20 years ago!

I was at work on 9/11/2001. I figured the nation would come together, then the unity quickly dissipate. I wasn't disappointed. Now we are more divided than ever. I wouldn't mind being out of here, but there's nowhere to go in the entire world. Not even sure changing states is really all that helpful. Buckle down and load mags.
 
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I was standing in the lobby of my office talking to the receptionist when a girl walked in & said did you hear a plane crashed into the World Trade Center? I said no, but like many just thought it was a small plane with a pilot & maybe one or two others aboard. She then said something like 'actually it was two planes'.

The hair on my neck stood up. I ran upstairs to another office & burst in & my colleague was listening to the radio with his mouth hanging open. It was a few minutes after I got up there that the news of the Pentagon situation was reported & we were just floored.

We left the building & walked into town in search of a TV, found a lone bar with an open door, they weren't open for lunch yet but since the door was open we wandered in. One by one others filed in & watched the TV hanging above the door, we, this crowd, stood there for what seemed like all day in silence, probably in shock; to this day the image of this crowd is the most indelible image baked in my brain. I was 35 years old at the time.

My son was 5 at the time, within a few days of these events I happened upon this drawing in his room, he had a similar much larger version on his chalk board, I can't find the photo of it but I snapped this one from the box of art:

9-11.jpg


A couple years after that I took him to work with me one day, a day that took me into downtown Philly. As we drove over the bridge into the city he pointed in the general direction of the skyscrapers & said "daddy is that the building that the plane flew into?"

Just a surreal piece of history to all of us that experienced it.
 
I was home doing projects and using up "use or loose" leave from the Navy. I had recently completed my first operational tour and two deployments flying S-3's from the USS EISENHOWER and USS GEORGE WASHINGTON. My daughter was at daycare and I did not have the TV or any other news source on. I got in the truck to to go Home Depot and as the radio came on I heard local morning talkshow hosts saying "a second plane has just flown into the World Trade Center". There was no doubt in my mind, instantly, what was going on. Went to the base to help out and was told the base would soon close down, no one on, no one off. I left quickly so my less than one year old daughter would not be stranded at daycare. Picked my daughter up, went home, watched the news, cleaned guns and loaded magazines. My wife got home very late that night and we had not been able to communicate much during the day because we only had one cell phone and I had it that day. The next day we had the USS JOHN F KENNEDY in New York with a mix of airplanes on board. I have heard the air defense weapons and warning status went to RED/FREE, something we were always told would never happen.
 
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