PEASE AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.H. — Retired Lt. Col. Terry Hardy remembers Sept. 11, 2001, as a morning defined by uncertainty.
Hardy was serving as the New Hampshire Air National Guard’s state plans officer when an Airman came into his office in Building 16, then the headquarters of the 157th Air Refueling Wing, and said a plane had crashed into a building in New York.
Hardy went downstairs to the wing battle staff, where personnel had turned on CNN. They watched smoke pour from one of the World Trade Center towers.
“We were trying to get information as fast as we could,” Hardy said. Then they watched a second plane strike the other tower.
“You could tell people were getting nervous,” Hardy said. “Nobody could seem to find out what was really happening.”
While Hardy and other members of the battle staff tried to understand the unfolding attacks, retired Col. Richard Martell, then the 157th Air Refueling Wing commander, was overseeing the wing’s immediate response.
Martell was hosting an event in the hangar that morning, where nearly 2,000 civilians had gathered for breakfast. A maintenance officer brought him to a break room, where he watched television coverage of the attacks.
“I saw the north tower in flames,” Martell recalled. “When I saw the south tower get hit, I knew immediately we were under attack.”
Martell immediately focused on securing the installation, safely getting the civilians off base and convening the wing battle staff as the situation continued to develop.
The attacks became personal for the wing within hours.
Around 9:15 a.m., Martell received a call from then Lt. Col. Jim Ogonowski, who was serving in the 157th Operations Group as a KC-135 pilot.
“I think my brother was flying American Flight 11,” Ogonowski told him.
John Ogonowski was the American Airlines pilot of Flight 11, the first aircraft to strike the World Trade Center.
For Hardy and others at Pease, the attacks were no longer distant events unfolding on television.
Hardy called his wife, who was working in Hampton, New Hampshire.
“I said, ‘Just stay where you are for now,’” he recalled. “You’re probably safer there than anywhere else, because we didn’t know what other locations were going to be attacked.”
Despite the uncertainty, the wing quickly returned to an operational footing.
“We never recalled anybody,” Martell said. “But by noontime, all our flight crews showed up. Maintenance folks showed up. And by noon, we were ready to fly.”
The wing flew its first mission that night, beginning weeks of support to the nation’s response to the attacks. Three days later, Martell flew a mission over New York.
“It was so surreal, taking off from Pease,” he recalled.
The normally busy air traffic radio environment was almost completely silent. When Martell reached New York, the remains of the World Trade Center were still smoking below.
“That was very, very moving,” he said.
Twenty-five years later, Hardy returned to Pease for a Sept. 11 remembrance ceremony honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks.
For Hardy, the ceremony brought him back to the same installation where he had watched the attacks unfold from the wing battle staff.
For Martell, the memories include the moment he realized the country was under attack, the call that brought the loss of Flight 11 into the wing’s community and the silence of the skies over New York days later.