Anniversary ‘almost unbearable’
Terror threat, Afghan pullout weigh heavily on families
The deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan has elevated threat levels and left 9/11 kin sick with worry.
“This anniversary is devastating. I could cry right now over what’s happening in Afghanistan,” said Debra Burlingame, who lost her brother in the 9/11 attacks. “We’re in graver danger than we were on Sept. 10, 2001.”
New York City has hiked the terror watch to an “elevated threat environment” as Saturday’s 20th anniversary of the twin towers attacks looms. Nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security has issued a “heightened threat environment.”
Retired Federal Aviation Administration special agent Brian Sullivan told the Herald Wednesday he sympathizes with Burlingame.
“Everybody needs to be aware. The traveling public is our last line of defense,” Sullivan, who warned of holes in security at Logan International Airport in the months leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, added. “It’s no longer see something, say something — it’s do something.”
Burlingame said this anniversary of the attacks will be “one of the most horrible.” She cited the deadly evacuation in Kabul that cost 13 soldiers their lives — including U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario, 25, of Lawrence — that has put the Taliban back in charge.
“I’m worried. The terrorists have become so much smarter,” she said. “This has always been a war about intelligence. That’s all been blown away. What country is going to trust us now?”
She will be in Arlington National Cemetery on 9/11 — as she has for the past two decades — to honor her fallen brother and all the other soldiers who died during the War on Terror.
“It’s almost unbearable this year,” she said, choking back tears. “That’s just how I’m feeling.”
Burlingame’s brother Charles “Chic” Burlingame III was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77 that was hijacked out of Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va., and flown into the Pentagon on 9/11.
It hit about an hour after both American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 — both out of Logan — slammed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan 18 minutes apart beginning at 8:45 a.m.
Chic Burlingame was a former Navy fighter pilot who flew F-14s off aircraft carriers. “People used to say he was in the movie ‘Top Gun’ because he was so handsome,” Debra Burlingame said last year.
The FAA’s Sullivan said the nation needs to focus on air safety and not become complacent. Afghanistan, he stressed, has once again “returned to a base for terrorist planning.”