Monday, September 11, 2006

I knew it would all be different

I was pouring myself a cup of coffee when everything changed. I always wondered if people recognized life-changing events as they happened, or if they only knew in retrospect that that was the moment everything changed. But I knew as soon as I heard the woman screaming and I turned back around to the TV, coffee pot and half-full cup, one in each hand, that it was all different now.

Oh, there was some denial afterward, maybe this wasn't what everyone thought, but only until the third crash. When the Pentagon was hit, that clinched it. I had immediately grasped what would become clear, then get lost, and slowly, slowly become clear again.

We lost our innocence that day. We would never again think we were safe from things we only heard about on TV, safe because we were born in the good old U. S. of A. Suicide bombs happened in other places. Even our own previous brushes with terrorism - Oklahoma City, the Unabomber - never brought it home to us like this did.

Why not? Why did we never think this could happen here when it happens everywhere else? When I was in London in 95 there were two or three times that train stations were closed because of bomb threats, etc. It's not like I had never encountered terrorism before. Why did we never think it would happen here?

Some random events from that day in my life:
Mom worked at the NRC and I didn't know if her building was downtown or not. I had to wonder for quite a while if she was in downtown DC, which they were evacuating.

My stepdad finally called home, confirmed that mom did not work downtown, that he could not get ahold of her, that he expected she would not be home, and that he had dialed, from a land line, the home number twice and reached a satellite tracking center that was quite concerned that he kept calling. This is how screwed up the phone routing was on the east coast.

Mom finally called and said she wasn't coming home and that we weren't supposed to go into town. Um, duh, thanks mom. We'll try to avoid the city with the giant target on it. Not to mention we didn't have a car and the subways had stopped running.

I was told no less than 8 times over the next three days by Northwest that, yes ma'am, we fully expect that flight to go up. It wasn't their fault, they did the best they could, it was just so unprecedented. We finally got home on Friday after driving to Philadelphia to catch a plane out of there.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Does anyone forget where they were on 9/11? My job, because it is so political, has CNN on tv's on each floor. I was watching the film of the first plane hitting when two of my co-workers, both security personnel with serious backgrounds, came up, and told me to come with them. We went to the operations center of the government building and opened up the security center. By then the second plane hit and then the pentagon. Mom called, crying, to see if I was okay. After talking to her I called the kids to ensure their whereabouts. They were going downtown DC that day. From that day forward, I spent months in our operations center, collecting information, conducting interviews and many other intersting security tasks that I will always remember. One thing that sticks with me is this - I got up very early each morning to go to work and I was struck by the lack of commercial airlines over the DC area and the sound of the military flights patrolling the airspace. A few months later, when I was able to get away, I went to the pentagon and to ground zero - it's a lasting memory.