SHREVEPORT – When hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Penn., personnel at Barksdale Air Force Base were already preparing for war.
The base was in the middle of annual training exercise Global Guardian, which involves readying aircraft and submarines for battle.
Then a call came in – President George W. Bush was headed to BAFB on Air Force One.
Take a peek inside that day from Barksdale Air Force leadership and airmen through the exhibit “Looking Back: Barksdale on 9/11.
The exhibit is currently open and will run until Sept. 15 on the third floor of the Noel Memorial Library on LSUS’s campus.
“Strangely enough, Barksdale was already involved in a force-wide exercise where they get all the bombers ready – they pretend they are at war,” said Ashley Dean, assistant director of the Strategy Alternatives Consortium at LSUS and curator of the exhibit. “Barksdale was armed to the teeth and ready for action, and that’s when they get the news about the attacks and then about President Bush’s planned arrival.
“When a guy came in and told Commander of the 8th Air Force Tom Keck about the attacks, Keck had to make sure that it wasn’t an added element to this exercise that’s already taking place.”
Bush made his first public appearance and remarks from BAFB on the afternoon of Sept. 11.
“Freedom, itself, was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended,” Bush said to start his statement. “I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks. Make no mistake – the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly attacks.”
Bush scribbled notes for the speech on a piece of scratch paper, which sits in the exhibit.
Read the words from airmen who went from preparing for a nuclear drill that day to preparing for the arrival of the Commander in Chief.
The exhibit is curated by the Strategy Alternatives Consortium, a partnership between LSUS and the U.S. Air Force that focuses on USAF historic events, current integrated deterrence efforts, industry challenges and contributions and academic perspectives on the shifting global nuclear posture.
LSUS faculty and Barksdale Air Force personnel co-authored a white paper published about the events of Sept. 11 and a history of events that led up to the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
The whitepaper, which published in 15 years after the attack in 2016, is available on the SAC-LSUS webpage under the tab SAC-LSUS White Papers.
Faculty involved in that white paper and symposium include Dr. Gary Joiner, Dr. Alexander Mikaberidze, Dr. Christopher Hale and Dean.
“This is our Pearl Harbor,” Joiner said of Americans who were old enough to grasp the significance of that day and the events it unfolded. “It’s important for us to commemorate the victims and the first responders that lost their lives.
“The (SAC-LSUS) is very good at answering complex questions, and we got a lot of insight from the Air Force in this partnership (on the white paper). We were able to talk about 9/11 and Barksdale and 9/11 as a nation, but we were also able to go back into the history of how we got here.”
The white paper served as a cornerstone of a 2016 symposium hosted by LSUS.
