After the attacks, it was lock-down in Egypt for military

This is the second of a two-part series about remembering 9/11 written by Joe Diaz, a Carleton resident and retired command master chief who spent 40 years with the U.S. Navy and served in six wars and conflicts.

Since the phone call on September 11, we were on THREATCON DELTA for the entire week because of the attacks in the states and the terrorists came from the Middle East, including Egypt.  All military in the area were on lock-down and had restricted movement.

All our military personnel and families were safe as long as they stayed within their compounds and homes. That was my first priority. The news in the States identified the people who commandeered the airplanes were from this region and were all Muslim.  Because it occurred in the States, this created a major problem for me.

Our government employee and my friend, George Bedrossian, was attending disease vector control training in Jacksonville. His wife and daughter were in California with friends. George’s passport is Egyptian.  But technically he is Armenian and Roman Catholic. Not a terrorist.

People were looking at him in what he felt was a threat to his safety, so he called me at the medical compound on Sept. 12. I advised him to wear his gold cross on the outside of his shirt and call my brother Mike in Orlando. Which I did also.

My brother Mike had five times more attitude than I have and truly hates bullies. We were to move George and his family to Mike’s home if necessary until we could fly the Bedrossian family out of the country on the first planes allowed to fly after the attacks.  Problem solved.

I also wrote a strongly worded letter and sent it via e-mail to everyone I knew including Deb Saul, editor of The Monroe News at the time.  I said not everyone from this area is a terrorist, hates the USA and is Muslim.

Deb Saul printed my letter as a column in the paper. That started my 20 years of writing that the world is good place to visit. The problems are the bad people, foreign and domestic, who want to control us either by force or deception.

After the first week we went to CHARLIE, or restricted movement for the rest of the month.  No one was allowed to travel in their private cars. That was because our license plates were green and black and started with the Arabic number for 57, which identified us as Americans.

So travel was only in the armored cars to and from work and, if needed, to go to the commissary store or embassy, we had to call first to the embassy security office when we left home, when we arrived, left again and arrived home. What a pain!

I was lucky because my soon-to-be wife, Rose, had 10 years experience in Cairo working for Halliburton and was not bound by the orders.  She could go into local areas to buy fresh fruit and vegetables for us without problems.  Other families used her help also.

Later in October we went to BRAVO PLUS, which gave us a little more freedom to move around but any travel outside of Cairo needed to be reported to the embassy security.  

There was a military exercise scheduled for late October called “Bright Star."  Some of us at Navy Medical Research were scheduled to be part of the training because of health threats of the desert.  At first it was canceled because of the threat.  Then it was back on.  Because the countries involved could use it as a “dress rehearsal” for entering Afghanistan.

Three of us went up to the Mubarak Military Complex near Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea coast to set up. I had an armored Suburban with the windshield smashed out needing to be shipped to Germany via the port of Alexandria.  Although it wasn’t safe to drive, I needed some excitement, so I used it during the exercise and then dropped it off for ocean shipment.

We saw many of the four U.S. military services training for what would happen in a few weeks. Like so many at the time, I wanted to go with them and do what we called “pay back." 

But this time I got stuck with what we in the military call “in the rear with the gear."  I hated that!  A medical logistics Army colonel wanted me to store a pallet load of Ciprofloxacin pills in case of an anthrax attack. I carried “Cipro” in our climate-controlled storeroom since 2000 because of the threat of anthrax.  But never millions of pills at one time!

The rest of 2001 going into 2002 had a few moments of touch and go, but we never got out of BRAVO PLUS. Some of our doctors and corpsmen got temporary orders to Afghanistan. I went into another direction.

Later in 2002 I loaded medical equipment and supplies into trucks and drove one across the Sinai peninsula to Amman Jordan. It was a secret at the time but we were preparing for Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Jordan was to be a medical evacuation site. 

I was in a position to know there were no weapons of mass destruction.  But Saddam Hussein needed to be neutralized.  That is another story.

Joe Diaz can be reached at joediaz00@hotmail.com.