Day of Infamy

September 11, 2001

Ten-Year Anniversary

 

       2011

 

What are your recollections and impressions of the morning, and aftermath, of 9/11?

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Part I – The Attack 

 

It's morning, the second Tuesday of September. 
    My schedule is such that I'm off from work, not to return until the next day. I enjoy the luxury of sleeping in, there being no compelling reason to do otherwise. 
    The day starts lazily around nine o'clock, and finds me sometime after padding semi-groggily through the living room. 
    Our two-year-old, Alexandra, is up and, as usual, is engrossed in her Cartoon Network on television. She pays me little mind as I pass by. Her grandmother is in the kitchen, which is my destination, when the phone rings. I answer it in the living room. It's Marcy, calling from work.

    “Hon, did you hear the news?” A sense of urgency in my wife’s voice dispels any lingering grogginess on my part.
  “What happened?” I'm not sure I want to know. It’s unusual for Marcy to be phoning this early in the day, and her tone is serious. What in the world has occurred? A tornado? An earthquake? A tsunami?
  “Two airliners flew into the World Trade Center in New York. Turn on the T.V.”
    I locate the remote, preempting Ally's usual programming. She doesn't protest, which is out of character for her. Usually there is no competing with her insistent rallying cry: “I want my own show!” Does she sense, perhaps, something is amiss? Why is Daddy concerned?
    Remote in hand, the image in the living room changes from animated characters and dubbed voices to billowing black smoke and the World Trade Center’s twin towers.

    Shock. Disbelief.
    Unable to account for such an unimaginable live scenario, the mind goes blank. There is little conversation as, receiver to my ear, my wife and I share the passing moments. Then, without warning, the boundary of disbelief is pushed further.
    “Oh my God, Hon,” I hear myself saying, “one of the towers is collapsing!”

     It quickly becomes official: the United States has experienced a terrorist attack of unprecedented magnitude.

    The Federal Aviation Administration responds, suspending all commercial flight activity. And then, for the first time in memory, and after decades of observing them in the skies high overhead, there are no vapor trails across America.

    The rest of the morning, and most of the afternoon, is spent transfixed by the breaking story. 
    Two scenes become indelibly ingrained upon the mind, appearing repeatedly as they are rebroadcast again and again. The first, that of a Boeing 767 airliner gliding like a missile toward one of the towering structures, while the other stands already in flames.  The airliner disappears into concrete and steel. There follows, again and again, the inevitable fireball.

    The second set of footage is that of black smoke and the towers collapsing.
    First the one. 
    Then, like a loyal twin unwilling to allow its dear sibling to meet a terrible fate alone, the other.

    Meanwhile, thirty miles north of our Virginia home, the Pentagon is in flames and smoke. And an airliner has crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

     Upon awakening the next morning, one wonders if it was all just a nightmare.
    But then, grim reality settles.

    And in the days that follow, it becomes apparent how closely the terrorism has struck.

    When the smoke clears at the Pentagon, the name of a coworker's husband is on the missing list. He is later confirmed dead. 
    Lianne, our seventeen-year-old, reports that a high school classmate lost her father. 
    And we learn at church that a fellow parishioner also died in the attack.

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                Part II.

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