Posted on 09/10/2007 6:41:30 PM PDT by Milwaukee_Guy
God rest their souls and a prayer for peace.
I wasa at Ft. Gordon, Georgia and off work that day. I got the kids off to school and saw nothing unusual on the news so I turned it off. I was playing a game on the computer when my wife came in and turned on the tv. She said, “Isn’t that the World Trade Center? It’s on fire.” A couple minutes later the second plane hit. Needless to say I forgot about my game and was glued to the tv for a couple hours. I finally got too angry to watch anymore so we went to the store just to get out of the house. Four months later I was headed to CENTCOM for a deployment. Now I’m heading for Iraq in December.
Well, I was still an undergrad then, single and living with my grandfather in Manhattan at 20th and 1st Ave. (Sty Town for those in the know). I woke up about 9:30 (first class was at 1 that day) and got ready. I dialed up the internet, and couldn’t connect...and the phone was dead..(nothing new, my dial up had knocked out the phone lines before, and on a couple of occasions, I had to call Verizon to get service restored).
After I got out of the shower, I looked outside, and for some reason it didn’t register that the only traffic on the FDR was police and fire vehicles hauling ass south at full speed. I figured it was a typical FUBAR morning. I said goodbye to gramps and set out to start the day at CUNY-Brooklyn. As I left, our neighbors were also starting the day (a bit late, my mind remarked), and keep in mind for a mite later, that they were fairly religous folks, nice as hell too.
I asked them if their phone was out (sometimes, the whole building would go kerflewey), they said yes, and asked me if I had heard. Heard what I said.
“Somebody crashed planes into the WTC, and the Pentagon, and there has been a car bomb set off at the State Department”.
I hauled ass back inside screaming for gramps to turn on Fox and saying “It’s #%$%$^ Pearl Harbor all over again!”
...more later.
A funny sort of thing, my letter of membership acceptance into the German Shepherd Dog Club of America was dated this day (I got it on the 12th or so). I’ve been a member officially since Sept. 11, 2001.
MSM, you are public enemy number one, and we’ve got your number. We know what we must never forget, and you best know what you must never forget.That bore repeating.This is your nation too. We demand you keep it in mind and act like it. Democrats, likewise...
The citizens of this nation will hold you accountable. Now all you have to do is carry on, but remember that we are watching. We don’t expect you to adopt our beliefs, but we do expect you to adopt our nation. It may pain you to act like it, but this nation is your nation. If it doesn’t survive, many of you and many of us will not.
There are only two flags flying on our entire block this morning.
One is mine.....
I was sitting at my desk, right where I’m sitting now. I was working on some certification / accreditation procedures for my boss’s calibration business. At about 9:00 a.m., the phone rang. It was my militant atheist mother-in-law, suggesting that I turn the TV on to channel 2, as it was the only TV station left on the air (she doesn’t have cable). I turned on FoxNews just in time to see plane #2 strike the second tower.
My wife works in finance, and spends alot of time in NYC. Before she heads out the door, I always ask her where she’ll be that day. On 9/11/01, I forgot to ask. I tried calling her cell phone, but the lines were dead. So were the landlines. I couldn’t even call my parents, who live only 30 miles north of here. After five minutes of panic, I thought to email my wife. She responded ten minutes later, saying that she was in her office in NJ, and that they’d be closing at 11:00. Back to the TV, and the south tower had collapsed. My rage knew no bounds. To this day, I can accept that planes were aimed at, and struck the towers, but I still cannot accept the images of them falling.
Next, I headed to my son’s school. I wanted “face time” with him, and wanted to tell him that his mom was OK, and was on her way home. He didn’t know that there had been an attack on Our Nation, so my visit only served to confuse him. I guess they didn’t want to upset the fifth graders, and I still bear a grudge against our school officials for making such a stupid decision.
Next, I headed to our local hospital and gave a pint. I was among the first to arrive to do this but, by the time I left, the line was out the door.
After that, I drove up to my parents’ place. I don’t know why I did, but I did.
I got home about 2 minutes ahead of my wife. She pulled in the driveway, crying her eyes out. On the way home, she made a mental list of all the people she knew in the WTC.
We spent the rest of the day watching FoxNews, in shock.
I want each and every death avenged. I want those responsible to be fully aware of their own suffering and pain just before their brains are blown out of their useless skulls.
“...This plane, tankers and AF1 would have been the only other large aircraft aloft that late in the day....”
I believe that Federal Express had a couple of specially approved flights flying after the grounding order come out. FedEx was flying some equipment up to New York to help out with the situation at Ground Zero.
I will never forget.
We all went home by midday, the kids were released early from school, and were very concerned that several of their friends had parents who worked in the WTC unaccounted for at that point.
In the early afternoon, we all went to Greenwich Point Park, where you could always see the World Trade Center on a clear day like this. All we saw was the smoke. It was incredibly affecting.
That evening our daughters went to a special meeting of their church youth group, at which several of the people seemed convinced this was all the US' fault and we deserved it....they never went back to the youth group again.
On the morning of the eleventh, we had planned to do some sight-seeing around Lower Manhattan. Our plans changed radically when we threw on the television to check out the weather. We spent the rest of the day trying to get out of New York City by car.
My 9/11 story is pretty boring compared to a lot of y’all’s.
I was at work, in my little cubicle at AgFirst Farm Credit Bank in downtown Columbia, SC, looking forward (not) to another day of programming and testing. About 9:00, one of our users walked by and matter-of-factly said, “Y’all know a plane hit the World Trade Center?” That was the first we heard of it.
So despite having been yelled at the week before for excessive Internet surfing at work, I immediately opened my browser and went to CNN.com. Couldn’t get to the site.
MSNBC.com. Couldn’t get to the site.
Foxnews.com. Couldn’t get to the site.
So I came here, to FR. FR had actually been blocked the month before, but on 9/11/01, for whatever reason, it wasn’t blocked and I could get to it. And it was here, on those original threads, that I saw the first pictures, and read the commentary, and the first correct guesses that Osama bin Laden was behind it all.
My next-cube neighbor cranked up his radio and it was from there, in between FR refreshes, that we got the news about the Pentagon and Shanksville, and the towers collapsing. But even though FR was up, the site was so overloaded that most pictures weren’t showing up. So when I heard “collapse,” I just thought that the top ten floors had broken off one of the towers and fallen to the street—cataclysmic for sure, but not total destruction.
About 12:00 they came around and told us that because of our proximity to South Carolina state offices (we were about five blocks from the Statehouse) we were being sent home at 1:00. I was one of the last ones out of the building, closer to 2:00, because we had to do some planning and juggling of processing schedules—they were sending the operations staff home as well and not running computer processing that night.
I got home at 2:30. My wife of two months, who also worked downtown one block from me, didn’t get sent home by her lawyer boss, so I had the place to myself. And that’s when I turned on Fox News and actually saw the replays of what had happened. I saw WTC 7 collapse live. My wife eventually told me to turn off the TV, she couldn’t handle watching it any more. I did, and we didn’t watch much more coverage until President Bush’s 20 September speech, which I still think is the finest oration he’s ever given.
Oh yeah, one last thing.
9/11 is my birthday. I turned 35 on 9/11/01.
I pause and remember today, but I don’t do it in the way that the liberals and peaceniks expect us to. We should not remember 9/11/01 in a maudlin, weepy, “give peace a chance” manner.
This, my friends, is a day that we MUST remind ourselves of the evil against us. There are evil men out there who seek to kill or enslave us in the name of their false god and their death cult. These men cannot be reasoned with, cannot be appeased, and cannot be negotiated with. They must be destroyed, ground back into the dust from which we all came. We must steel ourselves to do what needs to be done in order to achieve this...to wipe radical Islam from the face of the planet, and make the world brighter thereby.
}:-)4
Later that morning I finally heard from a friend who worked for Merrill Lynch who had had the day off for a family matter. Unfortunately, I learned FR had lost two of our own: Battalion Chief Moran (BCM) and Barbara Olson (BKO).
Today I remember them and the other fallen on this day. I remember the impacts on the Pentagon, the jumpers, the tower's falling, the clouds of dust and ash, the idiot reporter-ette playing in the ash on a car not realizing it likely included human remains, the first satellite images of "ground zero" and wondering what else Al Queda had planned for that day.
I offer a special thought for Ted Olson, his wife murdered by terrorists on his birthday.
Small world DC is.
placemarker
At noon, I went to my church for a prayer service. As I was walking in, a lady I knew was coming out, having worked at morning child care in the church. She said, what’s going on with all the people coming to church? I told her what had happened and she was shocked. No one working in the church day care knew anything about it.
My son was working at the Fed Ex distribution hub at the Memphis airport at the time. That night, with all the planes grounded, Fed Ex turned to semi trucks to move the packages. I drove to the airport and saw every size and type of 18 wheeler truck lined up on all the border streets waiting to get into the Fed Ex complex to pick up freight.
I then drove by the airport terminal building where news crews were doing live interviews with stranded passengers.
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