Like most who were alive to witness it, Glenn Carlson of Laconia remembers where he was when news of the 9/11 terror attacks came in.
Unlike almost everybody else, however, he found himself amid a slew of B-52 bombers ready to respond — if only they could figure out who to respond against.
“Within about five seconds, we were all responding to the airplanes, but we had no idea what to do,” said Carlson, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, looking back on that morning. “Nobody was sure if there were any more attacks coming or not… We weren’t sure who was involved. Was it Iraq? Was it Iran? Was it somebody else?”
Carlson was at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, with the largest bomb wing in the Air Force, which had just returned from a huge Red Flag exercise simulating large-group response to an emergency.
The massive B-52 bombers, a mainstay of America’s nuclear armament for more than a half century, were still lined up and ready to go, an indication of their preparedness but also a nervous reminder of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when carefully arrayed aircraft were easily destroyed in the Japanese sneak attack.
“All the weapons were there, full fuel, we were already in a full security posture at that point. The base went to total lockdown,” he said.
Teams redeployed aircraft to reduce their vulnerability. “We knew our mission at that point was to prep for whatever the situation was,” he said.
As they prepared to receive orders, they noticed a civilian aircraft approaching.
“Once we saw the colors we knew it was President Bush coming in to Barksdale,” he said. The massive air base had the secure systems he needed. “This is where he gave his first official speech because we had the communications he would use to get the word out to the forces, the United States and the world.”
When the pieces linking Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban to the attack fell into place, the B-52 bombers headed off to Diego Garcia, the remote Indian Ocean island that is an important American staging base for long-distance forays in the region, including the Middle East.
Carlson was wing electronics warfare officer for the bomb wing at the time. Like many in the unit, deploying to Diego Garcia wasn’t new — he had experience in Desert Shield and Desert Storm a decade earlier following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. In the coming 18 months, the wing flew some 1,800 sorties, covering the roughly 3,000-mile trip to Afghanistan with the help of mid-air refueling.
The long-term effectiveness of America’s response is debatable: Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011, but the Taliban have retaken power in Afghanistan. Yet there’s no question that responding to the terror attack unified the country in a way that we’ve rarely seen since.
After retiring from the service in 2007 and moving to New Hampshire, Carlson worked work as the Electronic Attack Capability Group Lead at BAE Systems in Nashua before moving to Elbit America, an Israeli defense electronics firm with offices in Merrimack until his retirement in September 2024.
He recently discussed his 9/11 experience and what it meant for U.S. military operations at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire in Manchester.
