9/11: 'The World Is Still A Dangerous Place'

Ledyard resident Drew Wesche, 56, was boarding a plane for Ann Arbor on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when news of the terrorist attacks grounded his flight. This was just the first time his life would be altered by that event.

Weshe is one of hundreds of people across the country featured in a 9/11 photo gallery whose life was altered by 9/11.

In 2003, as a member of the Army National Guard, Wesche was deployed to Kuwait with the Guard’s 1109^th AVCRAD unit. When he eventually returned to his security job at Pfizer’s Groton site, security was big business.

“All you had to say was ‘security’ and people would open their check book,” he recalled. But that would change. In 2009, after 22 years with Pfizer, Wesche lost his job when the site downsized its security department. He now works as a contract auditor for AVCRAD, and worries that America is at risk of forgetting what it learned 10 years ago.

“The world is still a dangerous place,” he said. “We have to resign ourselves to the fact that there are people in the world that just hate us, hate everything about us, and will go to their death to prove their point. If we don’t have some awareness of that, then we’re just pulling the wool over our eyes.”