09/13/2026
The Only Carrier Available, Twenty-Five Years Apart, Six weeks out of Newport News Shipyard, USS George Washington had been underway off the Virginia coast for barely a day when the attacks began on September 11, 2001.
The first F/A-18 trapped aboard within three hours of the last hijacked airliner going down.
She was ordered north immediately. By the next morning she was sitting three miles off Coney Island Beach, the only aircraft carrier the Navy had in position to defend New York's airspace.
For five days she flew combat air patrols around the clock, launching 234 sorties in case a second wave came. Belowdecks, her medical department opened a walking blood bank, drawing blood from sailors and Marines to send ashore for the wounded.
On September 17 she began offloading aircraft and turned for home. Nine months later she deployed again, this time to the Persian Gulf, flying more than 10,000 sorties over Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom. A piece of twisted steel from Ground Zero sits in her onboard museum today, displayed beneath a photo of the ship underway with the New York skyline burning behind her.
Twenty-five years later, almost to the week, George Washington found herself in the same position. The Navy's only forward-deployed carrier, she was midway through a routine Indo-Pacific patrol out of Yokosuka when the order came to head west instead. No other carrier was close enough to relieve USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East, so she went. She is now on station in the Arabian Sea, near the Strait of Hormuz.
The sailors flying combat air patrols off her deck today were mostly born after the towers fell. The carrier they serve on was not.
