My generation’s ‘where were you when…?’ moment unquestionably occurred on the 11^th of September 2001 when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by terrorists. The death toll, and the unimaginable suffering of those that perished, are shocking in their own right, but the impact reached far beyond Manhattan. The lives we all live have been to some extent influenced by 9/11.

A week or so before I had arrived in Oman to take part in the largest British military exercise in living memory. I was part of a force of 20,000 troops in holding areas in the southern desert near the border with Yemen. Each unit was allocated a square kilometre of desert to assemble. My Troop had just collected our vehicles and were spending a few days preparing for the exercise ahead. This was a world before smartphones or reliable internet connectivity; this was remote and we felt it. There were welfare portacabins dotted around the desert that provided some access to painfully slow internet, but the nearest to us was a half hour trek across the sand.

I first heard the news by word of mouth. Some of those returning from a mid-afternoon break in one of the portacabins mentioned, almost in passing, an accident in the US involving a light aircraft crashing in to one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Only when I heard the BBC World Service on a shortwave radio a few hours later did I begin to understand the reality was on an altogether different scale.

In the isolation of the desert it was difficult to grasp the full magnitude of what had happened. Nobody had seen any video, nor would we for several weeks, so all we had was the radio reports and some grainy still images. I had visited the World Trade Center several times, so I had a better idea than most what the collapse of those huge buildings could mean, but by evening there was little doubt amongst everyone that something enormous had happened. The talk in the mess tent was of nothing else.

Rumours and speculation spread very quickly. I recall there was an early suggestion that Saudi Arabia and Yemen were somehow involved. Given that we were not much more than 100 miles from the borders of both those countries, their potential involvement was a sobering prospect. I also recall a conspiracy theory that seeped through from the UK questioning why the UK just happened to have its largest deployed exercising force in 20 years camped on the border of those countries in advance of the attacks. On the ground we certainly didn’t see it that way, especially as we didn’t have a single round of live ammunition between us. If anything we felt suddenly very exposed.

The exercise did continue, and my communications Troop deployed onto the training area. Shortly afterwards we received a detachment from 30 Signal Regiment of a satellite ground terminal that connected our command network back the UK. It is incredible by modern standards, but that connection was one of only two providing reachback communications from the deployed Division and its headquarters to the UK. There was clearly going to be some kind of Western military response so communications between the UK and the British force deployed in the Middle East were essential. By holding that link my Troop became strategically critical for a time. In reality this was quite welcome as we were directly ordered not to move or indeed do anything else that might put the satellite link at risk. For around two weeks my Troop of 30 soldiers played volleyball and generally amused ourselves in the desert whilst babysitting a satellite dish and willing it to keep working.

As the exercise drew to a close it became clear that we would not have an immediate role in any military response, and that the focus was likely to be in Afghanistan rather than on the Arabian Peninsula. The fledging conflict in Afghanistan that would define all our careers for the next 15 years was already close to home though, as each night we watched aircraft fly across the clear sky en-route to missions in Afghanistan. By the time we got back to Thumrait to fly home, the airport had been converted from a sleepy airfield to a bustling military operating base. The difference between exercise and live operations was stark.

A couple of years ago I visited the 9/11 memorial and museum in New York. It is spectacular in scale and the tone is well judged. It is the perfect memorial for a tragic event that touched so many lives. Everyone knows the story of how events unfolded that day, but it was clear from the faces and the hushed conversations of those at the memorial that every single person had their own story, and knew exactly where they were on the 11^th of September 2001.