On the 24th anniversary of 9/11, Rep. Troy Downing, R-Mont., is sharing his unusual experience that day, which inspired him to join the United States Air Force.
Downing was on a moose hunting trip with a friend in the Alaskan wilderness, with the only outside communication being an aviation radio, when he and his friend noticed that no planes were flying over remote Alaska anymore.
“I’m thinking nuclear holocaust. I have no idea what could make planes stop flying,” he said in an interview with Fox News Digital.
“We decide if they don’t come pick us up on our scheduled day, which was the 16th, I said we got to hike to Anchorage and, you know, Anchorage was about 350 miles away, so it would have taken quite a while,” he added.
On Sept. 16, as they were packing up the hunting camp, a Grumman Goose plane lands on the lake, goes to the shore to pick them up, and the pilot informs them by rolling down his window that “They blew up the World Trade Center.”
“Like, who? And I’m just trying to process this. And keep in mind, we didn’t see any of this on TV,” he said, explaining how he was quickly coming to terms with the sadness and anger about what happened thousands of miles away in New York City.
He said the tragedy ended up as fuel for inspiration to enlist at 34, just one year from the cutoff, like the hundreds of thousands who did after the attacks.
“It took a while to get out of Alaska because the airspace was closed over Canada so I couldn’t fly home. And as soon as they opened the air space, I flew home and the next day, I walked into a recruiter’s office,” Downing said, adding that he had no prior military experience and never considered joining before, as he was a tech entrepreneur.
“’Hey, I used to teach at New York University. I’ve got a pilot’s license, you know, what can you do with me?’” the Republican asked the recruiter. Downing ended up doing two tours in Afghanistan for the USAF and Air National Guard, including in a combat search and rescue squad.
“And the recruiter looks me in the eye and says, ‘Well, how old are you?’ I said, ‘34.’ He goes, ‘Good, 35 is the cutoff, go take the ASVAB,’” he said.
The Republican, who joined Congress earlier this year after serving as Montana State Auditor, said that the unity in the days following 9/11 should be the takeaway decades later and emphasized that “we continue to take care of our veterans.”
“We were all just Americans, and you saw those flags everywhere, and you saw this common goal of fighting back, of coming together, of having that real, you know, that pride in being American. And I hate that it took such a tragedy to get us to that spot. But I’m hoping that we can find a way to get to that spot again, where we really look at our common balance of being American,” Downing said.
