Remembering 9/11

Today marks the first national service day. Obama made 9/11 a day of service because I guess he didn't think Patriot Day or a day of remembrance was enough. In my opinion not remembering 9/11/01 is the BIGGEST disservice this country can do to itself. So for service day I'm going to write about my personal story of 9/11.

The day started out like any other day. I drove my wife to work, and was on my way to the bank to deposit the left over money from our vacation. I was listening to Howard Stern as I pulled up to the bank. He was reporting that a plane hit the world trade center. I figured it was a small Cessna type plane, as I went into the bank. By the time I got to the teller I found out the truth. The AM station in the bank suddenly broke into a live ABC radio report. It reported that a commercial airline crashed into the north tower. When I got back in the car, I did something I never did before, I changed the radio to AM. I have never changed back. At the time I worked for my dad at his gas station. I remembering walking into the station, and asking my dad if he heard that a plane crashed into the world trade center. He thought I was messing with him. So I turned on the radio and a minute later we heard about another crash into the south tower. The guy that worked for us said "you think this has something to do with Y2K?" and my dad said "its terrorism, not Y2K!". That day was hard, having to wait on customers and trying to listen to the radio at the same time. We told every customer that didn't know about it. It was easy to see who knew and who didn't, the ones that didn't know were still smiling. Somewhere around 9:45am we heard that a plane had crashed into the pentagon(actually first reports said an explosion). We were talking about some of our customers that commute to D.C. every day, and hoped that they were alright. Suddenly live on the radio we heard the south tower collapse. You could have heard a pin drop. My dad turned to me and said "you know how you always wondered how I felt when Kennedy was shot, its just like this" I can't describe how I felt. I was angry, sad, scared all rolled into one. Its a feeling that I hope my son will never have to feel. A little after ten I remember a Marine came in frantic. He was on his honeymoon and was called back to his post at Camp David. After he left another customer came in to tell us he heard there was another plane hijacked and headed our way. He thought they were aiming for either Camp David or the Gettysburg National Military Park. After he left my father said to me "Today you will learn how dumb people can be when they are scared". The phone rings, its my wife, a travel agent. She told me that its like a ghost town in her office with the exception of one person that came in around 9:30 for airline tickets. They had no idea what was going on around them. She also told me her mom wanted her to go home for the day, for fear a plane could crash into her office. I reassured my wife that no plane would crash into a strip mall in a small town in Pennsylvania, they have bigger plans in mind. I get off the phone with her and hear about the north tower collapsing. Not long after that we learned about flight 93. I walked outside to have a smoke and try and relax. As I was standing there I realized there was no sound. Hardly any cars were driving by the interstate next to us, but more importantly there was no noise from any plane above. Our location is on the outer most circle of flight plans going into BWI. It was eerily quiet. Through out the morning the news would tells us unverified news about explosions in DC, another plane being hijacked heading for DC, more proof that my dad was right. Later that afternoon a truck load of local firefighters came in for gas. They were heading for NYC in the hopes they could help. They didn't know anyone that was in either world trade center. They felt it was their duty to try and see if they could help rescue anyone that might be alive in the rubble. These wouldn't be the only firefighters we would see that day. The National Firefighter Academy is in Emmitsburg, MD about 10 miles away. We saw over a dozen cars and trucks filled with firefighters heading to NYC, some of their colleagues were heading to DC to help with the Pentagon. The rest of the day we stood by the radio hoping that we wouldn't hear about more planes being used as missiles. I got a phone call from my other job(I worked part-time on the local radio station). My boss told me that I wouldn't have to come to work tonight, they decided to just simulcast CNN news instead of other programming. Days later I would find out that the news anchor I was friends with owned part of the property in Shanksville that flight 93 crashed on. I called my wife to tell her I didn't have to work that night and I was going to pick her up after she got off. The ride home was completely silent. We just listened to the radio all the way home. When we got home we turned on the TV, and after seeing the famous scenes of the carnage, and how people chose to jump out of windows instead of burning to death, it sunk in even more. We never ate dinner that night, as we just stared at the TV and tried to reason why someone would do this.

Until 9/11 I thought that the space shuttle explosion was the worst thing I would have witnessed. After 9/11, I hope that nothing will surpass it.