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TERRORIST TRAINING
Exploding Mail Bombs, Search, Rescue, Recover the Dead
The final exam to end all final exams.
As many of you know, and if you don’t, there are links below, I was an unwilling and unknowing participant in 9/11. By living 20 minutes from the impact site of the Pentagon for one. And for two, working in the disaster response and recovery field for the federal government. Post 9/11 R&R, I was one of a handful of students in a terrorism response class. It was a 40-hour class with the final exam on day five. That meant long hours on days one through four.
Trainers brought materials with them from headquarters in DC. I worked in an unmarked building (yes; they are a thing) in the Maryland suburbs. The final exam was a scenario that was set up in one of our conference rooms on the 6th floor. The situation was this:
A pipe bomb has just gone off in a government building. There is major damage. Unknown number of injured. Unknown number of causalities. Unknown status of utilities.
That last one is critical. You don’t want to run into a building where they could be live wires, leaking gas, etc. The unknown factor will get you killed.
They assigned each of us a role and we were to execute that role to the best of our abilities based on…
