Twenty-five years ago, a fighter pilot at Andrews Air Force Base loaded his jet with live air-to-air missiles and took off knowing he might have to destroy a plane full of American civilians. That pilot is now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a new interview with CBS News, Gen. Dan Caine told Norah O'Donnell exactly what that morning felt like — and it is one of the more remarkable things you will read today.
A Scheduling Meeting, Then the World Ended
Caine was the chief of Weapons and Tactics for the 121st Fighter Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base on September 11, 2001. He had just walked into a scheduling meeting, the most mundane possible setting, when a young staffer burst through the door to say a plane had hit the North Tower. Then, on live television, alongside everyone else on the planet who was watching, he saw the second plane hit.
"I knew right away that our nation was under attack," Caine told CBS News, "and we began to move right into action immediately." No ambiguity, no waiting for more information. He started moving weapons. With smoke from the Pentagon visibly rising on the horizon, the White House called and ordered his squadron to scramble and defend Washington, D.C. The rules of engagement, Caine said, were "very liberal." That is a military euphemism for: you are authorized to kill.
The Planes That Launched Without Missiles
Here is the part of the 9/11 story that most people still do not fully know. Some of the planes scrambled out of Andrews that morning launched so fast there was no time to arm them. Two of those aircraft were flown by squadron operations officer Lt. Col. Mark Sasseville and his wingman Heather Penney. As CBS News reported back in 2021, Sasseville and Penney had a plan for intercepting United Flight 93: they were going to ram their jets into it. They both knew they would not survive.
"In the military, we don't send our service members on suicide missions," Penney said. "But it was clear what needed to be done that morning." Read that sentence again. A military pilot, unarmed, was prepared to fly her body into a hijacked 757 to keep it from hitting the Capitol. This is not a metaphor for dedication. This was a literal plan.
Caine's plane, by contrast, was fully loaded with live missiles. He took off knowing that if Flight 93 did not go down on its own, the shot was his to take.
'Dear God, Please Don't Let Me Screw This Up'
Before he launched, Caine's wing commander, Brig. Gen. Dave Wherley, pulled him aside. "He said, 'Look, Dan, I don't know what you're going to have to do out there, but I know you're going to do the right thing. I trust you.'" That was the briefing. That was all there was time for.
Caine described the moment he realized that he was the one who would have to fire on a commercial airliner carrying American passengers. All civilian air traffic had been grounded and any craft that did not comply was to be shot down immediately. "I remember thinking, 'Wait a minute, that's me that's going to do the shooting here,'" Caine said. His internal monologue, as he told it to CBS News: "the fighter jet pilot prayer: 'Dear God, please don't let me screw this up.'" Think calm thoughts, do the job, protect the country, and maybe, if the math works out, do not have to kill a hundred and some people who got on an airplane this morning.
The Passengers Who Took the Shot Away From Him
Caine did not have to fire. The passengers aboard United Flight 93, after learning through phone calls what had already happened in New York and at the Pentagon, stormed the cockpit. The plane went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board, and sparing Washington, D.C. from a third strike.
"We take an oath in the military to protect and defend the United States of America," Caine said in the CBS News interview. "They got on an airliner, and yet they were the first ones that fought back in those dark, dark moments on September 11." A fully armed fighter pilot, ready to do the unthinkable, was ultimately made unnecessary by civilians in coach class who decided they were not going down without a fight. That is the actual story of September 11. That detail should never stop being staggering.
Caine, now 25 years removed from that morning, told CBS News the day permanently changed his understanding of service. "I don't think I understood what it means to serve this country until September 11," he said. "I was probably a young fighter pilot who thought it was cool to fly jets, but then it got very real."
From That Cockpit to the Pentagon's Top Chair
Caine is now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in the United States. He got there via a path that runs straight through that runway at Andrews on the morning of September 11, 2001, a day that shaped an entire generation of American military leadership.
The interview with CBS News aired as the country marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks. Whatever your politics, whatever you think of the wars that followed, whatever argument you want to have about the last quarter century of American foreign policy, there is something in Caine's account that resists easy framing. A man sat in a jet with live missiles and quietly asked God not to make him use them. Then other people, with no weapons at all, handled it.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to hear a story like this and just nod along, file it under "9/11 anniversary content," and move on. Do not do that. What Caine described to CBS News is genuinely one of the more morally staggering situations any American military officer has ever been placed in: fly out there, and if those passengers do not save themselves, you shoot the plane down. There is no good version of that outcome. There is only the version where you do your job and carry it for the rest of your life, or the version where you hesitate and Washington burns. He was ready to do it. He was twenty-some years old.
The Penney and Sasseville detail deserves its own memorial. Two pilots launched with no weapons and a plan to use their own aircraft as the projectile. No ceremony, no orders signed in triplicate, just a quick conversation and then you point the nose of an F-16 at a 757 and you go. The fact that it did not come to that is due entirely to the passengers on that plane, who are the real protagonists of September 11 in ways that the official narrative has always struggled to fully accommodate.
Caine is running the American military now. He got that job carrying the memory of a morning when he sat armed and airborne over the capital and prayed for the simplest possible outcome: not to screw it up. There are worse foundations for a career in public service. There are considerably worse things to pray for.
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