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Navy nuke 1996-2005. Below is a pic of my ship, the George Washington in NY Harbor on 9/12/01. We were out for a 2 day cruise to run reactor drills prior to ORSE. The day of the drills is when the attacks occurred. At first we thought, "Damn, these guys are getting detailed with their scenarios" until we realized it was real.
We were the first nuke carrier in the harbor in a long time.
We had no air wing on board, no ammo (I think someone said 2 sea sparrows and 500rd of CWIS ammo) The planes on the deck were all broken, some of them even shells, but we brought them up to the flight deck to make it look like something.
We ended up being out for over two weeks. I didn't even bring a change of clothes and didn't leave my wife the ATM card. We didn't know if we were going straight to the gulf or what. It was quite stressful not knowing anything.
It was surreal standing on the smoke deck looking at the city. If you took away the smoke, it suddenly looked like every port we'd visited, with the towers gone it just didn't stand out at all.
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