On September 10, 2001, ALFA Platoon was in the second week of our combat swimmer training block. The week before, we had finished most of our daytime qualifications. Week two moved us into nighttime training, which meant waiting until it was pitch black before getting into the water. A training day didn't really end until around two in the morning. There was the safety brief, safety checks, jocking up, the evolution itself, the debrief, taking care of team gear, platoon gear, our own gear, and finally ourselves. Add a 20-minute drive home, and I was lucky to be in bed by 2:30 a.m. The training scheduled for the night of September 11 was our first night practicing static visit board search and seizure — SVBSS. At the time, it was probably one of the most dangerous and technically involved training evolutions in the Teams. I managed to sneak into bed around 2:30 without waking my wife, which was a win. She was six months pregnant with our first child. One thing about combat swimmer ops: they can completely exhaust you without you realizing how tired you are. Maybe it's breathing pure oxygen. Maybe it's the concentration the op requires. It's probably the oxygen. Whatever the reason, I slept like a rock. Around 5:30 in the morning, the phone rang. I vaguely remember hearing it and quietly cussing out whoever was calling that early. We had another late night ahead of us, and I didn't have to be back at the Team until around two that afternoon. My wife was already awake, so she answered. It was my godfather, Tim — the man I was named after. He didn't say much to her except, "Wake him up." I got on the phone. He said four words: "Turn on the television." I turned on the TV. CNBC was on — whatever their premarket show was called back then. They were reporting that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and they were actually doing a pretty good job of piecing together information as it came in. The market always knows, right? I'd been watching for maybe a minute when the camera caught the second plane hitting. I knew. My wife knew. The whole world knew right then. This was an attack. We sat there in silence for the next 45 minutes or so. Then the phone rang again. This time it was my LPO. "You up?" "Yep." "Well, you better pack your shit and come in." That was pretty much the whole conversation. Of course, nobody knew shit about what was going to happen next. As far as West Coast SEAL Teams went, the coolest operation happening in those days was probably a noncombatant evacuation operation — a NEO – pretty lame. But hey, you take what you can get. So now I'm throwing random shit into a duffel bag while my six-month-pregnant wife is watching the country get attacked on television and wondering where the hell her husband is about to go. Total horror. Luckily, my godparents were only a couple of hours away. This is where things started getting weird. Not only did I have no idea what the fuck was happening or what would happen next, but it became apparent pretty quickly that the entire Navy in San Diego didn't know what the fuck was happening either. I mean, when was the last time the homeland had been attacked? World War II? Traffic into Coronado was backed up all the way into downtown San Diego. My normal 20-minute drive took about three hours. The problem was the gates. Security had suddenly been cranked up, and the gate guards at every base were trying to figure out how they were supposed to search every vehicle. We all knew the standard system of threat conditions. Apparently, nobody had actually trained for it. Three hours later, I finally reached the gate on the beach side of the amphibious base. They checked my ID. They ran mirrors under the truck. Amazingly, they didn't check a single bag in the back. And the back of my truck was full. Side note: the gate guards got much better at their jobs after that, which meant the lines got even longer. Eventually, a lot of us started parking in Coronado and riding bikes the last mile to base. By about 11:00 that morning, all but a couple of us had made it to the Team. And then we waited. There was no news. No orders. Nobody knew anything. But we had a solid core of senior enlisted guys who immediately recognized the danger of a bunch of idle sled dogs sitting around waiting for something to happen. So they put us to work. There might not have been orders, but there was always work to do. Departments started inventories and function checks on radios. We got personal gear squared away with supply. Guys started checking everything we might conceivably need. There were also a few side ops. Four of the guys somehow got their hands on a stake truck and headed over to the air station looking for pallets and cargo nets. Were we going anywhere? No idea. But if we were going somewhere, suddenly everybody in the Navy would be looking for pallets and cargo nets. That's the kind of weird, specific shit only a senior enlisted guy thinks about. So we worked all day. Still no news. Eventually, word came down from Group 1: don't expect anyone to know anything for days, maybe weeks. Carry on with training. So, back to attacking ships in San Diego Bay. We all called our significant others and told them we'd be home that night, then started getting ready for training. By then, the politicking had already started inside the Team. The rumor was that two platoons would deploy almost immediately. Two out of six. Everybody wanted in. Everybody wanted to get into the fight. Everybody wanted blood. My wife was relieved that I was coming home that night. She was still in shock, but in better shape than when I'd left that morning. That night's training was fairly straightforward. No long dive involved. We'd load up in boats, stop about a hundred yards away from a destroyer, then repeatedly practice hooking and climbing the ship. Under normal circumstances, you could probably get 10 or 15 climbs in during a night. Training Cell had sent a safety officer over to the ship. His job was to make sure the ship's firemain wasn't sucking water and that the ship's watch had been briefed. Pretty basic stuff in San Diego. Ships had three Teams' worth of SEALs climbing all over them year-round. We almost died that night. Engineering had been briefed. The officer of the deck had been briefed. Nobody had briefed the two seamen standing on the bow behind a hastily mounted .50-caliber machine gun. They were guarding the ship, and they were amped. Our two boats were well lit. They were standard Navy workboats—easily recognizable. Didn't matter. Those guys on the bow were keyed up. A spotlight hit our boat. Then, over the loudspeaker: "DO NOT COME ANY CLOSER OR WE WILL FIRE ON YOUR VESSEL." Yeah. An entire platoon of Navy SEALs was about to get taken out by the bow watch of a U.S. Navy destroyer in San Diego Bay. We watched our safety officer and the officer of the deck sprint toward the bow to call off their very enthusiastic defenders. Meanwhile, we're all sitting in the boat speculating. "There's no way those guys actually have a belt in that gun." That turned out to be a losing bet. We watched them unload the .50 cal. Those guys were ready to roar. Needless to say, Training Cell canceled training for the night. A few weeks later, the decision came down that the two platoons that had just returned from deployment would be on the hook for rapid deployment. I got to see my baby born. Our platoon never went to Afghanistan. Instead, we ended up covering PACOM across both the blue and purple mission sets. We even picked up some of the green mission set, which belonged to Army SF. Over about seven months, we had eight or nine different engagements throughout the Pacific and Indian Ocean. It was a great deployment. But we never went to the fight. I tell this story for one reason. After 9/11, nobody knew what to do next. NOBODY. I can't speak for the rest of the military. I can only speak for our Team and our platoon. And on our Team, the senior enlisted guys took control of the sled dogs and put us to work. They focused us on the little things we could control. Inventory the gear. Check the equipment. Find the pallets. Get ready. Then slowly expand outward toward the bigger things. Nobody had the grand plan because there wasn't a grand plan yet. There was just the next thing that needed to be done. I wouldn't actually see the fight until three years later. It's pretty crazy when you think about it.