My annual 9-11 tribute. They say time heals all wounds, but nine years later we’re still arguing about the terrorist attack, the war on terrorism and the clash of civilizations between the modern world and militant Islam.
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A few hours, we will marked the eighth ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Where were you that day??
I work in Edison NJ, about 25 miles from New York City. On the morning of 9-11-2001 I was pulling into the parking lot at work, listening to Curtis and Kuby on WABC talk radio when I heard them announce that a plane had hit one of the towers. At the time, it sounded like a small plane. I walked by the guard house at my company and saw the security guard and another employee were watching the news on TV. When I got to my office, our secretary had the radio on, and then we heard about the second plane hitting the other tower. More people gathered around the radio, and we stood there stunned trying to digest the news. This wasn’t a couple of lost pilots, these were passenger airlines being driven into the towers. Rumors of more planes and more targets. The feeling that something big was going down, that America was under attack. Later we heard that the Pentagon had been hit. Wow. Then we heard the towers collapsing, and thought about how many thousands of people had died. More rumors of other hijacked planes, about planes being shot down. Some of us were trying to keep up to date via Internet news, but many sites were down or not available due to high volume.
I work at a chemical plant, and we decided for safety reasons to shut down. At noon, we were told we could go home. My son Daniel was in first grade at the time, and his school was releasing kids to their parents to go home early. I remember going to the school to pick up my son. When I got to the school, there were administrators outside telling parents that the kids hadn’t been told about the terrorist attacks. At the time, the school wasn’t sure if any students had parents who worked at the WTC. I remember my son running out to me, excited to see me because normally my wife picked him up from school. He didn’t know about what happened, and I didn’t want to say anything. He seemed so innocent, an advantage of being only six years old.
At home I watched the news. Casualty figures of 20 or 30,000 dead were being thrown around. By midnight, I was exhausted from the days events.
In the following days, the news was all about the WTC and the smoldering ruins and thoughts that there might be survivors hidden under the wreckage. Thousands of emergency response personnel descended on Manhattan to help in the recovery efforts. But all they found was death and destruction. The videos of the towers collapsing are etched into my memory. And the picture of that guy in the white coat leaping to his death.
Then I found out that someone I knew had died in the World Trade Center. I had known Fran Riccardelli since 1980. Fran made the trek from New Jersey to upstate New York for my wedding in 1986. He was an engineer, a graduate of NJIT, and he worked for the Port Authority, the agency which operated the World Trade Center. He was a property manager at the World Trade Center, the manager of vertical transportation which means he was responsible for the elevators and escalators at the twin towers. He had worked there since graduating from college in 1984. He was there in 1993 for the first attack on the WTC. Fran had an office on one of the lower floors, so he walked out the towers after the planes hit. But as a PA employee he was part of the emergency response team, so he grabbed his hard hat, flashlight and walkie-talkie and assisted the firemen and rescue personnel as they tried to get people out of the towers. Fran was an incident commander in the south tower which was the first tower to collapse.
Foxnews did a story about Fran and the other Port Authority employees who died in the attack. There’s a good summary of Fran’s efforts at Elevator World. Fran was married with five kids (picture at left). I think about the family alot and about all the other thousands of kids who lost parents. I’ll be praying for them later today when our church has it’s annual 9-11 prayer service.
Have we forgotten about 9-11?? I think so. We’ve forgotten about how awful we felt that day. I thought we’d be seeing more attacks in the days and weeks afterwards. Maybe it’s a testament to the American spirit that we can get up, dust ourselves off and get back to work. But that was a grim day in American history, starting a war that is still going on three years later. I’m afraid the public doesn’t feel like it’s a war, and based on the political rhetoric of today, a large percentage of America thinks this war on terrorism is a scam by George Bush to win elections. History will judge our actions to be correct, and maybe only until we are looking back at 9-11 after twenty or thirty years will we be able to grasp the enormity of the situation.
