Where were you?

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I'm surprised -- I would have thought every soldier in the nation would have been mobilized. Would someone with military experience enlighten me?

Drew, NSA is communications and codes, right? (or is that Hollywood BS?) Were you a code cracker?

 

NSA is the National Security Agency - they are certianly invovled in communications and codes, but they do a heck of a lot more than that. They are the eyes and ears of the federal government. I've only met one person in my life who held a position of significance in the NSA, and from what I gather, the FBI and CIA are nothing compared to these guys.

 

Aldeth, I would tend to disagree. The NSA, FBI, and CIA have different missions, even if they do occasionally overlap. This site provides a very good explanation of the differences between these three organizations. Quoted below is a portion of their explanation of the NSA.

LKD, most US troops are stateside. The Pentagon was also targeted, so it was at the time unclear if other military facilities might also be hit. Non-essential government and other military personnel were in most cases sent home for the day or merely not required to come in because the scope and ultimate aim of the attack was as of yet unknown. Since I was an OPS guy and not an analyst, I still had to go in. As to what I did at the NSA, I trained as both a linguist and a signals analyst, but I did neither once I got to the field. At the NSA, I did something that fell a little outside the scope of my initial training. Since most jobs at the NSA proper involve unique, proprietary equipment, they can't be easily trained for.

 

At least as to how it pertains to me, that would apparently be true.

 

I blame Hollywood.

 

Drew, your somewhat evasive line:

makes me think that you were a freaking secret agent, sent out to capture special black boxes designed by poorly dressed mathematicians (Sneakers, anyone?) using any means necessary. I won't ask any more, though, because I get the feeling that if you told me, you'd have to kill me.

Or maybe just too much Hollywood for LKD.

 

Drew, just out of curiosity, what languages?

 

LKD, yeah, too much Hollywood. My job was well in keeping with the mission and purpose of the NSA, so your, uh, pet theory goes right out the window. Intelligence may look glamorous in the movies, but the truth is far different, and if I could actually talk about what I did at the NSA it would bore you to tears.

Just Arabic. I was never very good, though. I graduated from the Defense Language Institute with flying colors, but my functional ability with the language as determined by the defense language proficiency test (DLPT) was a bit lacking. I was given the option to re-train to a different language (spanish, which was an accelerated course), attend an Arabic refresher to get me up to snuff, or to train as a signals analyst. I chose the latter, and was very successful, but I would have been smarter to go with the refresher.

 

On that day I was back from London, watching a rerun of Early Edition. It was roughly 2 PM when that happened.

On a side note it's always a good thing to know many languages. Arabic is definitely not an easy language to learn. It may be easier than Chinese though.

 

I was back home for the vacation - the schoolyear in Bulgaria starts on September 15th - and I remember walking around my hometown's centre when I got a call about it.