September 10, 2025 • 35 mins
Ltt Gen. Marc Sasseville was born into an Air Force family and that played a significant role in his decision to attend the U.S. Air Force Academy and become an Air Force officer. After 14 years on active duty, Sasseville shifted to the Air National Guard in 1999 and also became a commercial airline pilot.
On September 11, 2001, Sasseville was serving with the 113th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard at Andrews Air Force base when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners. Once the second plane struck the World Trade Center, Sasseville and everyone else on base knew it was a terrorist attack. But would there be more planes? And would they be headed for Washington, D.C.?
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Gen. Sasseville tells how that day unfolded. He explains what development required pilots in the D.C. Air National Guard to scramble their F-16's and be ready to confront any other other planes being flown by terrorists. But they had a big problem. None of their F-16's were armed with missiles and there was no time to wait for that. The reality soon hit home: if they needed to stop an airliner, they'd have to hit it with their own planes. If that was required, they would not be coming home.
Sasseville takes us through his thinking on the most effective way to strike an airliner with an F-16. Ultimately, that would not be necessary due to the heroism of the passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93. Sasseville honors them and he tells us what it was like flying near the Pentagon not long after it was attacked.
He also reveals the unexpected assignment he received later in that day on 9/11 and details his time as commander of the 410th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron in the early days of the Iraq War. Finally, he reflects upon what was really asked of him on 9/11 and his instinctive willingness to put his life on the line to protect our nation.
On September 11, 2001, Sasseville was serving with the 113th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard at Andrews Air Force base when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners. Once the second plane struck the World Trade Center, Sasseville and everyone else on base knew it was a terrorist attack. But would there be more planes? And would they be headed for Washington, D.C.?
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Gen. Sasseville tells how that day unfolded. He explains what development required pilots in the D.C. Air National Guard to scramble their F-16's and be ready to confront any other other planes being flown by terrorists. But they had a big problem. None of their F-16's were armed with missiles and there was no time to wait for that. The reality soon hit home: if they needed to stop an airliner, they'd have to hit it with their own planes. If that was required, they would not be coming home.
Sasseville takes us through his thinking on the most effective way to strike an airliner with an F-16. Ultimately, that would not be necessary due to the heroism of the passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93. Sasseville honors them and he tells us what it was like flying near the Pentagon not long after it was attacked.
He also reveals the unexpected assignment he received later in that day on 9/11 and details his time as commander of the 410th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron in the early days of the Iraq War. Finally, he reflects upon what was really asked of him on 9/11 and his instinctive willingness to put his life on the line to protect our nation.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sassavill.
He served a total of thirty nine years in uniform,
including time in the Air National Guard, and he was
serving as acting commander of the one hundred and thirteenth
Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard at
(00:31):
Andrews Air Force Base on September eleventh, two thousand and one.
That day, he was ordered into the air to interdict
any additional commercial airliners under the control of Al Qaeda
terrorists and to take it out of the sky, initially
with no weapon other than his plane. Mark Sassivill grew
up in an Air Force family. His father served for
(00:54):
many years, including time in Vietnam. Sassaville says those years
helped to give him perspective on what the US and
the world were really like.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I had a view of what America was that I
think turned out to be quite different from what my
contemporaries had by the time I got to the Air
Force Academy at the age of seventeen, because what we
saw from being overseas was a very different America. We
didn't have TV, we didn't have the internet, we didn't
(01:24):
have a lot of the technology and.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
The social media that we have today.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So it was always nice to come home for home
leave a month at a very two years, if you will.
And we always held America as this idealistic land where
we always yearned to go back to, So it really
were very formative years.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
At age seventeen, Sassaville was off to the US Air
Force Academy in Colorado. After a successful four years there,
he was commissioned as an officer. Upon graduation in nineteen
eighty five, he was off to flight school, where he
fell in love with the F sixteen.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
It is just a dream to fly. It's so easy.
It does so many different missions. It's nice and comfortable.
You feel like he can wrap the airplane around you.
It feels like there's nothing that the airplane can't do.
It's got a great thrust aweight ratio, very maneuverable, and
it was just a dream to fly.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
After all the required training, Sassaville was deployed to Torrejon
Air Base in Spain. Over the next fourteen years, sassavill
thrived in Spain, followed by time at Homestead Air Force
Base near Miami. Then came his attending and instructing at
the Air Force Weapons School. After that, overseas deployments in
Japan and Korea where sandwiched around a two Reretnellis Air
(02:47):
Force Base in Nevada. By nineteen ninety nine, Sassaville was
married and a father. He decided to leave active duty,
joined the Air National Guard and become a commercial pilot
with Delta Airline service. In the National Guard is how
Sassville found himself on the front line against the nine
to eleven terrorist attacks. Sassaville explains how the day began
(03:09):
very quietly, but that clearly changed in a hurry.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So the morning of nine to eleven, that Tuesday, that
was Tuesday, as we all know, the week before, we
had come back from a training deployment to Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
They were called them Red Flags.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
And those are very intense two week exercises that everybody
goes to, and that was the mode at the time.
You take everybody out there and you really get a
good brush up on the tactics that you're going to
use in any kind of combat scenario, weapons, employment, and
so forth and so on. So I say that because
(03:48):
most of everybody, most of the squadron wasn't on the
base at the time, and we just had the skeleton crew,
and I was in charge of the skeleton crew at
the time, and we had a scheduler and a training office,
and that morning we are trying to reconstitute. Everybody's gone,
but they're going to come back at some point once
they've retouched base with their employers.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
That's a big part of how the National Guard is built,
as most of the people, the pilots and the maintainers
and all the support staff are part timers. So when
you ask them to go on a long two week trip,
they got to come back, check in where their bosses,
spend a little bit of time, and then they'll come
back and get into a training cycle. And that's what
we're putting together. And we're in the process of building
(04:33):
the following week's schedule, trying to figure out who's going
to be here. When the meeting's interrupted by Dave Callahan,
he says, hey, you guys ought to look and see
what's on TV. And so we left a meeting room
and go into the break room, if you will, and
sure enough, there's one of the trade towers on fire, smoking, incredible, shocking, obviously,
(04:57):
and we start to process what does this mean? Is
this an accident? Did somebody get a bad vector? Was
there an airplane malfunction? You just start to think through
what the cause could be. And we're not really thinking
of reacting yet. That's not we're not there in the
(05:19):
thought process. It's more, oh my god, what just happened.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Once the second plane hit the World Trade Center, everyone
knew exactly what was happening. America was under attack, and
immediately Sassaville's Air National Guard unit was in touch with
the White House Joint Operations Center. Before long, it was
clear the DC Air National Guard needed to get into
the air. Sassaville details the sequence of events and how
(05:44):
their small crew scrambled to get into the sky.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Once we may contact, Dan Kane makes contact with the
White House shock to find out, Hey, what's going on.
That's when they ask can you get anything airborne? And
so I'm standing there to this conversation, and I knew
that when they asked can you get anything airborne? And
it wasn't a tasking. Multiple reasons for that. A they
(06:10):
weren't ready, they didn't have the authority to issue a tasking,
and not only as a jock, but from a Title ten,
Title thirty two. Who's in charge of what? In that environment?
They don't have the authority. They knew that, and that's
why they asked. But I took that as we're in trouble.
Come to find out later on that what the White
(06:32):
House jock had seen was the air traffic control flow,
and they saw one track that was basically heading west
turn around into.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
A button hook looks like a fish hook, and then stops.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That's what they were reacting to, and they knew that
that stopped near where the river would pick up, the
Potomac River would pick up. So their question was, we
think we see something coming down the river.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Can you get anything in the air? So we respond.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Immediately three of our airplanes had just come back and
had landed after a training mission. Normally was four, but
again since people had gone back to their employers, three
was all we could put up that one morning for
the training sorty. So Billy Hutchison, who has eight hundred
pounds of gas in n F sixteen, which to anybody
(07:23):
driving car means you're on E.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Literally you're on E.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
We asked him to see if he can get back
up in the air, fly up the river, see if
he sees anything. And then he turns around and comes back.
He doesn't see anything. He's got his radar looking low
because that's where we expected it to be. He turns
around and comes back and lands below e. Obviously couldn't
go very far and couldn't do anything because he didn't
(07:47):
have any weapons, and you know that wasn't the task
at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Do you see anything?
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Meanwhile, myself Dan Kine, who's now a Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, Brandon Rasmussen, who was an active dude pilot
that was spending time with us to get flight hours
and experience, and that was a common thing back in
those days, and actually it still is today. And number
four was Lucky Penny, one of the new hires into
(08:13):
the squadron. So we organize ourselves. I basically lay out
the structure and I ordered us and that was the
order of experience. I had the most experienced, Lucky I
had the least. And so I paired myself and Lucky
and had Nan.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
And I gore.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
That was his call sign raising an I goor wait,
because I knew that we didn't have weapons, So I said,
Lucky and I are going to run out there establish
a combat air patrol, which is a combat term obviously,
and so basically what that involves is flying over a
geographic piece of train and looking with your radar and
(08:51):
your eyeballs for anything coming at you. The better your radar,
the farther you can see. The higher you go, the
farther you can see, and so that's beneficial. But we
knew that this was going to be a close end scenario.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Their F sixteen's were unarmed, leaving Sassville to figure out
how to potentially take down a commercial airliner with two
fighter jets.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Lucky and I get airborne as soon as we can.
Once we get airborne, things start to crystallize. In my mind,
I don't know what the thread is. I don't have
any weapons, I don't have any rules of engagement. Yet
they come and from the Vice President. We get weapons free,
(09:36):
and we really don't have any tactics.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
We did know that.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Two airplanes had crashed before we took off, and I
had a conversation with Lucky, Okay, when we get airborne,
if we come up across an airliner, that's intent on
and how do we know, Well, we had to think
through that as well. That's intent on being used as
a weapon. I'll take the front of the airplane, you
(10:02):
take the tail of the airplane. And I kind of
looked it at that. I didn't really explain what take meant.
We get airborne and the radio is just blaring. We're
looking for traffic that's hasn't gotten the word that everybody
needs to be landed, which had been put out.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So we're seeing some.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
TV station helicopters, probably some police traffic, and there's general
aviation traffic as well, just flying around. And we spent
a lot of time essentially shoeing them away, but we
had to split up to do that because there was
so much. And so that's the point where I realized
my idea of one taking one part of the airplane
and the other the other part isn't going to work.
(10:47):
So it's going to be a single shot. And thinking
through how I was going to take down an airplane
without weapons was kind of a challenge and a little
bit of a trick. I knew about airliners because I
had been a Delta pilot, and so I knew where
the redundancies were. I knew where the weaknesses of the
(11:09):
airplane where I knew where the strengths were, and had
a pretty good idea of what it would take to
bring one down. So the plan that I concocted in
my mind was I was going to have to hit it.
Even if I did head and I did have the
training bullets, those training bullets.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Are just slid slugs.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
What you prefer in combat is the combat round, which
has a fuse in it and explodes when it hits something,
and that obviously causes much more damage and is much
more effective in destroying the target, whether it's another airplane
or something on or attached to the ground.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
When we come back, Sasaville determines how to best take
an airliner out of the sky with one F sixteen
and how the rest of his day unfolded. I'm Greg
Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Sixty Seconds of Service.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
This sixty Seconds of Services presented by T Mobile, recognizing
these steadfast, edication and sacrifices made by service members and
their families. T mobile is committed to supporting active duty
veterans and military spouses. Visit t mobile dot com slash
military to learn More, founded by World.
Speaker 5 (12:13):
War II veteran Arnold Fisher, Vets Helping Heroes funds service
dog training for disabled veterans. These dogs are not pets,
They're highly trained assistants who help with everything from opening
doors to detecting seizures. Army veteran Raoul Sanchez, blinded in Iraq,
credits his dog Bolt with restoring his independence. I couldn't
leave my apartment alone, he says. Now we go everywhere.
(12:35):
Each dog costs over twenty five thousand dollars to train,
but donations ensure veterans never pay. The result hundreds of
lives changed, four pause at a time. Today's sixty seconds
of Service is brought to you by Prevagen. Prevagen is
the number one pharmacist recommended memory support brand. You can
find Prevagen and the Vitamin Aisle in stores everywhere.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Kurrump. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sasseville.
We now pick up his story as he determines the
most likely way one unarmed F sixteen could bring down
a commercial airliner if he was required to do that.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
So I realized that I was going to have to
hit it, and I came up with the idea of
hitting the wing.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Destroying the aerodynamic capabilities.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
The things that are going through my mind are, first
of all, it's a plane full of people, American citizens
mostly probably, So I had to do that calculation of.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
These of the few versus the needs.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Of the many, right, that ethical conundrum, the idea of
hitting it at the right time and making that decision
early rather than late, getting in position. We hadn't trained
against this kind of a threat.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Now in the.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Cold War and back in my tour home days when
we would deploy to Turkey, we knew that the Russians
had bombers, and so we did a little bit of
work on how would you intercept a Russian bomber and
where were the soft.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Spots and how would you attack one?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
So we knew a little bit about taking big airplanes down,
but I had to go through that thought process. And
so the first two hours and that's all we really
had gas for. Lucky and I are chasing airplanes down
and thankfully we didn't have to ram any We didn't,
but we didn't know. We didn't know how many other
airplanes were coming our way. We're still their born. It
(14:33):
was just a very, very uncomfortable time.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
At this point, there was still heavy air traffic in
the Washington, DC area. Sasseville says his fellow Air National
Guard officer Dan Raisin Kane, was working with Washington Tower
to sift through the planes in order to determine if
any of them posed a threat.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Dan spent a little bit of time on the radio
working with them to help develop reference points. And there's
a there's a mechanism by which we communicate. We have
a common pitcher, so we can have a radial and
a distance off of a common point that we can
(15:12):
use to communicate where there's something that needs to be
looked at. It either it's a known target or a
unknown target, and we would go after that. So we
depended upon Tower for a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Before Sasaville and Heather Penny got up into the air,
American Airlines Flight seventy seven smashed into the Pentagon, killing
one hundred and eighty nine people on the plane and
in our Department of Defense. Sasaville says, flying near the
Pentagon is something you will never forget.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
The one thing I'll remember from that first sorty though,
The thing that sticks on my mind is right after takeoff,
I'm still trying to get the cockpit set up. I
needed to get airborne as soon as possible, so I
flew over the Pentagon. Billy had flown already over the
pen and come around and landed. I flew a little
(16:02):
bit higher than he did, So the first one that
everybody sees is Billy.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
I was higher.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I don't think many people saw me. And I can
smell the fumes from the fire, the concrete, the gas
that's burning, everything else that's burning inside of that section
of the Pentagon. It's not smoke. I can't My vision
isn't included, but I can just smell it. And that
(16:28):
just triggered my brain gut relationship where my stomach just
fell and I said, oh my god, how did we
miss this? We failed, We got attacked. We had no
idea this was happening. And that's that's a memory that
I'll take to the grave.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And remember that button hook flight pattern that forced Sasaville
and his team into action. That was United Airlines Flight
ninety three, on which the passengers stormed the cockpit and
forced the plane to crash Pennsylvania Field, Sassaville sheds more
light on that and articulates how grateful we all should
be for the heroic patriots on that flight.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
That was flight ninety three.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
So that button hook, where that hook ends, we estimate
as the crash site. What the White House had thought
was maybe that's where they pulled the circuit breakers. Because
they were aviators inside that said they knew aviation, and
so they had thought that maybe the black box, the
(17:32):
identification friend or foe that transmits a signal that allowed
them to see that track was turned off. The way
you turn it off is by pulling the circuit breakers,
and that they had gone lower and were sneaking into
Washington d C. Low altitude that nobody would see it.
They saw that, they said, can you get airborne? That's
what we went after. But the time delay, even if
(17:55):
we had gone all the way up there, they had
crashed much earlier than that. And while I'm on flight
ninety three, I got to tell you, I'm here to
tell my side of the story. So is dan Kin
and Agre and Billy and all the maintainers that were
a part of this. Tony Russell Cheatham, the leadership, John
(18:18):
Jeff Johnson George Dagnan, all the pilots that participate in this.
So we're the survivors, we tell the story, but there's
a plane of full of American heroes that did the
unthinkable and took that plane down.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
And if that hadn't happened, if.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
They hadn't done that, if they haven't taken they didn't
take that action, we might be in a very different
place today. And so I always make a point of
drawing attention to that. There's a great website, Friends of
Flight ninety three that does a good job of honoring them,
(18:56):
and obviously the memorial up there in Shanksville, Pennsylvania is
something that's very impressive. If folks haven't been there and
encouraged them to go do that.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
That's retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sassovil, who
spent thirty nine years in uniform for our nation. When
we come back, Sassaville finally gets some weapons and then
heads right back up into the sky to defend our
nation's capital, and he does finally have an important encounter
with another plane that's straight ahead on Veterans Chronicles. This
(19:27):
is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus, our guest has retired
US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sassovil, who was sent
up to interdict any additional commercial airliners under the control
of al Qaeda terrorists on September eleventh, two thousand and one,
even though the first time he went up he had
no weapons other than his own plane. After that first sortie,
(19:50):
Sassavill and Heather Penny returned to Andrew's Air Force Base
for refueling, and now the crews were ready to provide
them with missiles if they needed to use them. So
Aassville was back in the air with Heather Penny, and
as the day went on and all air traffic was grounded,
the skies got quieter and quieter. But suddenly Sassville heard
a message that should ideally have come on an encrypted channel,
(20:13):
except as F sixteen didn't have that communications system. Nonetheless,
he was given a very important assignment.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The controller wants to communicate with me about an airplane
coming in. He communicates to me in a very low voice,
trying to evade AYE, telling me in the clear to.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Vector two seven zero for one hundred and twenty miles
or one hundred and forty miles.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
I guess it was meaning go west for over one
hundred miles and the mission is to escort Air Force
one back. So what had happened was President Bush had
been notified. He was in Florida at a pre elementary school,
and he had been notified of the attack, and then
(20:58):
the day started unfold thing for him. He was moved
around several places in the United States all day long
and then finally decides, Okay, it's time to come back
and I need to get back to DC. And so
I think the enterprise probably stalled a little bit. I'm
just guessing making sure that the environment's safe. And now
(21:19):
it's safe enough. But they wanted to fighter escort. Nor
AID command wanted a fighter escort.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
So we leave the cap, we leave the area.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
I bring the two F fifteen's out with me and
Lucky and we go out to the west waiting to
pick up US Air Force one and we find them
there's another Leer jet up in at altitude that the
fifteen's committed out on early because we didn't know, you know,
(21:51):
we didn't know anything at that point. Weren't going to
take anything for granted, and air traffic Control wasn't talking
to him. So they go investigate and they come back,
and so now the task is to get back into Andrews.
And I get the frequency for the Air Force one
(22:13):
so I can talk to him right as a victor frequency.
We start exchanging and finding out what his plan is.
He goes, okay, we're going to go to Andrews and
do a strad in, meaning a normal landing, probably a
little bit drug out.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
So I put the.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Wingmen out in front to see if she can see
anything on the ground, because again we don't know if
there's if there are other airplanes waiting for us, if
there are assets on the ground that intent to use
surface to air missiles to make things difficult worse, shoot
at Air Force one again if they're intent on doing that.
So I put Lucky ten miles out in front, and
(22:50):
she's going to stay in front, station keeping with some
new with a new machine, new computer equipment that.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
We had just gotten on the F sixteen.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
She clears the airfield, air Force one lands and I
get back up on top and we send the F
fifteen's back up high and continue flying for the next.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Two or three hours.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
But that was unique because Air Force one doesn't like
to be escorted and they're very understandably so they're very
concerned about other airplanes getting too close. When I'm on
the wing and there's a picture on the web of
me on the wing of Air Force one, and there's
also it's a Reuter's picture. There's a reporter on the
(23:34):
airplane taking a picture of President Bush and call Rove.
I think it is they're looking out the window of
the airplane at me on the wing.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Which I think is kind of cool. I should get
those printed up.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
And so as I'm on the wing, I'm thinking, wow,
this is this is a very unique time in history,
very unique circumstances that a it's the country needs a
fighter escort. It's been determined by authorities that the country needs,
the president needs a fighter escort to get back to
his capital, and that I'm the one doing it with
(24:10):
my appointment.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Right surreal moment.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
After escorting Air Force one to a safe landing at
Andrews Air Force Base, Sassaville, went right back to work
patrolling the skies around Washington for two more hours. Of course,
the nine to eleven terrorist attacks triggered the global War
on Terrorism, which included Iraq. Starting in two thousand and three,
Sassaville was deployed to that theater early on in the
(24:34):
conflict as commander of the four hundred and tenth Expeditionary
Operations Support Squadron.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
That was another very interesting chapter. In two thousand and three,
in the spring, late spring, early summer of two thousand
and three, the mission for the four tenth we were
sent to Southwest Asia, right, so somewhere in the Middle East.
Still can't reveal exactly where, but what our mission was
was to find and destroy the scud missiles, the Iraqi
(25:04):
scud missiles that might be employed. And so again this
is ancient history and you don't hear much about it
these days, but during that timeframe we were concerned. The
combatant commander was concerned that they would have scud missiles
on basically trucks to transporter, erector, launcher, ride teller, but
(25:29):
basically it's a truck that carries a missile and you
could hide them anywhere, you can move them any where
you wanted, basically undetectable because they were low signature and
you can't find them, and they would raise them, shoot
hit a friendly nation and then go back. And if
they were able to do that, that would significantly, significantly
change the tide of the war. So our mission was
(25:52):
to go after those with the weapons and the tools
that we had on board the F sixteen. In those days.
One of the new capabilities that was just emerging was
this idea of putting a targeting pod on an older
F sixteen. So we took new technology married up with
an older F sixteen. Gave us a great capability to
(26:14):
search the environment for things that were hot or cold
and in the desert. That's a great thing to have
and it would allow us to investigate it and if
we found an enemy position, if we had the right authorization,
we had the right weapon to be able to destroy it.
So that's what we spent most of the time doing
(26:37):
from our base. The base also housed other capabilities, search
and rescue. It was a coalition base. We made great
friends with the UK coalition partners that were there. There
were some special forces and so forth. So it was
a very interesting experience.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Sasavill said, as it was clear the US had overwhelming
air power in Iraq.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
We owned the skies by then, and this is the
idea of the importance of having air superiority. You can
maneuver wherever you want, unimpeded. We didn't have complete air superiority.
There were a couple of nights that we flew these
missions where the Iraqis were still trying to shoot us,
and you could see the Triple A come up a
few service to air missiles on other flights, not on
(27:27):
me per se, but they were non impactful right and
easy to defeat, relatively easy for them to defeat, so
it wasn't extremely critical. The other thing that we spent
quite a bit of time doing is also close air
support for the troops, so it was actually that was
(27:47):
a primary mission.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Secondary mission was.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
To support troops in contact, and we had several engagements
all the way over by Haditha Dam and Mosol and
so forth and so on, So that was much more
activity in that mission set than the primary one.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Two more notes in this story. Sassaville mentioned several times
one of his key team members that day was Captain
Dan Raisin Kane, who was now General Kin and serves
as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sassaville explains
what kind of man and leader General Kane was and
still is.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Dan is one of a kind. He's got a great mind.
He's a very sharp, very in tune, switched on all
the time, two steps ahead of everybody. He was like
that when we're I was a major and he was
a captain, and he's still that way today.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
He understands the bigger picture, right.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
He's part of a small part of something that's much
bigger than all of us, right. A patriot to the core,
he understands the value of the contributions of those who
have gone before us, those who have served, but also
those who have paid the ultimate price, and he takes
(29:10):
that very to heart. He's very gracious and grateful for
the service.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
He's a great.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Friend and and I'm proud to count him in my
list of friends. He's great for the nation at this
point in time. I think that the President made an
excellent choice in picking him. The other part, aside from
the military, which makes him such a good pick, I
think in this environment, is because he's had a civilian life.
(29:39):
As a guardsman, you play both roles. So when your
active duty, this is it. You're in uniform and that's
all you do. But as a guardsman you live in
both camps, and so he's got quite a bit of
time as a civilian working with civilians, understanding the environment,
understanding what civilian.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
Leaders priority ties.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
And when you look at previous chairmen that I've served,
you going back to Vietnam even and there's.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
Been quite a lot written about.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
The Joint chiefs in Vietnam at that time, understanding the
political environment. Not that he's political or that he hasn't
a political agenda, much to the opposite, but you have
to understand the environment that you're operating in, and I
think he's a very well positioned to do that.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Sasaville admits he did not have time on nine to
eleven to think about what would happen if he had
been forced to give his life in defense of his nation,
But he's had plenty of time since then to reflect
on what he was called to do and what he
did instinctively on that day.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
It's kind of odd to think when I went to
the Air Force Academy in nineteen eighty one, that was
less than ten years after Vietnam War ended. So there's
still a lot of chatter about what happened in Vietnam
and all the heroism that happened, and how many people
did some very brave things in the Air on the
ground on the seas, right, and you learn that at
(31:10):
the academy, you learn what heroism is about, you learn
the risks that people take, and you, as a young
man or woman, I think, ask the same question, why
what is it?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
And I think it really just comes down to.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Having a believing in the cause. And if you believe
in America and you know that freedom isn't free. It
sounds very cliche, but it costs to maintain what we have.
We're a commercial nation, we have democratic values. We're not perfect,
(31:50):
but from my experience as a young person living overseas,
we've probably got it better than just about everybody else.
Just about everybody else, not everybody. And the only way
that you do that is by defending it and protecting
it so when it comes under attack. I was a
little bit older right in my career, all these ideas
(32:12):
had cemented in my mind. My values were pretty set.
So believing it and dedicating myself to the cause believing
in it, which obviously I still do, wasn't that much
of a leap, because I knew there was a long
line of people who had done and given much more
(32:32):
than I had. Prisoners of war, right, I mean that
is somebody who's been in pow for nine years. That's
a sacrifice. That is a tremendous sacrifice. So a long
history of heroes that had gone before us, and to
(32:54):
put myself in that position wasn't as hard at the
time with the panic and everybody in the confusion wasn't
as hard.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I don't think.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
As we make it out to be, and I think
a lot of people would have done the same thing.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
After nearly forty years in uniform. General Sassville also shared
what he's most proud of about his entire career in
the service.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
I would say that I'm most proud of the team.
And when I say the team, the people that I've
worked with, and it's not just military, you know I've done.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
We were in Turkey.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
I was a Defense attache in Turkey and the ambassador's
country team there, great Americans trying to do great work
in uniform, out of uniform, contractors, civilians. It's just been
a tremendous honor and it was and you know, I
still dabble a little bit now that I'm retired, but
(33:50):
just being part of a long over a long period
of time with people who are dedicated to making this
place where we can keep our ideals, where you can
stay free. There's a lot of friction, especially now when
people look at this years from now and they'll know
(34:11):
that this is twenty twenty five and a challenging time
for us. I'm convinced that in the long arc of
time everything is just going to be fine. The country
historically has gone through tough piers like that. We don't
know that because we didn't experience it, but it's if
you read a history book, it was contentious right at
the turn of the century, even before that. So we
(34:35):
are where we are now and it'll get better, and
the team that I've been associated with, I couldn't be
more proud of.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
That's retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sasseville. You
served a total of thirty nine years in uniform between
active duty Air Force and the Air National Guard. He
was ordered on September eleventh, two thousand and one, to
go up and interdict any additional terrorist cont old commercial airliners,
even though his plane was completely unarmed. I'm Greg Corumbus
(35:05):
and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus,
and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles. A presentation of
the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American
(35:28):
Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans
Center on Facebook and on Twitter We're at AVC update.
Subscribe to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full
oral histories and special features, and of course, please subscribe
to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
(35:49):
Thanks again for listening, and please join us next time
for Veterans Chronicles
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sassavill.
He served a total of thirty nine years in uniform,
including time in the Air National Guard, and he was
serving as acting commander of the one hundred and thirteenth
Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard at
(00:31):
Andrews Air Force Base on September eleventh, two thousand and one.
That day, he was ordered into the air to interdict
any additional commercial airliners under the control of Al Qaeda
terrorists and to take it out of the sky, initially
with no weapon other than his plane. Mark Sassivill grew
up in an Air Force family. His father served for
(00:54):
many years, including time in Vietnam. Sassaville says those years
helped to give him perspective on what the US and
the world were really like.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
I had a view of what America was that I
think turned out to be quite different from what my
contemporaries had by the time I got to the Air
Force Academy at the age of seventeen, because what we
saw from being overseas was a very different America. We
didn't have TV, we didn't have the internet, we didn't
(01:24):
have a lot of the technology and.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
The social media that we have today.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So it was always nice to come home for home
leave a month at a very two years, if you will.
And we always held America as this idealistic land where
we always yearned to go back to, So it really
were very formative years.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
At age seventeen, Sassaville was off to the US Air
Force Academy in Colorado. After a successful four years there,
he was commissioned as an officer. Upon graduation in nineteen
eighty five, he was off to flight school, where he
fell in love with the F sixteen.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
It is just a dream to fly. It's so easy.
It does so many different missions. It's nice and comfortable.
You feel like he can wrap the airplane around you.
It feels like there's nothing that the airplane can't do.
It's got a great thrust aweight ratio, very maneuverable, and
it was just a dream to fly.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
After all the required training, Sassaville was deployed to Torrejon
Air Base in Spain. Over the next fourteen years, sassavill
thrived in Spain, followed by time at Homestead Air Force
Base near Miami. Then came his attending and instructing at
the Air Force Weapons School. After that, overseas deployments in
Japan and Korea where sandwiched around a two Reretnellis Air
(02:47):
Force Base in Nevada. By nineteen ninety nine, Sassaville was
married and a father. He decided to leave active duty,
joined the Air National Guard and become a commercial pilot
with Delta Airline service. In the National Guard is how
Sassville found himself on the front line against the nine
to eleven terrorist attacks. Sassaville explains how the day began
(03:09):
very quietly, but that clearly changed in a hurry.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So the morning of nine to eleven, that Tuesday, that
was Tuesday, as we all know, the week before, we
had come back from a training deployment to Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
They were called them Red Flags.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
And those are very intense two week exercises that everybody
goes to, and that was the mode at the time.
You take everybody out there and you really get a
good brush up on the tactics that you're going to
use in any kind of combat scenario, weapons, employment, and
so forth and so on. So I say that because
(03:48):
most of everybody, most of the squadron wasn't on the
base at the time, and we just had the skeleton crew,
and I was in charge of the skeleton crew at
the time, and we had a scheduler and a training office,
and that morning we are trying to reconstitute. Everybody's gone,
but they're going to come back at some point once
they've retouched base with their employers.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
That's a big part of how the National Guard is built,
as most of the people, the pilots and the maintainers
and all the support staff are part timers. So when
you ask them to go on a long two week trip,
they got to come back, check in where their bosses,
spend a little bit of time, and then they'll come
back and get into a training cycle. And that's what
we're putting together. And we're in the process of building
(04:33):
the following week's schedule, trying to figure out who's going
to be here. When the meeting's interrupted by Dave Callahan,
he says, hey, you guys ought to look and see
what's on TV. And so we left a meeting room
and go into the break room, if you will, and
sure enough, there's one of the trade towers on fire, smoking, incredible, shocking, obviously,
(04:57):
and we start to process what does this mean? Is
this an accident? Did somebody get a bad vector? Was
there an airplane malfunction? You just start to think through
what the cause could be. And we're not really thinking
of reacting yet. That's not we're not there in the
(05:19):
thought process. It's more, oh my god, what just happened.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Once the second plane hit the World Trade Center, everyone
knew exactly what was happening. America was under attack, and
immediately Sassaville's Air National Guard unit was in touch with
the White House Joint Operations Center. Before long, it was
clear the DC Air National Guard needed to get into
the air. Sassaville details the sequence of events and how
(05:44):
their small crew scrambled to get into the sky.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Once we may contact, Dan Kane makes contact with the
White House shock to find out, Hey, what's going on.
That's when they ask can you get anything airborne? And
so I'm standing there to this conversation, and I knew
that when they asked can you get anything airborne? And
it wasn't a tasking. Multiple reasons for that. A they
(06:10):
weren't ready, they didn't have the authority to issue a tasking,
and not only as a jock, but from a Title ten,
Title thirty two. Who's in charge of what? In that environment?
They don't have the authority. They knew that, and that's
why they asked. But I took that as we're in trouble.
Come to find out later on that what the White
(06:32):
House jock had seen was the air traffic control flow,
and they saw one track that was basically heading west
turn around into.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
A button hook looks like a fish hook, and then stops.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That's what they were reacting to, and they knew that
that stopped near where the river would pick up, the
Potomac River would pick up. So their question was, we
think we see something coming down the river.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Can you get anything in the air? So we respond.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Immediately three of our airplanes had just come back and
had landed after a training mission. Normally was four, but
again since people had gone back to their employers, three
was all we could put up that one morning for
the training sorty. So Billy Hutchison, who has eight hundred
pounds of gas in n F sixteen, which to anybody
(07:23):
driving car means you're on E.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Literally you're on E.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
We asked him to see if he can get back
up in the air, fly up the river, see if
he sees anything. And then he turns around and comes back.
He doesn't see anything. He's got his radar looking low
because that's where we expected it to be. He turns
around and comes back and lands below e. Obviously couldn't
go very far and couldn't do anything because he didn't
(07:47):
have any weapons, and you know that wasn't the task
at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Do you see anything?
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Meanwhile, myself Dan Kine, who's now a Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, Brandon Rasmussen, who was an active dude pilot
that was spending time with us to get flight hours
and experience, and that was a common thing back in
those days, and actually it still is today. And number
four was Lucky Penny, one of the new hires into
(08:13):
the squadron. So we organize ourselves. I basically lay out
the structure and I ordered us and that was the
order of experience. I had the most experienced, Lucky I
had the least. And so I paired myself and Lucky
and had Nan.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
And I gore.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
That was his call sign raising an I goor wait,
because I knew that we didn't have weapons, So I said,
Lucky and I are going to run out there establish
a combat air patrol, which is a combat term obviously,
and so basically what that involves is flying over a
geographic piece of train and looking with your radar and
(08:51):
your eyeballs for anything coming at you. The better your radar,
the farther you can see. The higher you go, the
farther you can see, and so that's beneficial. But we
knew that this was going to be a close end scenario.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Their F sixteen's were unarmed, leaving Sassville to figure out
how to potentially take down a commercial airliner with two
fighter jets.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
Lucky and I get airborne as soon as we can.
Once we get airborne, things start to crystallize. In my mind,
I don't know what the thread is. I don't have
any weapons, I don't have any rules of engagement. Yet
they come and from the Vice President. We get weapons free,
(09:36):
and we really don't have any tactics.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
We did know that.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Two airplanes had crashed before we took off, and I
had a conversation with Lucky, Okay, when we get airborne,
if we come up across an airliner, that's intent on
and how do we know, Well, we had to think
through that as well. That's intent on being used as
a weapon. I'll take the front of the airplane, you
(10:02):
take the tail of the airplane. And I kind of
looked it at that. I didn't really explain what take meant.
We get airborne and the radio is just blaring. We're
looking for traffic that's hasn't gotten the word that everybody
needs to be landed, which had been put out.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
So we're seeing some.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
TV station helicopters, probably some police traffic, and there's general
aviation traffic as well, just flying around. And we spent
a lot of time essentially shoeing them away, but we
had to split up to do that because there was
so much. And so that's the point where I realized
my idea of one taking one part of the airplane
and the other the other part isn't going to work.
(10:47):
So it's going to be a single shot. And thinking
through how I was going to take down an airplane
without weapons was kind of a challenge and a little
bit of a trick. I knew about airliners because I
had been a Delta pilot, and so I knew where
the redundancies were. I knew where the weaknesses of the
(11:09):
airplane where I knew where the strengths were, and had
a pretty good idea of what it would take to
bring one down. So the plan that I concocted in
my mind was I was going to have to hit it.
Even if I did head and I did have the
training bullets, those training bullets.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Are just slid slugs.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
What you prefer in combat is the combat round, which
has a fuse in it and explodes when it hits something,
and that obviously causes much more damage and is much
more effective in destroying the target, whether it's another airplane
or something on or attached to the ground.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
When we come back, Sasaville determines how to best take
an airliner out of the sky with one F sixteen
and how the rest of his day unfolded. I'm Greg
Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Sixty Seconds of Service.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
This sixty Seconds of Services presented by T Mobile, recognizing
these steadfast, edication and sacrifices made by service members and
their families. T mobile is committed to supporting active duty
veterans and military spouses. Visit t mobile dot com slash
military to learn More, founded by World.
Speaker 5 (12:13):
War II veteran Arnold Fisher, Vets Helping Heroes funds service
dog training for disabled veterans. These dogs are not pets,
They're highly trained assistants who help with everything from opening
doors to detecting seizures. Army veteran Raoul Sanchez, blinded in Iraq,
credits his dog Bolt with restoring his independence. I couldn't
leave my apartment alone, he says. Now we go everywhere.
(12:35):
Each dog costs over twenty five thousand dollars to train,
but donations ensure veterans never pay. The result hundreds of
lives changed, four pause at a time. Today's sixty seconds
of Service is brought to you by Prevagen. Prevagen is
the number one pharmacist recommended memory support brand. You can
find Prevagen and the Vitamin Aisle in stores everywhere.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Kurrump. Our guest in
this edition is retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sasseville.
We now pick up his story as he determines the
most likely way one unarmed F sixteen could bring down
a commercial airliner if he was required to do that.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
So I realized that I was going to have to
hit it, and I came up with the idea of
hitting the wing.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Destroying the aerodynamic capabilities.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
The things that are going through my mind are, first
of all, it's a plane full of people, American citizens
mostly probably, So I had to do that calculation of.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
These of the few versus the needs.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Of the many, right, that ethical conundrum, the idea of
hitting it at the right time and making that decision
early rather than late, getting in position. We hadn't trained
against this kind of a threat.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Now in the.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Cold War and back in my tour home days when
we would deploy to Turkey, we knew that the Russians
had bombers, and so we did a little bit of
work on how would you intercept a Russian bomber and
where were the soft.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Spots and how would you attack one?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
So we knew a little bit about taking big airplanes down,
but I had to go through that thought process. And
so the first two hours and that's all we really
had gas for. Lucky and I are chasing airplanes down
and thankfully we didn't have to ram any We didn't,
but we didn't know. We didn't know how many other
airplanes were coming our way. We're still their born. It
(14:33):
was just a very, very uncomfortable time.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
At this point, there was still heavy air traffic in
the Washington, DC area. Sasseville says his fellow Air National
Guard officer Dan Raisin Kane, was working with Washington Tower
to sift through the planes in order to determine if
any of them posed a threat.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Dan spent a little bit of time on the radio
working with them to help develop reference points. And there's
a there's a mechanism by which we communicate. We have
a common pitcher, so we can have a radial and
a distance off of a common point that we can
(15:12):
use to communicate where there's something that needs to be
looked at. It either it's a known target or a
unknown target, and we would go after that. So we
depended upon Tower for a lot of that.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Before Sasaville and Heather Penny got up into the air,
American Airlines Flight seventy seven smashed into the Pentagon, killing
one hundred and eighty nine people on the plane and
in our Department of Defense. Sasaville says, flying near the
Pentagon is something you will never forget.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
The one thing I'll remember from that first sorty though,
The thing that sticks on my mind is right after takeoff,
I'm still trying to get the cockpit set up. I
needed to get airborne as soon as possible, so I
flew over the Pentagon. Billy had flown already over the
pen and come around and landed. I flew a little
(16:02):
bit higher than he did, So the first one that
everybody sees is Billy.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
I was higher.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I don't think many people saw me. And I can
smell the fumes from the fire, the concrete, the gas
that's burning, everything else that's burning inside of that section
of the Pentagon. It's not smoke. I can't My vision
isn't included, but I can just smell it. And that
(16:28):
just triggered my brain gut relationship where my stomach just
fell and I said, oh my god, how did we
miss this? We failed, We got attacked. We had no
idea this was happening. And that's that's a memory that
I'll take to the grave.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And remember that button hook flight pattern that forced Sasaville
and his team into action. That was United Airlines Flight
ninety three, on which the passengers stormed the cockpit and
forced the plane to crash Pennsylvania Field, Sassaville sheds more
light on that and articulates how grateful we all should
be for the heroic patriots on that flight.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
That was flight ninety three.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
So that button hook, where that hook ends, we estimate
as the crash site. What the White House had thought
was maybe that's where they pulled the circuit breakers. Because
they were aviators inside that said they knew aviation, and
so they had thought that maybe the black box, the
(17:32):
identification friend or foe that transmits a signal that allowed
them to see that track was turned off. The way
you turn it off is by pulling the circuit breakers,
and that they had gone lower and were sneaking into
Washington d C. Low altitude that nobody would see it.
They saw that, they said, can you get airborne? That's
what we went after. But the time delay, even if
(17:55):
we had gone all the way up there, they had
crashed much earlier than that. And while I'm on flight
ninety three, I got to tell you, I'm here to
tell my side of the story. So is dan Kin
and Agre and Billy and all the maintainers that were
a part of this. Tony Russell Cheatham, the leadership, John
(18:18):
Jeff Johnson George Dagnan, all the pilots that participate in this.
So we're the survivors, we tell the story, but there's
a plane of full of American heroes that did the
unthinkable and took that plane down.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
And if that hadn't happened, if.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
They hadn't done that, if they haven't taken they didn't
take that action, we might be in a very different
place today. And so I always make a point of
drawing attention to that. There's a great website, Friends of
Flight ninety three that does a good job of honoring them,
(18:56):
and obviously the memorial up there in Shanksville, Pennsylvania is
something that's very impressive. If folks haven't been there and
encouraged them to go do that.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
That's retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sassovil, who
spent thirty nine years in uniform for our nation. When
we come back, Sassaville finally gets some weapons and then
heads right back up into the sky to defend our
nation's capital, and he does finally have an important encounter
with another plane that's straight ahead on Veterans Chronicles. This
(19:27):
is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus, our guest has retired
US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sassovil, who was sent
up to interdict any additional commercial airliners under the control
of al Qaeda terrorists on September eleventh, two thousand and one,
even though the first time he went up he had
no weapons other than his own plane. After that first sortie,
(19:50):
Sassavill and Heather Penny returned to Andrew's Air Force Base
for refueling, and now the crews were ready to provide
them with missiles if they needed to use them. So
Aassville was back in the air with Heather Penny, and
as the day went on and all air traffic was grounded,
the skies got quieter and quieter. But suddenly Sassville heard
a message that should ideally have come on an encrypted channel,
(20:13):
except as F sixteen didn't have that communications system. Nonetheless,
he was given a very important assignment.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The controller wants to communicate with me about an airplane
coming in. He communicates to me in a very low voice,
trying to evade AYE, telling me in the clear to.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Vector two seven zero for one hundred and twenty miles
or one hundred and forty miles.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
I guess it was meaning go west for over one
hundred miles and the mission is to escort Air Force
one back. So what had happened was President Bush had
been notified. He was in Florida at a pre elementary school,
and he had been notified of the attack, and then
(20:58):
the day started unfold thing for him. He was moved
around several places in the United States all day long
and then finally decides, Okay, it's time to come back
and I need to get back to DC. And so
I think the enterprise probably stalled a little bit. I'm
just guessing making sure that the environment's safe. And now
(21:19):
it's safe enough. But they wanted to fighter escort. Nor
AID command wanted a fighter escort.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
So we leave the cap, we leave the area.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
I bring the two F fifteen's out with me and
Lucky and we go out to the west waiting to
pick up US Air Force one and we find them
there's another Leer jet up in at altitude that the
fifteen's committed out on early because we didn't know, you know,
(21:51):
we didn't know anything at that point. Weren't going to
take anything for granted, and air traffic Control wasn't talking
to him. So they go investigate and they come back,
and so now the task is to get back into Andrews.
And I get the frequency for the Air Force one
(22:13):
so I can talk to him right as a victor frequency.
We start exchanging and finding out what his plan is.
He goes, okay, we're going to go to Andrews and
do a strad in, meaning a normal landing, probably a
little bit drug out.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
So I put the.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Wingmen out in front to see if she can see
anything on the ground, because again we don't know if
there's if there are other airplanes waiting for us, if
there are assets on the ground that intent to use
surface to air missiles to make things difficult worse, shoot
at Air Force one again if they're intent on doing that.
So I put Lucky ten miles out in front, and
(22:50):
she's going to stay in front, station keeping with some
new with a new machine, new computer equipment that.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
We had just gotten on the F sixteen.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
She clears the airfield, air Force one lands and I
get back up on top and we send the F
fifteen's back up high and continue flying for the next.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
Two or three hours.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
But that was unique because Air Force one doesn't like
to be escorted and they're very understandably so they're very
concerned about other airplanes getting too close. When I'm on
the wing and there's a picture on the web of
me on the wing of Air Force one, and there's
also it's a Reuter's picture. There's a reporter on the
(23:34):
airplane taking a picture of President Bush and call Rove.
I think it is they're looking out the window of
the airplane at me on the wing.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Which I think is kind of cool. I should get
those printed up.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
And so as I'm on the wing, I'm thinking, wow,
this is this is a very unique time in history,
very unique circumstances that a it's the country needs a
fighter escort. It's been determined by authorities that the country needs,
the president needs a fighter escort to get back to
his capital, and that I'm the one doing it with
(24:10):
my appointment.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Right surreal moment.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
After escorting Air Force one to a safe landing at
Andrews Air Force Base, Sassaville, went right back to work
patrolling the skies around Washington for two more hours. Of course,
the nine to eleven terrorist attacks triggered the global War
on Terrorism, which included Iraq. Starting in two thousand and three,
Sassaville was deployed to that theater early on in the
(24:34):
conflict as commander of the four hundred and tenth Expeditionary
Operations Support Squadron.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
That was another very interesting chapter. In two thousand and three,
in the spring, late spring, early summer of two thousand
and three, the mission for the four tenth we were
sent to Southwest Asia, right, so somewhere in the Middle East.
Still can't reveal exactly where, but what our mission was
was to find and destroy the scud missiles, the Iraqi
(25:04):
scud missiles that might be employed. And so again this
is ancient history and you don't hear much about it
these days, but during that timeframe we were concerned. The
combatant commander was concerned that they would have scud missiles
on basically trucks to transporter, erector, launcher, ride teller, but
(25:29):
basically it's a truck that carries a missile and you
could hide them anywhere, you can move them any where
you wanted, basically undetectable because they were low signature and
you can't find them, and they would raise them, shoot
hit a friendly nation and then go back. And if
they were able to do that, that would significantly, significantly
change the tide of the war. So our mission was
(25:52):
to go after those with the weapons and the tools
that we had on board the F sixteen. In those days.
One of the new capabilities that was just emerging was
this idea of putting a targeting pod on an older
F sixteen. So we took new technology married up with
an older F sixteen. Gave us a great capability to
(26:14):
search the environment for things that were hot or cold
and in the desert. That's a great thing to have
and it would allow us to investigate it and if
we found an enemy position, if we had the right authorization,
we had the right weapon to be able to destroy it.
So that's what we spent most of the time doing
(26:37):
from our base. The base also housed other capabilities, search
and rescue. It was a coalition base. We made great
friends with the UK coalition partners that were there. There
were some special forces and so forth. So it was
a very interesting experience.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Sasavill said, as it was clear the US had overwhelming
air power in Iraq.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
We owned the skies by then, and this is the
idea of the importance of having air superiority. You can
maneuver wherever you want, unimpeded. We didn't have complete air superiority.
There were a couple of nights that we flew these
missions where the Iraqis were still trying to shoot us,
and you could see the Triple A come up a
few service to air missiles on other flights, not on
(27:27):
me per se, but they were non impactful right and
easy to defeat, relatively easy for them to defeat, so
it wasn't extremely critical. The other thing that we spent
quite a bit of time doing is also close air
support for the troops, so it was actually that was
(27:47):
a primary mission.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Secondary mission was.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
To support troops in contact, and we had several engagements
all the way over by Haditha Dam and Mosol and
so forth and so on, So that was much more
activity in that mission set than the primary one.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Two more notes in this story. Sassaville mentioned several times
one of his key team members that day was Captain
Dan Raisin Kane, who was now General Kin and serves
as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sassaville explains
what kind of man and leader General Kane was and
still is.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Dan is one of a kind. He's got a great mind.
He's a very sharp, very in tune, switched on all
the time, two steps ahead of everybody. He was like
that when we're I was a major and he was
a captain, and he's still that way today.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
He understands the bigger picture, right.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
He's part of a small part of something that's much
bigger than all of us, right. A patriot to the core,
he understands the value of the contributions of those who
have gone before us, those who have served, but also
those who have paid the ultimate price, and he takes
(29:10):
that very to heart. He's very gracious and grateful for
the service.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
He's a great.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Friend and and I'm proud to count him in my
list of friends. He's great for the nation at this
point in time. I think that the President made an
excellent choice in picking him. The other part, aside from
the military, which makes him such a good pick, I
think in this environment, is because he's had a civilian life.
(29:39):
As a guardsman, you play both roles. So when your
active duty, this is it. You're in uniform and that's
all you do. But as a guardsman you live in
both camps, and so he's got quite a bit of
time as a civilian working with civilians, understanding the environment,
understanding what civilian.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
Leaders priority ties.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
And when you look at previous chairmen that I've served,
you going back to Vietnam even and there's.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
Been quite a lot written about.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
The Joint chiefs in Vietnam at that time, understanding the
political environment. Not that he's political or that he hasn't
a political agenda, much to the opposite, but you have
to understand the environment that you're operating in, and I
think he's a very well positioned to do that.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Sasaville admits he did not have time on nine to
eleven to think about what would happen if he had
been forced to give his life in defense of his nation,
But he's had plenty of time since then to reflect
on what he was called to do and what he
did instinctively on that day.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
It's kind of odd to think when I went to
the Air Force Academy in nineteen eighty one, that was
less than ten years after Vietnam War ended. So there's
still a lot of chatter about what happened in Vietnam
and all the heroism that happened, and how many people
did some very brave things in the Air on the
ground on the seas, right, and you learn that at
(31:10):
the academy, you learn what heroism is about, you learn
the risks that people take, and you, as a young
man or woman, I think, ask the same question, why
what is it?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
And I think it really just comes down to.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Having a believing in the cause. And if you believe
in America and you know that freedom isn't free. It
sounds very cliche, but it costs to maintain what we have.
We're a commercial nation, we have democratic values. We're not perfect,
(31:50):
but from my experience as a young person living overseas,
we've probably got it better than just about everybody else.
Just about everybody else, not everybody. And the only way
that you do that is by defending it and protecting
it so when it comes under attack. I was a
little bit older right in my career, all these ideas
(32:12):
had cemented in my mind. My values were pretty set.
So believing it and dedicating myself to the cause believing
in it, which obviously I still do, wasn't that much
of a leap, because I knew there was a long
line of people who had done and given much more
(32:32):
than I had. Prisoners of war, right, I mean that
is somebody who's been in pow for nine years. That's
a sacrifice. That is a tremendous sacrifice. So a long
history of heroes that had gone before us, and to
(32:54):
put myself in that position wasn't as hard at the
time with the panic and everybody in the confusion wasn't
as hard.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I don't think.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
As we make it out to be, and I think
a lot of people would have done the same thing.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
After nearly forty years in uniform. General Sassville also shared
what he's most proud of about his entire career in
the service.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
I would say that I'm most proud of the team.
And when I say the team, the people that I've
worked with, and it's not just military, you know I've done.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
We were in Turkey.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
I was a Defense attache in Turkey and the ambassador's
country team there, great Americans trying to do great work
in uniform, out of uniform, contractors, civilians. It's just been
a tremendous honor and it was and you know, I
still dabble a little bit now that I'm retired, but
(33:50):
just being part of a long over a long period
of time with people who are dedicated to making this
place where we can keep our ideals, where you can
stay free. There's a lot of friction, especially now when
people look at this years from now and they'll know
(34:11):
that this is twenty twenty five and a challenging time
for us. I'm convinced that in the long arc of
time everything is just going to be fine. The country
historically has gone through tough piers like that. We don't
know that because we didn't experience it, but it's if
you read a history book, it was contentious right at
the turn of the century, even before that. So we
(34:35):
are where we are now and it'll get better, and
the team that I've been associated with, I couldn't be
more proud of.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
That's retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Sasseville. You
served a total of thirty nine years in uniform between
active duty Air Force and the Air National Guard. He
was ordered on September eleventh, two thousand and one, to
go up and interdict any additional terrorist cont old commercial airliners,
even though his plane was completely unarmed. I'm Greg Corumbus
(35:05):
and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus,
and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles. A presentation of
the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American
(35:28):
Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans
Center on Facebook and on Twitter We're at AVC update.
Subscribe to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full
oral histories and special features, and of course, please subscribe
to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
(35:49):
Thanks again for listening, and please join us next time
for Veterans Chronicles
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.