September 11, 2001: On Post When the Towers Fell

On September 11, 2001, Marine Security Guard Mark McCabe was standing post at the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia. In this episode, he takes us inside that day from behind post one — the local guard chief walking past with a warning, the RSO rushing in to react the detachment, and piecing together the attacks from blurry images loading on a slow embassy computer while his fellow Marines watched it unfold live on a TV out in town. Hours later, a bomb threat came in, and a normal Tuesday became a day none of them would forget.Mark describes how the attacks pulled a young, still-forming Marine Security Guard detachment together, then takes us to his second post at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway — a glass-fronted building with almost no standoff, and the massive protests that came as the Iraq war kicked off. He closes on how MSG duty shaped him, the road it opened toward federal law enforcement, and why he'd tell any Marine considering the program to do it without hesitation.