Members of the Army Chemical Corps arriving for their annual regimental week events will be able to see new museum displays showing two of their corps’ highest-profile incident responses in recent years: the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the discovery of pulmonary anthrax spores a few weeks later in tabloid newspaper offices located in Boca Raton, Fla.
Civil support teams from area National Guard units responded to both incidents but were among the key agencies when anthrax was discovered in the offices of American Media, Inc., publishers of the National Enquirer, the Sun, and other supermarket tabloids. The museum features a display showing Capt. John Wilson of Florida’s 44th Civil Support Team in full biohazard protective gear using special tweezers to collect samples of items that may have been contaminated by anthrax.
Wilson, who worked closely with museum personnel to help them plan the exhibit, said it was an unusual feeling to see himself depicted in a museum with displays showing the roles of his predecessors in the Chemical Corps during World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
“I’m really proud that we were able to participate in that effort,” Wilson said. “Back then, the mission was to actually determine the extent of the contamination of the building and facilitate interagency cooperation.”
Civil Support Team members knew anthrax was in the building; Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun, had been hospitalized on Oct. 2 and died three days later. Anthrax spores were found on his computer keyboard and company mail clerk Ernesto Blanco, who had been hospitalized and misdiagnosed with pneumonia on Oct. 1, was later determined to also be a victim of inhalation anthrax.
President George Bush declared in 2001 that anthrax-laden letters sent to newspapers, television news networks, and several congressional offices were a second wave of terrorist attacks against America, but the source of the anthrax has never been determined.
“This is still one of the top priority FBI cases,” Wilson said.
Wilson has spent 24 years in the military beginning as an enlisted soldier, and had served in the explosive ordnance disposal units and other roles before becoming a member of Florida’s 22-member Civil Support Team. A second team is being organized and Florida will be the third state to have two teams, following the lead of California and Florida.
“I think the determination was based on the actual size of the state,” Wilson said. “When you consider north, south, east and west, I think we’re as large as California though not as wide.”
Air National Guard Senior Master Sgt. Tom Corey said Civil Support Teams operate in two-person pairs with one person identifying potential hazards and the other person keeping records. At the Boca Raton offices, Wilson climbed under desks and chairs to find potential anthrax spores while Corey made sure their location was documented.
In a pre-9/11 environment, the Army didn’t train for entering newspaper offices. Few precedents existed for handing anything other than industrial accidents or spills, and most procedures for a terrorist attack had never been tested in a real-life incident.
“It was pretty scary at first, to be honest; there was a lot of apprehension going in there,” Corey said. “We didn’t know what we were getting into, nobody had ever done this before. It was a brand new experience and we didn’t really have anybody to fall back upon to get good advice from.”
The high-profile role of the Civil Support Teams has attracted “a lot of sharp type-A personalities,” and both Corey and Wilson said they’re glad to work with a unit composed of people who are strongly committed to their work.
“There’s a lot of pride on our team and we don’t lose a lot of people,” Corey said. “The ones that we have lost are normally enlisted folks who have gone through (officer candidate school) and have been promoted into bigger and better positions.”
Corey and Wilson both said the importance of interagency cooperation was driven home to them in Boca Raton; their Civil Support Team worked closely with agencies as diverse as the Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We’re really happy to have taken part in that, but hope it never happens again.” Wilson said.