SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, APPEARED no different from any other late summer day in the big, metropolitan D.C. area. I was driving to work on the Capital Beltway from Virginia to Maryland when National Public Radio (NPR) announced that a plane had flown into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. After this announcement, NPR continued its normally scheduled program. My brain could not process what I had just heard, and I became nervous. Had I understood correctly? A plane flew into the twin towers? How? Why? I wanted to get to my destination as soon as possible, get on the Internet, and find out what happened. When I arrived at Emmes, I saw people gathered in small groups near computer screens. I joined a group of people from our department. We stared at the screen in disbelief, watching the events unfolding in New York City, the report of the first plane crashing into the North Tower, and then the second going into the South Tower. It was then we understood it was a terrorist attack. Shortly after the report, Emmes let all employees go home for the rest of the day.
In distress, I drove back home on the already congested beltway. I thought we might be at war. For the rest of the day, we watched TV at home. As if in a horror movie, we watched the twin towers crumbled, diminished to dust. The structural steel of the skyscrapers, built to withstand winds over 200 miles per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel. We learned that nineteen terrorists had hijacked four airplanes. They carried out suicide attacks against different targets in the United States. These terrorists were associated with the Islamic extremist group, Al-Qaeda. In New York City, two planes hit the World Trade Center twin towers, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside of Washington, D.C., a thirty-minute drive from our home, and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, near Shanksville. The last of these flights, United 93, was hijacked about forty minutes after leaving Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. Because the plane had been delayed in taking off, passengers on board learned of the events in New York and Washington via cell phones. The passengers fought the four hijackers. There is a belief that they attacked the cockpit with a fire extinguisher. The plane then flipped over and sped toward the ground, crashing in a rural field near Shanksville in western Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m. All forty-four people aboard were killed. The intended targets of hijackers are not known, but theories include the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, or one of several nuclear power plants along the eastern seaboard.
More than 3,000 people never made it home that night. We witnessed the largest terrorist attack on American soil since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Many weeks passed before I was able to fully process the events of that day. Our innocence on our home front was forever shattered. From that point, we have looked at the world and ourselves differently.
Eighteen years later, in October of 2019, Sparky and I traveled to New York City. We visited the “National September 11 Memorial Museum” that was built where the World Trade Center twin towers once proudly stood. The somber memory of September 11, 2001, will stay with me forever.
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