CNMI reflects on 911 and the War on Terror

“Boom. There’s a large explosion,” U.S. Army Reserve member Pedro Towai said, recalling the split second before he was thrown a few feet from his convoy vehicle while on a patrol mission in Balad, Iraq on Oct. 31, 2005. He was standing beside the third of four Army vehicles on patrol.

The biggest horror of what had just happened came a few minutes later.

Two of his comrades, also from the CNMI, who were in the last vehicle-the late Army SSgt. Wilgene Lieto and Army SPC Derence Jack-lost their lives when their vehicle was hit by a bomb.

“That vehicle could have been our vehicle,” Towai told Saipan Tribune. “We could have been the ones hit. The third person from the fourth vehicle was standing beside their vehicle. He was alive. The gunner and the driver, Jack and Lieto, were inside the vehicle.”

Towai, along with Lieto and Jack, were members of the 100 Battalion, 442 Infantry Regime of the U.S. Army Reserve called to active duty in August 2004.

They left the CNMI for a one-year tour of duty in Iraq in January 2005, as part of the War on Terror spawned by the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on that fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001.

As the CNMI and the rest of the world marks the tenth anniversary of those terrorist attacks that forever changed the United States and the world, Towai also remembers his brothers-in-arms who paid the ultimate sacrifice to win the war.

Towai, a sergeant-at-arms in the CNMI House of Representatives, said the 9/11 anniversary always reminds him of Lieto, Jack, and 12 other men and women from the CNMI who lost their lives in the War on Terror.

“It’s a sad day. But I always have this thought about all this: It’s much better we fight them in their own soil than to fight them in our own backyard,” Towai said of the U.S. response to those attacks.

The 47-year-old father of five said there are a lot of painful and sad things about the War on Terror but he said “it’s much better we talk about it instead of keeping it bottled up inside.”

Of his five children, one also serves in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

For many, including Lt. Gov. Eloy S. Inos, the world has become more safety-conscious after the 911 attacks.

“The U.S. is at war,” the voice on the other end of the line said, recalls Inos when he received a phone call about the plane attacks in New York almost 10 years ago today.

When he turned on CNN, what greeted him were images of the planes hitting New York’s Twin Towers and people jumping to their death to escape he burning buildings, another plane hitting and burning portions of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and another plane crash in Pennsylvania-all the works of a terrorist network.

The attacks claimed the lives of 2,753 people from 70 different nations, including over 400 first responders in New York.

“It was kind of having this feeling that you don’t know what’s happening. You have all sorts of fear that the world is coming to an end. But as we received more information at the time, things became clearer,” Inos said.

Besides the emotional toll of the attacks, there were also the negative impact on the nation’s economy and the CNMI’s was no different. Tourism arrivals further plunged, among other things.

“On the good side, it’s kind of an awakening for us. After that, we were more vigilant about security issues, although many of us are still bothered by the fact that we have to go through all these [security screening at the airport].But it’s something that we had taken for granted for many years,” he said.

Even with additional security measures, evil deeds still happen. “Imagine if we didn’t step up security at the airports.” Inos said.

As the CNMI observes the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Inos also salutes those innocent lives lost, the families who lost their loved ones, and those who fought in the War on Terror in different parts of the world.

“We sent many men and women to Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. They’re still there,” he said.

With beefed up security also came the federal grants and financial assistance related to homeland security that came the CNMI’s way in the last 10 years.

Juan T. Dela Cruz, assistant chief of operations for the Commonwealth Ports Authority’s Ports Police, was off-duty when he received the call 10 years ago about planes hitting New York and the Pentagon.

“We had to secure the airport and make sure nothing like that would happen here,” said Dela Cruz, who was an immigration investigator with the CNMI Division of Immigration at the time.

He and his colleagues stayed up all night at the Saipan International Airport.

It was only a few hours later when he saw the images of the terror attacks on TV that he realized the magnitude of what was going on.

“It was total disbelief,” he said in an interview right after attending yesterday’s proclamation signing for National Preparedness Month on Capital Hill.

And just like the rest of the CNMI, Dela Cruz also remembers the men and women who fought back to prevent such attacks on U.S. soil again.

Delegate Gregorio Kilili Sablan, who has called for a minute of silence in commemoration of the 10th year of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, said “whether near or far from the attacks, our lives as Americans were forever changed.”