lc_story260.xml

lc_story260.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-01-16

I was at a corporate training center for Metlife, which is located in Secaucus, NJ, and in fact, our building was tall enough to allow us a good view of the cityscape of the lower half of Manhattan. I remember on the night of Sept 10, I had visited the World Trade Center observatory with some fellow trainees, and was in awe of the view to which those towers provided. Later that evening, I called my wife to share with her how beautiful it was from the top and how one day I would take her there.

The morning of Sept 11, I was in a training session watching some video, when my instructor who had left the room after starting the video, rushed in frantically and stopped the tape. He told us something terrible has happened....that a plane had hit one of the twin towers. At first, before looking out the panoramic windows toward Manhattan, we all thought it was some small plane, but once we got to the windows, all we saw was smoke just billowing out of one of the towers. We thought it might have been an accident or something. Later events would obviously show that it wasn't.

My strongest memory of that day was watching the second tower getting hit. At that point, we were all in shock of what we were seeing. It was like watching a movie, only we all knew this was for real. Some of my fellow trainees had friends and family that worked in the building. Our class had been scheduled to visit the towers sometime later in the day, as Metlife had a floor or two. The first person I thought to call was not my wife or my Dad, but my grandfather, Leslie Hotchkiss. The reason I called him first, as I would figure out later, was that he was at Pearl Harbor and of all people I knew, he would help me get a grasp of the magnitude of the situation....to help me understand how to cope with what I was seeing. Thankfully, I had the foresight to tell him to pass the word along that I was okay, as minutes later, it was impossible to call out due to phone lines being jammed. Thank God for the internet, as email was the only way I could communicate with anyone for several hours. I wanted to get back to Virginia as fast as I could, but every mode of transportation had been shut down. The only way out of New York and the surrounding areas was to walk. We had to wait until the next day to drive home, and what a long drive it was.

Well, it's not often that you see 3,000 people being murdered right before your very eyes, much less actually being present when it happened. Having been a history major in college, I had always wondered what would it be like to be present at a momentous occasion in our nation's history. Now I wish to God that I hadn't. As much as I would like to say that I'm back to normal now, I'm really not. I've fallen in and out of depression for over 2 years now, taking medications I never needed before, and for the most part, I've lost that zest for life that I had before....and I don't know how to get it back. I haven't been back to New York since then. And I'm scared that if I do, my mental state would only get worse....or it might get better. I'm afraid to find out.