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It was the morning of my first vacation day. I had been sleeping, and we had two very young babies in the house. My second had been born just 1 month before the attack.

My wife came into our bedroom and woke me up, because I had slept in from feeding my son the during the early morning.

She turned on the TV, and there was a replay of the first plane hitting the tower.

I was now up at that point.

Not too long after, the second hit the tower.

I looked at my wife and said to her, “That’s not an accident. We are now at war.”

Then we started filling bathtubs, moving plywood, and positioning hammers and nails to cover doors and windows.

About 45 minutes after the second plane hit the tower, we could here military aircraft flying low and almost directly over our house. It was low and loud enough to shake the house.

My wife had a sort of normalcy bias going while I was running around - I was completely committed to preparation for what I though would be a serious of follow up strikes all over the US.

After the jets rattled the house, she was now fully on board and getting stuff ready.

Then we heard about the Pentagon hit, and something happening in PA.

Once we had done some basic prep stuff, we were glued to the set waiting for updates.

I hadn’t been turned on to FR at that point. I was going by what Fox was broadcasting, and back filling that with CNN stuff. CNN, in events like this, has traditionally had better live coverage, with people positioned closer to where stuff was going on at the time.

I remember, later in the very early morning of 12SEP01, thinking that the Muslims here had acted with incredible stupidity. They had made a bold opening move, and succeeded in bringing down the commercial air traffic to nothing.

But nothing happened afterward - no attacks on malls, no attacks to power infrastructure, no attacks to banking, the internet, or water supplies.

I remember thinking in the following days, “What was the point? Now we are pissed. You know what’s coming.”

I also remember thinking, “Does W need an engraved invitation to hit something at this point? Why isn’t the Middle East a sea of glass? One big Chihuly sculpture piece?”

My inlaws were on a cruise down off of Florida. A planeload of tourists from their ship went down in a sightseeing sortie over one of the islands down there. They had real trouble getting back to WA state from that trip.

Hindsight is 20/20. I remember thinking, “An asymmetrical attack by a state-sponsored terror group on a superpower deserves an asymmetrical response.”

We should have responded with nukes that day, the following couple of days, where we had a window - but didn’t.

Instead we got sucked into the doctrine of ‘appropriate response’, and here we are today.