What Were You Doing?

Today will be a heavy blogging day remembering the tragedy that happened 5 years ago in New York City, Washington DC, and in a field in Pennsylvania. The terrorist attacks against the United States were the first foreign acts of terrorism carried out in the America. The world was shocked.

I will not post a detailed account of people and places or that "we will never forget". What I want to do is spur your memory of that day...what you were doing, when you found out, what you did. I am hoping that it will be different enough to keep people interested and thinking about the world we live in.

Since this evil act took place during the "information age", we all knew about it (or had the ability to) in real time. CNN, Fox News, the Internet (albeit it was slow due to EVERYONE wanting up to date info), etc kept us up to date. Had this happened 50-60 years ago, an air raid siren may have sounded and people would have taken cover in their homes and tuned in to local radio for up to date info.

No, this event, that will live in infamy along with Pearl Harbor and the attacking of Japan with nuclear bombs, was experienced in real time. Most of the images I saw I will never forget.

I was at work at my new job in Richardson, Texas...which is a couple of miles north of Dallas. I had been in my new job 2 months and was just learning the ins and outs of what I was required to do. I was logged on to AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) when a former colleague IM'ed me "A plane has just hit the WTC." I thought a small commuter plane had lost control and crashed. I tried to get news of this event from the web but all the major sites were being hit so hard they web servers could not keep up. I decided to go down to our Global Network Monitoring Room, which has satellite news and weather running 24X7, to see if I could get an update. I walked in and saw the room filled with people staring at the screen. Just about then I saw the second plane hit. I at first thought it was an instant replay, thinking that some poor soul had been recording this and got it by accident, but the people in room all gasped and said, "OMG, another plane hit!" I was numb.

My boss was standing next to me and I looked at him. I told him that we were at war. This was a terrorist act. He just hung his head and shook it slowly. We just stood there when the manager of the monitoring group told us we needed to leave. It was nothing personal, but they had work to do. We filed out...mostly quiet.

I made it back to my office and called my wife. She had heard the news but not all of it. She was not worried yet, but I convinced her that we needed to be careful. I had the feeling that "soft" targets (malls and other public gathering spots) would be next. I was happy to see that I was wrong.

All day long the events that unfolded in real time were coming in. Someone said a car bomb went off near the Pentagon and another report had the military shooting down an airliner over rural Pennsylvania. By the end of the day I was exhausted by the constant barrage of news.

The evening walk with our dogs was punctuated with the eerie stillness of a sky devoid of planes. We have several airports within 50 miles and the skies are usually very active with air traffic. At any given time you can see 5-10 commercial jets in the sky, but on Sept 11th and 12th, this was not the case. On the evening of September 12th we had a power outage in our neighborhood which caused some minor panic until the power was restored.

Over the next 30 days, things were a blur. I remember that a commercial airliner crashed into a neighborhood and the first reaction was that another attack had occurred. Thankfully (if one can say that about an airliner crash), it was mechanical failure and not a terrorist attack.

During the next couple of months, we began seeing many more military helicopters in the sky, which only added to the atmosphere of dread. In the span of just a few minutes, the world had changed.

It took a few months to finally get the story of what happened and it began to stir a patriotic movement that had not been seen in this country for quite some time.

Think about that day, September 11, 2001 and reflect what you were doing and how you felt when you heard the news. I encourage you to write down those thoughts. They will be valuable later in your life.

BtW, Michelle Malkin has a great series on this...very detailed.