Most of us recall all too well the otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning 25 years ago this week when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists reared their ugly heads to launch the deadliest foreign attack ever on U.S. soil.
“And then essentially all hell broke loose,” recounts Flathead County Administrator Peter Melnick, who was a far cry that notorious day from Main Street’s historic brick courthouse.
“Everyone was watching the sky to see what would happen next.”
Growing up along Florida’s Gulf Coast, Melnick aspired to be a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter pilot, to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, Bruce Melnick, who went on to become the first Coast Guard aviator to fly into space as a NASA astronaut—aboard the Shuttle Discovery and the maiden flight of Shuttle Endeavour.
In the process, though, why not set a few records as the All-American quarterback of the United States Coast Guard Academy’s football team, the Bears?
After earning his science degree and officer’s commission, Melnick went to sea for two years, until the day finally came when he was told to report for flight training at Naval Air Station Pensacola, where he earned his aviator wings.
“My first tour of duty was [Coast Guard Air Station] San Diego,” he tells me, “mostly search and rescue in the whole Southern California Pacific stretch. And that was when I learned that the Twin Towers had gotten hit.”
Juggling duties of both helicopter pilot and the air station’s public affairs officer, Melnick’s phone was “ringing off the hook” as the surprise attacks unfolded—first in New York, then Virginia, and finally Pennsylvania.
“Obviously the day was tragic and unsettling,” Melnick reflects, “and scary for everyone in the country.”
Even his fellow guardsmen in San Diego reacted with “absolute disbelief … how surreal it was.”
Working alongside Melnick that infamous day was the Captain of the Port of San Diego, who in short order “shut down all the shipping … there was a moratorium on anything coming in and out.”
One of the immediate concerns for large military and cargo ports like San Diego was the possibility of sinister mass-destruction devices concealed in any number of metal shipping containers.
And while nobody at the air station realized it yet, two of the terrorist hijackers—Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar—had recently taken flight lessons at a private San Diego flying school.
(The same pair, I will point out, were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon—as it was within close proximity of this former Washington columnist).
From those terrifying moments forward, “the mission of the Coast Guard in San Diego, and really all over the country, changed from more of a search and rescue/counter-drug to counterterrorism,” Melnick continues.
“It really was a monumental shift and growth for the organization. We went from being under the Department of Transportation to the Department of Homeland Security.
“And we started arming our helicopters.”
In addition, more emphasis was placed on the Maritime Security Response Team, the Coast Guard’s most elite tactical and counterterrorism unit, its “fast roping” skills involving descending rapidly from hovering helicopters onto the decks of seaborne ships.
“When I was at the [Aviation] Training Center Mobile [in Alabama], I taught airborne use of force, fast roping,” Melnick reveals. “We made these security teams that were able to go onto a boat and take control of it.
“The whole Coast Guard just shifted,” he explains. “We were always military, but it became apparent that the country needed us to really exercise that muscle.”
Which meant increasing the Guard’s security patrols, air and sea, of the country’s critical infrastructure.
“One of the first things that we did [from San Diego in the wake of 9/11] is begin … patrols of the Colorado River dam system,” he says. “Starting around Lake Havasu, and there’s a series of dams ending up at Hoover Dam near Las Vegas.
“We were flying security patrols, essentially providing a presence, to let anyone know who may be thinking about, you know, destroying that infrastructure. They knew that at least there was a military presence there. And we did that all four years I was there.”
Also closely guarded were nuclear-powered submarines going in and out of the San Diego naval base, “the aircraft carriers, the cruise ships, and most importantly the liquid natural gas tankers.
“There was an incredible amount of fear that those could be used as a weapon of mass destruction.”
Unthinkable weapons that the married father of six children would ultimately have to think more about.
Promoted during the course of his career to several top-level positions in the nation’s capital, Melnick, prior to arriving in the Flathead, was tasked with leading the Department of Homeland Security’s Executive Strategy Group for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction [CWMD].
Established by Congress in 2018, the purpose of the office is to protect the United States against all chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats.
“I can’t talk much about CWMD because it’s highly classified,” he stresses, but it’s “focused on what I would say [is potential 9/11-type] behavior …
“It seems like such a memory—a quarter of a century ago at this point. But the federal government is not resting on it,” the 52-year-old Melnick guarantees from his Kalispell office. “A lot of energy is still expended into protecting the homeland, and that’s a good thing.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.