Former Camp Pendleton-Based Sailor Recalls First Troops to Afghanistan After 9/11

Today, Tyler Wichman of Imperial Beach is a public health nurse at Donovan State Prison in San Diego.

Ten years ago on 9/11, he was on a Western Pacific tour aboard the USS Peleliu. When the planes hit the twin towers, Wichman was on leave in Australia, bar hopping and relaxing with other sailors when military police found them and told them to get back to the ship.

"At this point we were just like, ah, the military's overreacting again, but once we started seeing the footage and stuff we were, like, we're in trouble now," Wichman said.

Attached to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit out of Camp Pendleton, Wichman was in the newly established Camp Rhino in Afghanistan two months later. South of Khandahar, Rhino was the first land base for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

"You know, I'll never forget, they were serving us Thanksgiving dinner early 'cause we were going to leave and they made a good meal and stuff but we were a nervous wreck," he said.

There was little water, only rations to eat and desert clothes for a bitter Afghanistan winter, but soldiers on the ground today have a different set of challenges than Wichman or the Marines he was attached to, he said.

"Probably the worst thing out there for us at that point was we just didn't know," he said. "What they're going through is much worse than we ever did, you know with the explosive devices and all sorts of stuff, but our fear was just we didn't know.

"Supposedly they said there was like 10,000 al-Qaida around the hills where this Camp Rhino was and there was only 2,000 of us."

"It was just the fear of the unknown, you know? You just had no clue," he said.

While Wichman was there, Marines captured John Lindh, the American-born Taliban fighter, and laid a foundation for American presence in the area for years to come.

The toughest night he could remember was two weeks after he arrived.

"The alarm went off at one in the morning and we had to run out to the wall and it's cold and we were out there like two or three hours. There were flares going off everywhere and we were like, man, we're getting attacked," he said.

A helicopter crashed and .50 caliber rounds started going off. "You know we're medical, we only had little 9 mils and we were locking and loading them. We thought they were at our doorstep coming in but they were just in the mountains."

After that, he said, things got quiet, and by February he was back home.

Ten years after 9/11, Wichman believes history has shown Afghanistan is an incredible challenge to foreign armies, and that if there was no 9/11, the American people wouldn't support wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But he believes an American military presence in Afghanistan has helped prevent another attack on the United States, and that if another attack on the same scale or worse were to happen, arguments that we should leave Afghanistan would change fast.

"It's really surprising that nothing too terrible has happened in 10 years since then," he said. "But if we weren't out there doing what we're doing right now, those things would happen again, so people say we shouldn't be there, pull out or something, but you can't. You can't."

Shortly after leaving Camp Rhino, Wichman finished 20 years in the U.S. Navy and retired. A decade after 9/11, he said he has seen security at the borders and airports change like everyone else.

As an observer from the outside, he said he has seen a fair amount of change in the U.S. military as a result of the war on terror. He thinks people are more likely to see combat in longer tours, more likely to be operational and less likely to have shore duty.

"We never used to leave more than six months away from your family," he said. "I'd have a hard time doing it in the military nowadays."

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