As we mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States, frequent NR contributors and other friends remember that morning.
RALPH KINNEY BENNETT
I was in my office in Washington when my secretary came to the door and told me to turn on the television. I was soon transfixed by the horror unfolding on the screen. I bowed my head at my desk and began to pray for all those in the World Trade Center towers and the hijacked airplanes. As the realization that this might be a general attack involving airplanes began to grow, my mind began scanning the names of friends who I knew flew frequently. I thought of David Beamer, a fellow elder in my church, who often traveled on business. How many more planes had been commandeered? Perhaps he was aboard one. I whispered a prayer for Dave. It was not until the next day, in a throat-catching phone call, that I learned Dave’s son, Todd Beamer, was aboard the “fourth plane,” United Flight 93. It soon became known that Todd was one of those passengers who apparently attacked the terrorists in the cockpit, thus thwarting their plans by bringing the plane down in the western-Pennsylvania mountains not far from my hometown.
— Ralph Kinney Bennett retired from the Washington bureau of The Reader’s Digest as an assistant managing editor.
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PRISCILLA BUCKLEY
I had taken the second cup of coffee into the living room and flipped on the TV to see if there was any late news. A plane had just flown into a World Trade Tower. I looked out the picture window. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It couldn’t be an accident. It had to be an attack of some sort. What to do? The best thing, I thought, was to do what I had planned and get out of town. I went down to the garage, picked up the car, and headed up the FDR drive. Within half a mile, there were streams of emergency vehicles — fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, sirens blowing, red lights flashing — streaming southward on lanes usually closed to truck traffic, headed for the disaster area. I kept the radio on and listened with growing horror. By the time I had reached Sharon, in the quiet Litchfield Hills of Connecticut, two hours later, many of those men, having charged into the maelstrom to give what help they could, were themselves, already, also dead. God rest their valiant souls.
PETER BROOKES
It’s hard to know where to start in recounting what I remember most about September 11. The day started for me with finding myself sitting on the taxiway at Dulles Airport for a seemingly interminable period on a westbound United Airlines flight, thinking I was going to miss my San Francisco connection en route to the Pacific Command in Hawaii for meetings in my role as a deputy assistant secretary of defense.
My second thought was that I should’ve taken the earlier American Airlines flight that my assistant had offered up as another option, one that connected through Los Angeles to Honolulu. I later learned that the earlier American Airlines flight was the one that al-Qaeda operatives flew into the Pentagon that morning.
I was actually able to leave Dulles before it closed and return home, where I found a message on my answering machine for me to come to the Pentagon as soon as possible. I’ll never forget approaching the Pentagon through clouds of billowing smoke from the crash site, the first responders fighting the fire and the armed soldiers protecting its grounds. It was at this moment that it all really hit home that America had been savagely attacked.
— Peter Brookes is a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.
I was on the far side of the world when it happened thus my disconnect with the fast moving events and an inchoate response to that terrible event except the terror of it all. The tears followed.
A foul act, senseless and abhorrent, an excrescence on the world whose selective memory has abased evil to a perverted justice.
'Dabit deus his quoque finem'.
I was driving to a monthly pastor's conference with an associate. Unlike my usual practice, I left the radio off and we enjoyed our conversation. As a result, when we arrived at our meeting we were unable to understand the somber pall that hung over the group. "A plane hit one of the World Trade Towers," the man sitting next to me confided. When the 2nd plane hit and realization dawned, I remember the change in the group. From then on it was only, what will we do next to care for all the people in our communities. We scattered in many directions to counsel, to pray, to lead worship at churches and schools, around flagpoles and in parks. Not only first responders, but people all over our nation mobilized to encourage one another, to help those displaced, to raise up new warriors, and to support the families sending them off. We had a job to do. It was God's calling.
I was in the Third World, watching it all unfold on an old and fuzzy picture tube. My initial thought was that the United States would retaliate with great force, and that many more would die. What's sad is that it all could have been avoided.
I'm Canadian, working in the US and I was at a training course that day. The internet slowed to a crawl so we all just watched it unfold on TV.
I remember driving back through the tunnel to Windsor and it was deserted. For the next few months there would be four hour lineups to get back into the US via the tunnel, so I started coming over at 5:00 in the morning.
For weeks, there was a line of trucks backed up for about 30km and some of the truckers had been stuck in their cabs for days.
Canadians have a love-hate relationship with Americans. I consider it a sort of sibling rivalry - the younger brother is a bit jealous of the older. There was none of that in the weeks that followed. On the contrary, I remember billboards in Windsor saying "God Bless America".
My husband had jury duty that day. It got cancelled and he came home to tell me the news. I remember being shocked and stunned, and watching the news for hours.
The thing I remember most though, is praying. That evening, I had a Bible study to attend. Ten to fifteen stunned women sat around wondering what to do, and decided to pray. I'll never forget that, we all stood around in a circle holding hands, and prayed aloud, unconcerned for once about the way we sounded or looked.
That Sunday, or maybe the next I'm not sure, we didn't hold a traditional service. Instead, we prayed. We turned our seats into mini circles and prayed with the people seated around us.
We prayed for the families of the victims. We prayed for wisdom and strength for the President and the rest of the government. We prayed for the military as it faced an uncertain future. We prayed for our country, our fellow Americans and ourselves.
My thoughts turned to my wife, who I thought was already at work in a high rise. At that point I had no idea if they were targeting random buildings or just the WTC's. When I called her to tell her to turn on a TV, she sounded exasperated. She wasn't at work yet, the dog had run off and she was trying to catch it, so she was running late. She was so mad at the dog that she hung up on me. She called back later when she saw the news and didn't ever go into work.
I actually think Joseph Pearse's reaction was appropriate. As the signs used to say, "Keep calm and carry on."
(I was working in an office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Of course, it was closed and all of us sent home. That struck me as a particularly bad idea, because it was obvious that the streets would be jammed with cars barely able to move, which would have made them sitting ducks for anyone who, like Mir Aimal Kansi at the entrance to the CIA in 1993, might want to strike at people stuck in their cars.
Reading all these memories gave me a chill up my spine. The sadness, the anger, the tears...it feels like yesterday. I lost a friend and a co-worker on that day. I was so angry I left work and mounted my massive American flag on the front of my house, hammering away in anger and wishing I was younger and could enlist.
Nothing brought me back to the feelings I experienced that day and following more than these words in this column by William Voegeli:
"I was evacuated twice that week: the night after the attacks... and the day after that... We evacuees were somber and purposeful. As I walked down 22 flights of stairs from my office — the fire department directed us not to use the elevators — I sensed that the people behind and ahead of me in the long, orderly descent were determined not to give voice to their fear. *** None of us wanted to be the first who was unworthy of the victims who had climbed down the World Trade Center’s longer, darker stairways two days before, or of the heroes who had climbed up them."***
At these words a sob caught in my throat...
And Daniel Pipes' remembrances also struck a chord, since I had been in Israel many times during and after terrorist attacks before 2001. "Wake up, America! land that I love! You can't afford to be caught off guard again!"
These memories are chilling and horrifying. The many personal and poignant tragedies. My own memories are sad ones - my father, a Navy veteran of World War II, passed away but two days later in a nursing home. We cannot prove this, but my brother and I believe strongly that the shock and horror of the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks affected him physically and contributed to his death.
It was an attack that I had feared for at least 20 years, knowing what I knew about Islam and the nature of terrorism. When I heard the second plane had hit the South Tower, I knew it was an act of war and that nothing would be the same. It was an inconceivable, dastardly act, one no one could have imagined. But it was that failure of imagination, that complacency of our government, the underestimation of our enemies which helped cause this unspeakable tragedy.
Normally I always have a TV or two on in the morning. That morning I didn't. The woman I was with at that time was a long time resident of NYC and to her The World Trade Center was referred to simply as THE WORLD. We got a call from her daughter who told her what was happening. She started screaming out "Oh my God," and the like, but didn't say what it was about. All I could think was that her grandson or someone close had died or been injured. I asked what it was, she just screamed, "Turn on the TV, THE WORLD is under attack." I turned it on, and the first image was a close up of a building collapsing, couldn't see anything else, other than that radio tower at the top disappearing into the dust. All I could imagine was a nuclear war, or even attack by space aliens against THE WORLD had started, but then in a few seconds I saw what it was in reality. I think it would have been more comforting if aliens had been attacking.
I'd taught my early morning religion class to a small group of dozing high school students, sent my husband off to his work as a civilian contractor supporting the Air Force, my younger son to his university classes, and my younger daughter to her high school. The electrician was installing the ceiling fan in the new master bedroom suite of our latest home improvement project. I booted up the computer to prepare next morning's lesson and, as usual, stopped to check the latest news. The initial report sent me to the TV, which clicked on just in time to show the second plane hit the WTC. When the news reports first came in about the Pentagon, I went upstairs and posted our flag on the front porch. It was several hours before I finally reached my husband, whose normal routine would have had him at the Pentagon that morning. Much of the rest of the day was spent numbly fielding concerned calls from family and friends across the country, coordinating transportation for my husband and several coworkers who were stranded outside their offices in Rosslyn, and praying. The following days brought news of friends and acquaintances lost in the attacks, a woman I'd worked with in Cub Scouts a decade before, the father of one of my daughter's high school friends, a former shipmate from my husband's Navy days. But my clearest recollections from that day are two: the sight of our flag's stars and stripes against a beautifully cloudless blue sky, and the warm gratitude we felt as our family finally gathered together again that evening tempered with the realization that many other families were not so fortunate as we.
John J. Miller, I beg of you to treat your iconic little flag respectfully. Remove it from your backpack. If it is ragged, either store it away safely as a memento, or dispose of it according to proper flag etiquette. Please do not allow the symbol of our country to be displayed in such poor condition.
RE: Candace de Russy-page 2 .
The author's sequence of events is off but her words are bordering on perfection. Why some Americans don't feel the same way is beyond explanation.
I was an Army major on my second day of leave in Falls Church, VA as my wife was expecting our first child on the 14th. I turned on the TV at 0900 to check out the weather to go for a run. The first tower had already been hit. A few incredulous minutes later I watched the second plane hit on live TV.
Not long after that we heard the plane hit the Pentagon and it rattled our windows. I tell my son, who wasn't born till the 19th, he may be the youngest person alive to have experienced 9/11, as the sound was certainly loud enough and deep enough to have been heard in utero.
As of this moment, right now, well into the 9/11 ceremony in NYC, absolutely NOTHING about 9/11/2001 appears on the HOMEPAGE of The White House: www.whitehouse.gov
I weary of the focus on the wrong people. It doesn't really matter how I felt on that day, or what I was doing. What matters is how we respond. Beyond the remembrance of those innocents who died and the responders who fought back despite what they knew they were getting into, there are others who fight back, & continue to do so.
Our presidents did a fine job of commemorating 9/11. I was so impressed that I’ve decided to share with you some of my favorite clips and quotes from over the weekend. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
