I typed up this message earlier this morning in response to a thread on usenet. Unfortunately I forgot to factor in the fact that usenet is now 90% trolls, 9% jackasses, and 1% people looking for serious discussion. I spent a lot of time typing it up, though, and it's the first real account of these events that I personally witnessed that I've put together; I hate to have it go to waste. So, understanding that it was originally crafted as a response to another thread, here are some very weird things that I noticed while in immediate proximity to Minot AFB, ND after the events of 9/11 started unfolding.

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I still remember that day more clearly than any other from my first attempt in college. I woke up that morning, missing my first class of the day (as was normal) with a vicious hangover. It took a little while, but eventually I was out to the student union for some reason or another at Minot State University, which was just a few miles away from one of NORAD's primary members, Minot AFB, ND. I remember passing the TV/lounge area, just trying to stay out of anybody else's way due to the way my head was throbbing, and starting to realize that people were really not in the hallways, which was extremely odd for this time of day on campus. I noticed everyone huddling in the TV/lounge area and, naturally, avoided it.
It didn't take me long to overhear a few people talking about the 'attack'. Eventually I pushed aside my antisocial hangover hibernation mode and went into the lounge area myself in order to see what kind of attack was truly powerful enough to divert everybody from this building on campus to the lounge. We all remember the clips of the tower(s) burning, that was my first time viewing them. I immediately headed back to my dorm room to find out what more I could on the subject from my computer, instead of the crap I knew that the media spoonfed out.
On the way back to my dorm room I hopped on my bike and was so fixated on getting back to the room as soon as possible that I forgot about the fact that there were speed bumps all over campus. I was booking it as fast as I could, totally oblivious to something I'd been watching out for on the way there just a few minutes prior. I absolutely flew over the first one I met and was launched forward off of my bike. I still remember shrugging off the embarassment as some valley girls cackled at me a bit for biffing it in front of a big crowd.
So anyway, let's jump ahead of a couple of hours of researching things and watching the horror unfold online to when my girlfriend arrived there. She would be of no consequence in this story, were it not for the fact that she was married to one of the airmen who manned one of the radar posts for NORAD there. Yeah, her husband knew about me, didn't give a shit, let me stay with her on their house on base, and was planning on getting an amiable divorce from her, so fihkaff about that. She'd been complaining about a complete radio blackout from the base for awhile now (can't remember if it'd been just a couple of days or more like a week at this point, it's basically just the day that's captured so vividly in my head) and not being able to get ahold of her husband for anything.
After she shows up, she ends up getting a call from him. This is pretty odd, because the base had been on lockdown and, obviously, after something involving the air force more than any other armed service, one would imagine that they would still be on lockdown. Well, it turned out that they were, but a few airmen manning that particular radar station had managed to sneak in a cellphone. They took turns calling out to their friends and family, and when she got the call from him I was close enough to her to hear both ends of the conversation when she put the phone up to her ear. The line in particular that I remember him saying was "Now do you see why I haven't been able to talk to you for so long? Fuck, we're not even supposed to have this cell right now, if we get caught we're fucked, but I wanted you to know that I was alright. You see what's happened, though?"
In particular, the part about 'now do you see why I haven't been able to talk to you for so long' really, especially with the tone in his voice, went a long way toward proving to me that there was advance knowledge that something was going down that was way unusual in the NORAD community, and not just typical wargames, either. It was enough to put me on the case of digging to find out what _I_ believed. Eventually it was this chain of events that led me to join the military to find out how much more I could find out about the trumped-up reasons for the war in Iraq, and I spent the next four years in the Army National Guard, volunteering for every deployment that I could in order to get more time in active duty (I loved the military life, despite the fact that everything that you're told about why you're there is complete bullshit-- the camraderie is something that you either love or hate, and I loved it). I spent a lot of the time digging through the resources available to me to find out more about the facts of different military operations, and trying to learn Arabic so that I wouldn't be completely in the dark or unable to communicate if I ever would've been sent to the battlefield itself.
The piece of evidence that I couldn't even get my fellow platoon members to believe (let's face it-- most people who join the army do so out of no other options, blind patriotism, or some other mainstream reasons, NOT to try to unearth the lies behind what we're told about our agenda on the world scene), came to me as I was mobilizing for my first major deployment. It was in Ft. Leonard Wood, where I had hooked up with a woman for awhile in a whirlwind kind of thing. She wasn't military, but it turned out that her brother-in-law, and the family that she was staying with, was military. She had me in to meet them at one point before we headed out from there, and his shpiel on events pounded another huge nail into the coffin of the official story.
He was part of the Chemical Weapons Corps. That requires a security clearance, and he was clearly not supposed to talk about what he was discussing, but hey, I was another soldier, so it was all good. He was an SFC, and was bent as hell about the fact that when they were first sent to Iraq to look for WMD, they were blatant tools that were used and abused just like the military does to most when they're in an uncomfortably compromising situation. His story was that they went in to look for those mobile chem weapons factories (the ones in the truck trailers, etc) or whatever else they might be able to find. Well they didn't find _ANYTHING_ and it became apparent to all of their platoons that there was nothing to be found in the way of chemical weapons. What did the higher ups do? Communications blackout for the company, confiscation of all communications devices that weren't used for official business, and lockdown for the next several months. This was immediately after the official invasion. It only took a few months for the public to forget about the reasons for the war and to just be gung-ho about it no matter what (never underestimate the public's ability to forget and fall for distraction), then they were taken off of lockdown, but he was horribly upset because all of his soldiers were unable to communicate with their loved ones, nobody knew if they were alive or dead, etc.
Just wanted to share my little bit on this. I don't think I've ever typed it all up before. I've read this group for long enough now that I think, if nothing else, it'll get read through by some people. Probably just looking for reasons to flame me but whatever, I can let that shit roll off. If you've got any serious questions or clarifications that you'd like, feel free to contact me, I'll try to keep watching this thread closely.

-Damo

P.S. Sorry if the language offends anybody; like I said I originally wrote this for usenet where I could really care less whom I'm pissing off. Here I'm hoping it generates a little more serious discussion, as the people are a little more personable to each other, from what I've seen so far.

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