America was under attack 25 years ago. The following is the story of U.S. Naval Commander, Matthew Sass, Executive Officer at Naval Station Everett.
Sass is a Naval Flight Officer with almost 2,000 hours, including 121 combat missions, in the mighty P-3C Orion. A weapons and tactics instructor, he’s the former Commanding Officer at NTAG Great Lakes and NaviGATOR for the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Sass shared his recollections of September 11th, 2001 with the EverettPost.com this week. This is an edited version of the interview marking 25 years since the insidious terrorist attacks on the United States.
SASS: I was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in their Naval ROTC program. So, I was one foot in the Navy. At that point, I was a sophomore. So I had done the full freshman year of ROTC. The semester had just started for sophomore year, which, coincidentally, the first day of your sophomore year is when you actually sign your contract that you’re going to join the Navy and if you quit at that point, you have to pay back your scholarship.
Everybody in my sophomore class at the University of Wisconsin for ROTC had just signed the paperwork just a few days earlier that, yep, we are agreeing to join the United States Navy as commissioned officers, provided we graduate with the right GPA to go onto the fleet.
The thing about ROTC back then, you wore your uniform to class one day a week. It happened to be Tuesdays and September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday.
So, we were up early that morning, doing Navy things. Marching and all the stuff you do before the campus comes alive. We were all in uniform and I had just gone back to the building that I lived in and was down having breakfast at the dining hall with my best friend and roommate.
The news was on the TV and I was still getting my food. I sat down and looked up. We saw the live coverage of that happening. It was in between the first plane and second plane (hitting the World Trade Center), one had already hit. We were like, oh, that’s terrible.
And as we’re just sitting there watching, we watched the second one hit. And remember, I’m in uniform and everybody that was in the dining hall, probably 100 students or so, everybody turned and looked at me because I was the one in the military uniform.
We’re just 19 year old college kids. Nobody knew anything, but they looked at me like I had answers at that point. I obviously had no answers. But I calmly took my tray back and immediately walked over back to the ROTC building because I felt like that was probably where I should go at that point.
I remember when it was happening, I was thinking: this was intentional. Somebody intentionally hurt us. Because I wanted to be an aviator and I knew a thing or two about that life. Pilots don’t do that on accident, on a clear day.
So I was like, this was intentional. And then confusion. There’s a lot of confusion about what was going on. And you start hearing about the other attacks as well. The Pentagon. The flight crashing in Pennsylvania.
This was definitely a concentrated, coordinated effort and we’re under attack right now.
I graduated and I selected an aviation spot as a naval flight officer. I went down to Pensacola and then to Texas and earned my wings. You go through the Fleet Replacement Squadron in Florida that takes about a year to learn your actual airplane.
I went out to my first squadron, which was VP-40, The Fighting Marlins right out of (NASWI) Whidbey Island up here. That was my first tour in 2007. In 2009, I deployed to Tallil, Iraq flying combat support for our troops on the ground, overland, Iraq.
VP-40 was a P3 squadron. It’s a P8-Posiedon squadron now (at NASWI).
The P3, the P3-Orion, P3-Charlie is an anti-submarine aircraft, and I know what you’re thinking: why on earth would an anti-submarine aircraft be over the desert? What they found is (on the P3-Orion) they gave us all these really great sensors to detect a submarine. Well, they found out that those radars and the electronic surveillance measures we had in the airplane actually worked really well for an overland fight. We had a really great camera operated on the front of the airplane and we had really long legs, which meant we had a really long endurance. We could stay up in the air for a really long time.
So we were flying the combat air support. Troops on the ground. Sailors, soldiers, airmen, Marines. We would fly up at 20,000 feet and watch. We would sweep in front of them. Use those great radars that they gave us to find those little bitty telescope masts that stick out of a submarine when they come up. We used all that, and we were able to sweep ahead, find IEDs (improvised explosive devices)–and you’re like, how do you find an IED from the air? In an IR (infared) camera, when you dig up that dirt from underneath to plant the IED in the ground, improvised explosive device, the ones that were killing all of our troops over there.
They put them in the (dirt) road and it just looks like dirt if you’re on the ground. For us (in the P3 Orion with IR cameras), because that ground was a little cooler that they dug up from underneath and put on top, it was a different temperature. And an IR camera–infrared camera–detects differences in heat. So to us, it looked like this giant black spot in the road and I could see that from 20, 30 miles away.
If we had a convoy on the road, we’d sweep the road in front and be like, hey, there’s a dark spot on the road up here, I think you guys should go around. You call in the explosive ordinance disposal, the EOD team, and they come in and sure enough, that was an IED, and they blow it up and. you don’t lose any soldiers that day. You don’t lose any of your teammates and your friends on the ground.
So, we would do that and we would be in comms with them. They could watch our camera view. It was like a FaceTime call almost. They could watch the camera from the Humvees. You could just tell, when we were on top watching that, they felt safer because we were out there and that that was a really important feeling for us.
It was pretty innovative at the time. You know, it’s 19 years ago. Our capabilities have far surpassed that, but at the time it was a pretty cool technological advancement to have in the field of having that two-way, flying support. We were out there, making sure that our guys survived that fight every day.
25 years after September 11th
SASS: Yeah, the conversation with colleagues (on base) comes up a lot, especially when you hit September because you inevitably talk about where you were or what you were doing and you’ve got people that were on ships on their way home. And they turned around to go back into the fight (in 2001).
That happens today. I was just on an aircraft carrier. I’m relatively new here (at NSE), and we got turned around several times. It feels different; oh man, we were so close to going home. But in 2001, every single one of them that you talked to (said), we didn’t question it at all.
(They would say) That was where we were supposed to go. We needed to turn around, because that was what our country needed for us at the time. And you don’t hear anybody complaining about it either. It’s amazing. We turned around. We went back into the fight and you hear those stories every year. The fact that it’s 25 years now doesn’t feel like 25 years ago. On paper, that feels like a really long time, but it still feels like it was just the other day.
It’s seared into your mind to never forget and I can never forget. I think a lot of us, it’s not just tied to those of us in uniform. A lot of Americans, as a whole, I think, remember exactly how it made them feel. It’s important to share those stories with each other. It brings you together, especially in the military.
We use where we’re from, often, to group us together with other people to find those common relations. But September 11th is something that doesn’t matter where you were from. It brings you together because you talk about where you were, what you were doing, how it made you feel, and it kind of gives you a repurpose on what it means to serve.
Hopefully it at least gets people talking to their neighbors and brings people together. I want a country the way it was right after September 11th, when everybody kind of put aside differences, and came together for a common goal. It doesn’t always happen. I know things are tough with competing ideologies these days, but sometimes we can set that stuff aside and come together and be the America that we really want to be.