It created stresses in my life at work and at home with my wife Catherine that I almost could not handle.

I woke up that morning at 6:00 with a rather bad cold. I was sick and called my boss to let him know that I was going to sick call, which opened up at 6:30am. I was hoping that the doctors would put me on quarters and I could rest at home for the day while I was getting over my cold. Unfortunately, I was not that lucky and I was just sent to work around 6:50 in the morning. I stopped at home shortly before 7:00am to grab some coffee and take the medicine that the doctors prescribed to me. It was during this time and on my way to work that the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. My life and the world had changed while I was sipping coffee, downing pills, smoking cigarettes, and listening to Creed while driving to work.

The 49MMSS unit that I worked at was a closed compound unit on the other end of base. We were a deployment squadron that was in some senses a separate entity from the rest of the base. It was kind of like a base within a base. It took a special ID to get into the compound and most of us required additional security clearances to work there.

I arrived at the front gate around 7:20am to sight that I thought was some sort of readiness exercise in progress. There were Security police standing at the gate with M-16s locked and loaded. Temporary barricades were set up to limit access and I remember seeing that large yellow sign “Threatcon DELTA”. I drove past the Security police and handed the gate guard my ID, the whole time I was wondering what the hell was going on. I asked the guard if we were in the middle of and exercise that I was unaware of and he said back to me “No, just report to your unit”. I remember being rather confused trying to find a parking spot next to the Vehicle Maintenance section where I worked. The compound was alive with people and machines running around and working with a sense of urgency I had not yet seen in the military. I don’t know if I was scared but maybe just incredibly anxious to find out what the hell was going on.

I ran into the Vehicle Maintenance office and the first person that I saw was my boss, Sgt Wing. The only thing that I could say was, “What the f**k is going on?”. I’ll never forget what he said, “Sgt G., we are at War, get your shit together, they hit the twin towers and the pentagon”. I just looked at him and said nothing. I could see the office TV with two spit screens showing the towers and pentagon burning. It was a dream-like moment; my brain was trying to process everything going on. For those couple of seconds everything was in slow motion, staring at my boss, watching the TV images and trying to conceptualize the fact that we were at war and I was right there in the middle of it.

Finally time returned to normal speed and I could see the entire shop prepping vehicles in the work bay for deployment. At the time, I don’t think that anybody knew where we were going, but we all knew that we had to be ready for anything. I ran to my office and jumped into my work clothes, ran out in the work bay and got right to prepping vehicles for deployment. Out of the 20 people there all working franticly around me, nobody said a word. Everybody including myself was just focused on working franticly on prep work.

It was about 8:42am when everybody was called over the PA system to the shop meeting room. 24 people from the entire shop ran to the meeting room to see the first World Trade Center fall to the ground on TV. Again, there was absolute silence. Nobody said a word. We just watched TV replays of the tower crashing down. Sgt Wing the Shop Boss sat everybody down to discuss the game plan. Word came down from the Commanders office. First, the base was in a state of war. No military personnel could leave the base and nobody was going home, everybody was on 24-hour shifts until further notice. Keep prepping vehicles for deployment.

I think by this time the scope of what was going on was settling into people’s minds. We all new that we had a job to do and we had to stay focused. After the meeting I tried calling my wife Cathy to tell her to stay home, but there was no answer. I didn’t know where she was at the time but I hoped that she knew what was going on and that she needed to stay put until I got home. As I was getting off the phone to go back to work, there was an incoming call for me from the 49th Security Forces Squadron. About one month prior I had been signed up to be a Security Forces Augmentee. This meant that in a time of war or mass deployment I was transferred to the Security Forces Squadron to be a more or less a deputized Security Forces Member. That phone call I picked up was the call to report in to the 49th SF Unit for gear issuing and training. I had been through some classes prior to 9-11 but in the following days I would become a military police officer.

It wasn’t since the last Gulf War that Augmentees had been needed, but now the SF unit was calling all of them in to report to duty. In a matter of 30 seconds I went from working in vehicle maintenance to becoming a military police officer. I got off the phone and told my boss that I had to report at 5:00pm for training. At the time he was mad that he was losing one of his workers when we had to get so much done around our unit. He didn’t have a choice in the matter, I was no longer under his chain of command. I told him that I would work until 5:00pm and then report to the SF unit.

Going back to work after the call, the shop was on fire again with people working. But now everybody was talking about what was going on. The conversations were who did this, where are we going, and who’s going. Nobody at time knew anything more than what we watched on TV, but we all had a feeling that this was just the beginning of many more things to come.

10:15am, the Second Tower fell and once again everybody rushed to the meeting room to see it come down over the TV screen. This time I started wondering just how many people died. The first one came down and I really was still in a state of shock watching it happen. When the second one fell, that’s when I started to think about the human factor and loss of lives I am watching take place on TV. It was about this time I started to get angry. I didn’t know what or whom was responsible, but I just hoped that some one or something was going to pay dearly for this. I remembered when terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center back in the early 90s. I couldn’t help but think that someone finished the job this time.

After the second tower came down, everybody worked with a sense of urgency. You could see the anger, shock and emotion on people’s faces as vehicles where coming and going from the shop. I don’t really remember much after going back to work once the second tower came down. I remember talking to Cathy finally around 4:00pm, telling her I was coming home soon after reporting to the SF unit. I remember driving to the Security Forces Squadron and being told to report back around 8:00pm to pick up my gear.

I finally saw Cathy around 6:00 pm. I met up with her at my friends Abby and Lance’s house. They lived on base just down the street from us. Cathy had told me she had been there pretty much all day glued to the TV. When I showed up all four of us just watched everything happen over and over again on the news. Nobody really said much. I don’t think anybody knew what so say.

So many things happened shortly after 9-11. I became a military cop working 16- hour shifts for about two weeks, spending most of my time in a Humvee armed to teeth driving around the base as part of a fire support team.