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Tuesday,
September 11, 2001
Veterans
call attack ‘more hopeless’
By Steven Baker
Special to the Skiff
Second
class motor machinist Lee Brown was sweeping for mines on
an auxiliary ship when he looked a Japanese pilot in the eye
as he flew over the channel at Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941.
“He
was peering out the cockpit,” said Brown, now a World
War II veteran living in Nevada. “I could have hit him
with a slingshot.”
The
three planes that smashed into the World Trade Center twin
towers and the Pentagon Tuesday were not as identifiable as
the red circle of attacking planes at Pearl Harbor. TCU associate
journalism professor Jack Raskopf was 15 years old at the
time of the Pearl Harbor attack. He said this incident is
more of a hopeless situation because of the unknown aggressors.
“Pearl
Harbor was a fixable problem,” said Raskopf, who joined
the Navy in 1943. “And then the atomic bomb dropped and
we were ecstatically happy. Now we don’t have a clear-cut
enemy.”
History
professor Mark Gilderhus said he didn’t know anything
sensible to say after the attacks Tuesday.
“This
is astounding and terrifying,” Gilderhus said. “One
thing is obvious — our world has changed for the worse.
We might have to give up some of our civil rights for security.”
Gilderhus
said air travel or even driving between states could become
much more restrictive.
Just
last year 17 people were killed when the USS Cole was attacked
on Oct. 12 in Yemen. Terrorists also attacked two U.S. embassies
in Africa in 1998.
“When
we try to retaliate against terrorists there is an obvious
enemy but there isn’t an obvious country,” Gilderhus
said. “Traditional war methods become obsolete.”
Gilderhus
said he remembers standing outside his childhood home in Minnesota
with his father during blackouts in World War II. The blackouts
were cautionary tactics used by the United States in case
of bombing raids. They would look up at the sky for the German
air force, the Luftwaffe.
“Today
we have a whole array of weapons,” Gilderhus said. “One
of the truly maddening things about terrorism is that all
of us are vulnerable.”
Steven
Baker
lastevas@aol.com
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Desk Chief Kristina Iodice contributed to this report.
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