ARLINGTON, Va. — As terrorist attacks unfolded in New York City and Washington, D.C., then-Lt. Col. Marc “Sass” Sasseville and 1st Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney took off from Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, in unarmed F-16 fighter jets, the first U.S. combat aircraft over the nation’s capital on Sept. 11, 2001. The fellow pilot who oversaw their scramble: then-Maj. Dan “Razin” Caine, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Flying unarmed aircraft, Sasseville and Penney planned to ram a hijacked airliner believed heading toward the U.S. Capitol, but passengers and crew overwhelmed the terrorists, and United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Sass and Lucky knew they likely would not have survived their mission.
In a historic first, the three former D.C. Air National Guard 113th Wing Airmen sat down in a DCANG hangar on Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, with Gen. Steve Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, to talk about their mission that day, the attacks and how the Guard’s critical role in national defense has changed over the last 25 years.
Nordhaus talked to Gen. Caine, retired Lt. Gen. Sasseville and retired Maj. Penney for a one-of-a-kind National Guard video scheduled for release Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026, in advance of the 25th anniversary of the attacks that killed 2,977 people. This group had never sat together before to talk about their shared experiences.
The full-length video is available at https://youtu.be/d1Da8yu9b-Y.
Other compelling videos and articles telling the stories of the exceptional Americans serving in the National Guard on 9/11 can be found at https://www.nationalguard.mil/Features/2026/25th-Anniversary-of-9-11 and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBOatujHTors.
For more information, visit https://www.nationalguard.mil/ or email ng.ncr.ngb-arng.mbx.ngb-press-desk@army.mil.