Dana King was among the millions of Americans who watched as the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell on September 11, 2001. But the terrorist attacks meant something different for King than for most others.
At the time, King was a sergeant in the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, based in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
The Myrtle Beach native was on pre-deployment leave that day, ready to head to a base in the Mediterranean for a 6-month cruise, but as he watched the towers fall, he knew immediately his life and mission would change.
"It's what we were trained to do and whenever there's trouble in the world, that's when they send in the Marines," said King, who retired from the Marines five years ago and now works at the Veterans Administration clinic in Myrtle Beach.
King got the official word just four days after 9/11: his unit would be among the first to be sent to Afghanistan in response to the terrorist attacks. King was ready for his mission, though deployment came with the knowledge of another big change coming to his life.
His wife had discovered on September 11th that she was pregnant.
"It's the big game. You train for something and, 'If there must be war, let it be in my time, so my child may have peace.' Thomas Paine said that and I'm a firm believer in that," King said.
Initially, King's squadron was assigned to set up a defensive perimeter around Kandahar International Airport, but there were other missions as well. King and his men were sent into the border region with Pakistan, to search cave complexes for intelligence on terrorist cells.
"We were hunting for al-Qaeda personnel, high ranking officials, and the amount of intelligence that we found there led our higher ups to determine we were going to stay there and get as much as we could from them."
King's time in Afghanistan didn't last long. He arrived in November, 2001 and was redeployed the next February. At the time of his departure, he knew the nation's effort in Afghanistan was far from over, but he could not have predicted that American troops would still be fighting in the country ten years later.
"Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, the British, the Russians. You look at the history and that's something that takes a lot of time and money and investment to make it successful for you. But as to this level? No."
At the same time, King believes the U.S. needs to press on in Afghanistan, to exploit its military advantages so the mission can end before his 9-year-old son is of age to serve in the military.
Ten years after 9/11, King's feelings about that day remain the same. "It just reaffirms why I joined the Marines and what my job is and I still get that same feeling, the anger that it happened and the sympathy for the families. But at that point, my focus became very clear as to what needed to happen, what my role was."
His role, King said, was to make sure the 16 men under his command, many of them 18 or 19 years old, made it out of Afghanistan after a successful mission. "Brought everybody home without a scratch."
Before he left the Marine Corps in 2006, King served for a time as a recruiter and some of the men he enlisted into the service during that period ended up being deployed to Afghanistan. He still hears from them occasionally and believes they have the same sense of purpose he had when he went over, that desire of all Marines to "win this thing right now."
"I still keep in touch with them, they're over there at various times and they're still doing what they need to do."
