Guard Leader: 9/11 Turned Unit Into Combat Army

Summary

---

MADISON - On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Dunbar was serving as executive officer in the National Guard Bureau's Washington, D.C., headquarters a block from the Pentagon.

He heard a plane had slammed into one of the World Trade Center towers. A B-52 bomber pilot himself, Dunbar assumed it was a terrible accident, that it must have been a small plane and the pilot must have had a heart attack and lost control. When he learned it was actually an airliner, nothing made sense. He turned on the television news as his commanding officer walked in and informed him that he wasn't paying him to watch TV. Then, before their eyes, the second plane hit. And then a third struck the Pentagon, the concussion rocking the bureau's offices.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Guard Leader: 9/11 Turned Unit Into Combat Army

Ten years later, nothing is the same for Dunbar. As the Wisconsin National Guard's adjutant general and homeland security adviser - a position that didn't even exist prior to the attacks - he finds h...

See the full content of this document

---