Tom Steinbach

Started in the Navy, finished in the Army. Trying to find balance in this ideologically wacked out world 🌎 Very novice violinist. Capitals fan🏒🏆

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@LizMair @bdomenech @RyanGirdusky @AndrewTWalker A tax on people with poor math skills. 🤨

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@KiKi1185 @pickedapepper2

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@washingtonpost

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

When Fukushima exploded, foreign embassies told everyone to FLEE.
Commercial planes turned around. Ships steered away as fast as they could.
An invisible radiation cloud was drifting across the ocean.

And where was the USS Ronald Reagan?

STEERING DIRECTLY INTO IT.
AT MAXIMUM SPEED.

The radiation alarms were screaming on the bridge.
Every textbook said: "Turn back. Save yourselves."

The Captain and his crew said:
"There are Japanese families shivering on rooftops out there. WE DON'T TURN BACK."

24 hours a day, in freezing sleet, they ran their desalination plants to the brink of failure.
Sailors gave up their OWN fresh water.
They stopped taking hot showers.
They ate cold rations.

Why?
To produce tens of thousands of gallons of pure, uncontaminated drinking water for Japanese babies.

Mechanics with radiation badges worked through the night on snow-covered decks so helicopters could fly non-stop rescue sorties.

While the world backed away in terror,
American sailors ran through the fire for us.

Never tell me true heroes don't wear dog tags. 🇺🇸🔥🇯🇵

[AG @AGHamilton29]

We rescued him in the middle of a war zone with IRGC forces actively looking for him; it is incredible. Our armed forces' willingness to do whatever it took to get him home is the only thing that averted a complete disaster.

God is good.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

The United States Navy has a warship whose bow was made from the World Trade Center.

The men who built her lost their own homes in the middle of building her.

They did not stop.

In 2003, twenty-four tons of steel pulled from the wreckage of the Twin Towers were trucked south, out of New York, to a small foundry in Amite, Louisiana. Population about 4,000. The steel was to be melted down and poured into the bow stem of a new amphibious warship. The Navy had already chosen the name.

USS New York.

The men at the Amite foundry were metalworkers. They had melted steel their entire lives. Scrap is scrap. It goes in the furnace.

This did not go in the furnace like scrap.

Witnesses said the workers handled it the way people handle relics. Some of them reached out and touched it as they walked past, gently, the way you would touch a coffin. Nobody told them to. Nobody could have explained to an outsider why grown men in a foundry in rural Louisiana were laying their hands on twisted beams from a building fifteen hundred miles away.

One man who had worked at that foundry for forty years was scheduled to retire before the pour. He postponed his retirement so he could be there when the towers went into the fire.

On September 9, 2003, they poured. Seven and a half tons of World Trade Center steel became the stem of the bow. The leading edge. The part of the ship that touches the ocean first.

The ship was built at the Avondale shipyard in New Orleans. Keel laid in August 2004. Twelve hundred Louisiana workers. Welders, pipefitters, electricians, shipwrights.

Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina came up out of the Gulf and drowned the city they lived in.

Their houses were under water. Their neighborhoods were gone. Some of them lost family. The shipyard itself was hit. There was every reason on earth for the work to stop.

The twelve hundred came back.

Men who were sleeping in shelters, in trailers, in cars, showed up at the yard and went back to work on New York's ship.

A firefighter from New York who came down for the christening said it out loud, the thing everyone in the yard already knew. This ship shows the strength of the country, past 9/11, past Katrina.

Two cities, two disasters, one hull.

She was christened on March 1, 2008, at Avondale, with the families of 9/11 victims in the stands.

In the fall of 2009 she sailed for the first time, down the Mississippi and out into the Gulf and up the East Coast.

On November 2, 2009, she came up the Hudson River into New York Harbor.

She stopped in front of Ground Zero.

The crew manned the rails in dress uniform. The ship rendered honors, a 21-gun salute, to the empty sky where the towers had stood, from a bow made out of them.

Five days later, on November 7, she was commissioned into the Navy in New York, in front of thousands.

Her crest shows a phoenix rising out of two gray towers. Her motto is on the crest.

"Strength forged through sacrifice. Never forget."

She is 684 feet long. She carries 800 Marines. She has deployed all over the world since. And at the very front of her, below the waterline, cutting through every wave she has ever met, is seven and a half tons of the World Trade Center.

The steel that fell on September 11 was twisted, black, and buried.

Louisiana dug it out, melted it, and sent it back to sea.

Pointed forward.

Hitting the waves first. 🇺🇸

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

At the Pentagon on September 11, American soldiers got into a shoving match with American firefighters.

The soldiers were trying to run back into the burning building.

The firefighters were trying to stop them.

Both sides were right.

At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 hit the west face of the Pentagon and drove through three rings of the building. A hundred and twenty-five people inside were killed in the first seconds. Hundreds more were trapped in smoke so thick you could not see your hand.

Lieutenant Colonel Ted Anderson was a field artillery officer working in legislative liaison. A desk job. When the plane hit, he opened the doors of his corridor, got people moving, walked a pregnant coworker out to safety.

Then he ran toward the smoke.

He found two women lying on the ground outside the impact zone. One of them had a compound fracture of the hip. He could see the bone. She was going into shock. He picked her up and carried her away from the building.

A staff sergeant named Christopher Braman had run up beside him. Braman was a cook. He worked in the general officers' mess. He was also a former Army Ranger.

The two men did not know each other. They turned around together and went back in.

They crawled through a broken window into a building that was on fire. Anderson pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket, one his grandmother had told him a gentleman always carries, and tied it over his face. Inside, the smoke was so heavy the only way to find anyone was by sound.

They found a woman from human resources and boosted her out through the window. They found another woman, badly burned, and got her out. She died eight days later.

Somewhere in another part of that fire, an accountant named Sheila Moody was trapped. It was her second day on the job. The smoke had taken her voice. She could not scream. So she did the only thing she could think of.

She clapped her hands.

Over and over. In the dark. Hoping.

Braman heard it. He followed the sound of clapping through the smoke, on his hands and knees, found her, and carried her out.

Then he went back in again.

Anderson and Braman came out the second time with a burned man who told them there were more people inside. They turned to go a third time.

That is when the firefighters arrived.

Arlington County Fire Department. The first professional responders on the scene. And their first order of business, before hoses, before anything, was to keep people from going back into a building that was about to fall down.

A firefighter grabbed Anderson by the ankle and told him he was leaving. Now.

Anderson refused.

He was not alone. Hundreds of soldiers, sailors, Marines, and civilian Pentagon workers were standing outside that building, and none of them were leaving, because they knew what was inside. Their own people. Burning.

It turned into a pushing match. A shouting match. Men in uniform trying to get past men in turnout gear. Anderson said later that everyone outside was incredulous. We have fellow soldiers in there, he said. We pledge never to leave a fallen comrade behind.

Generals had to step in to break it up.

The firefighters won. They pushed the soldiers back.

About thirty minutes later, the section of the Pentagon that Anderson had been fighting to re-enter collapsed.

If they had been inside, they would all have died.

Anderson said it afterward without hedging.

"I owe my life to the Arlington County Fire Department. They are the true heroes."

Then he said the harder thing. It took him a long time, he said, to accept that going back in was not his specialty. That the men who stopped him knew something he did not.

He received the Soldier's Medal, the Army's highest award for heroism outside of combat.

So did Braman. Along with a Purple Heart for his injuries. He stayed on the site into the night, helping recover the dead.

Sheila Moody, the accountant who clapped, told a national television audience that a cook named Chris Braman was her guardian angel.

Anderson still marks September 11 alone, with his family. He said he thinks about it every day. He said he still regrets the ones he could not get to.

Here is what the pushing match was really about.

On one side, men whose creed says you never leave a fallen comrade, even if it costs your life.

On the other, men whose creed says you never let a civilian go back into a burning building, even if you have to fight him.

Two groups of Americans, both trying to save lives, physically wrestling each other in front of a burning building.

That is not a story about a disagreement.

That is a story about a country where everybody wanted to go in. 🇺🇸

[Fr. Chris Vorderbruggen @FatherChrisVor1]

The body of a Christian priest was carried from the ruins of the World Trade Center by five men. His head had suffered fatal trauma from the collapse. His white clerical collar was still visible. The photograph would become one of the defining images of September 11.

Today is September 11, 2026, twenty-five years since that terrible morning. And tonight I want to tell you the story of Father Mychal Judge.

It began on an almost impossibly beautiful September morning in New York City.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower.

Firefighters, police officers and paramedics began moving toward something nobody yet fully understood.

And so did a priest.

Father Mychal Judge was a Catholic priest, a Franciscan friar, and chaplain to the New York City Fire Department.

He was 68 years old.

He grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Irish immigrants, and entered the Franciscans as a young man. His ministry took him among the homeless, people struggling with addiction, people dying of AIDS, grieving families, and the firefighters he loved deeply.

He knew suffering himself. Father Mychal was a recovering alcoholic.

By 2001, the firefighters of New York were his family.

So when the call came that morning, Father Mychal left St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street and went downtown with them.

He entered the North Tower.

Inside were smoke, shattered glass, injured and frightened people, and firefighters preparing to climb into an inferno while thousands desperately tried to escape.

Father Mychal did what a priest does.

He prayed.

He blessed.

He stayed with the dying.

He administered the last rites to a fallen firefighter.

Then, at 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed.

The force of the collapse blasted debris into the lobby of the North Tower. Father Mychal was thrown backward and suffered fatal blunt-force injuries to his head.

He died among the people he had come to serve.

Five men carried his body out: firefighters Christian Waugh and Zachary Vause, NYPD Lieutenant William Cosgrove, rescue worker Kevin Allen, and civilian John Maguire.

Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton raised his camera.

The photograph he captured has sometimes been called an American Pietà.

A dead priest being carried through the devastation in the arms of other men.

They brought Father Mychal’s body to nearby St. Peter’s Church and laid him before the altar.

Later, the medical examiner assigned him the designation Victim 0001.

Not because he was necessarily the first person to die that morning.

He was the first body formally recovered and certified.

Victim 0001 was a priest.

There is something about that which has stayed with me.

Twenty-five years ago, while I sat with my parents in Minnesota watching those towers fall, I was not yet a priest. I did not know Father Mychal Judge. But looking back now, as a priest myself, I realize that somewhere inside that devastation, one of my fraternal brothers had done what a priest is supposed to do.

He showed up.

He went where people were suffering.

And he stayed.

The Roman Catholic Church has not canonized Father Mychal Judge, and no formal cause for his canonization has yet been opened, although many have called for one.

So I am going to stretch across those ecclesial boundaries tonight.

I will not declare what the Church has not declared.

But I will ask a Christian brother who died serving his people to pray with us before the throne of God.

Father Mychal Judge, Christian priest, Franciscan friar, chaplain, brother:

Please pray for us.

Pray for the dead of September 11.

Pray for their families.

Pray for the firefighters, police officers, paramedics and ordinary people who carried one another through hell that day.

Pray for our country.

And pray for those of us given the terrible and beautiful responsibility of bringing Christ into places where people are suffering.

Father Mychal Judge, pray for us.

Amen.

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@Rainmaker1973 Lions gotta eat too. 🤷‍♂️

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@TelstarLogistic @conor64

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@GordoCDA Jack Hughes enters the chat.

[Latest in space @latestinspace]

25 years ago today, astronaut Frank Culbertson watched the 9/11 attacks unfold from the International Space Station 💔

He was the only American not on Earth

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@JerryDunleavy I was a CPT in the Army deployed in Kosovo. We went to DEFCON 1. It was surreal. Everyone in full combat gear yet we were 1000s of miles from the threat.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The 2977 victims of 9/11

[Griffin Gulledge @griffingulledge]

This put a lump in my throat.

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@HawkEmDownChris Craig Morton

[William A. Jacobson @wajacobson]

The haunting sound of hundreds of PASS (Personal Alert Safety System) devices chirping in the rubble after the towers fell. Each one represents a fallen hero. I can't get that sound out of my head.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The Last Sunset, 25 years ago, 09/10/2001

[📸 Evan Kuz]

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

One of the most haunting visualizations of September 11, 2001: watch as the skies over the United States suddenly empty as the FAA grounds all flights.

[Tom Steinbach @steinbacht]

@CaseyMattox_