Local Veteran's reaction to terrorist attack

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York Tuesday morning hit home to a local veteran of World War II.

Seventy-nine year old Robert Lloyd of Dayton was a machinist with an engineering squadron in the U.S. Army Air Corps in a material squadron, stationed at Hickam Field, a U.S. Army Air Corps base right at the mouth of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Lloyd spent Tuesday morning watching news reports of the events leading up to the attack, including video of a commercial jet veering into the second of the two towers, followed by an explosion and fireball, spewing debris into the air and on the ground, hundreds of feet below.

"Personally, it's such a tragedy like that of Pearl Harbor," said Lloyd from his home.

"My feeling is with all the technology we have now, we can't even protect our borders. It disturbs me to all end we can't protect ourselves. I'm extremely disturbed."

Lloyd feels the least of the United States' protected borders is at the south, where the largest influx of aliens have penetrated U.S. lands.

"The best action to take (against the terrorists) is difficult to say. I'm just a little old joker in Northern Nevada.

"We've been attacked, it's a declaration of war by somebody, and those somebodies are terrorists.

"When we find out who it is we retaliate. Wipe 'em out. Just take 'em out. That's the way I feel. We should have taken out some people long before this.

"I do feel the military should be more active in protecting our southern border. Stand shoulder to shoulder if they have to. If this was a terrorist attack, they may have come in from that direction.

"It's a difficult thing to protect ourselves. Our military is here to protect the United States of America, not in foreign countries fighting their wars. We are part of the world and we do have to help. But why are we the first to help in any tragedy that happens in other countries? Then, when we do, we're criticized for it."

Lloyd was wounded in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. After World War II, Lloyd went to school and became a pilot for 17 years, retiring in July 1960. He enlisted in 1939.

"It didn't matter what ship you were on because it wasn't only the Navy that took the blast.

"World War II was the war that changed the world. The war started in Europe long before we got into it, and we had to get into it, we had to."