[MikeSVX]

I'm active duty Coast Guard. I was stationed on a ship in Baltimore at the time. We were going through maintainence, with contractors on board, overhauling our engines. The work had just started that day. One of the contractors came back onboard, he was on break sitting in his truck, and said we needed to turn on the news. The first tower had just been hit. I headed up to the CO's cabin and turned it on for him to see. We watched the second one get hit live. He called down to the engineers and told them to put the ship back together as quickly as possible. By the time the first tower dropped, I was standing outside the activities command center asking if they had any classified messages to pass to the ship. I saw the both towers drop on a television in the passageway. Within 4 hours, our ship was put back together, our crew had ran home to get anything needed for an exstend deployment and all our systems were lit off and tested, and our CO was reporting our readiness to his bosses. We were dispatched into the harbor to effectivly shut it down. No vessel traffic was allowed. There was a fear that there may have been plans to attack targets near the water with boats. Our ships endurence is listed as 2 weeks. We were underway for a constant 3 months. We would pull into a peir for about an hour to take on fresh water, fuel and food, then pull back out.

After the initial 3 months, we back off a little bit, we stay underway during the day. We would tie up at sunset and then get back underway at sunrise, but even while tied up we had someone on watch monitoring the area for traffic. By this time we actually had 3 small boats under our command as well.