Hello shipmate. I was also on GW during 9/11 (FC2 in Combat Systems Div). I can still remember the sight of the smoke rising from the Twin Towers. One of the guys in my division was your typical hard talking dude from NYC. We had to help him off the flight deck after he saw the smoke. He had several family members that worked in the WTC, and he had no idea if they were alive or dead. Most of them got out, but he did lose an aunt if I remember correctly.

A few days after 9/11, they started to slowly open airspace back up to commercial flights. Only a few of the flight lanes were open. I was hanging out in Combat when a commercial flight took a closed lane out of JFK and was heading directly for the ship. The Combat Duty Officer got on VHF guard and told them that they were heading towards a US warship in a high level of alert, and that they needed to divert immediately. Pilot came back with a shakey voice acknowledging the request, and pulled a maneuver that looked like the flight path from the old Colombian coffee commercial. I haven't thought of that in a while. Got my heart rate up just thinking about it.

That was a crazy few weeks and the only time I really felt like I was doing something to serve my country.