By Kevin Baxter, Swimming World Guest Contributor
Clearing the numbers on my stopwatch I realized that when I clicked the start button again I would be timing more than a swimming event. The clock was already ticking in so many ways that had nothing to do with an athletic event and everything to do with a whole different race against time.
Our daughter Colleen, now an eighth grader, was an excellent swimmer and today had reached the pinnacle of her tiny athletic world. My wife Jodi and I had traveled 80 kilometers north of our Arabian compound at Abqaiq, to Ras Tanura, another Saudi Aramco camp located on the Persian Gulf, to watch her swim in the Regional Finals of the highly competitive Aramco Swim League. The top three swimmers in each age division would be advancing to the National Finals. Colleen wanted to be in that top three.
Today however, there would be other issues on our minds besides whether or not show she would win any medals. It was November of 2002. The date 9-11 was still very fresh in all of our minds for so very many reasons. Living in Saudi Arabia, we were constantly being made aware of our surroundings and who exactly had brought those planes down on that terrible day. We knew that Al Qaeda was a terrorist group that had little to do with the Saudi population in general, but we were constantly in a state of orange alert. A recent event in Kingdom did little to allay our fears and had set our nerves on edge. On the night of May 12, several vehicles containing heavily armed Al Qaeda assault teams under orders of Saad Bin Laden arrived at three Riyadh compounds. Thirty people were murdered during those attacks including nine Americans.
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