nmah6324.xml

nmah6324.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-10-03

My name is Dennis Tafoya. I have a wife, Jill, and in 2001 my children were 15, 11 and 8. I'm in industrial sales.
I was working, on my way to a sales call in a little town called Palmyra, PA, near Harrisburg. I was trying to find a radio station and actually heard the first clear reports on the Howard Stern show that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. They were making jokes about it. Eventually, I found a real news channel, but no one knew anything when I first started listening, around nine o'clock. I went into my sales call, but all we did was listen to the radio and try to figure out what was going on. The company was owned by a young couple with a child, and the husband was in South Africa. While I was talking to the purchasing agent, the woman came in and said her husband had called and told her to close the building and send everyone home. By then, the third plane had hit the Pentagon. From South Africa, I guess, it looked like the whole country was under attack. I got back on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and headed east toward my home in Bucks county.
The news on the radio consisted mostly of rumors and panic. A truck bomb at the State Department. A report that the Air Force had shot down one of the planes. State Police cars raced by me, lights flashing. I realized later I was only a couple of hours from Shanksville, where Flight 93 went down. I kept expecting that they would close the turnpike and I would have to find my way home on secondary roads.
When I got home a couple of hours later, my wife and a friend of hers were watching CNN. We didn't turn the the TV off except to sleep. We had the most terrible feeling of helplessness, of wanting to do something and not knowing what was appropriate. We made arrangements to donate blood. People took their children home from school. I had friends working in lower Manhattan that I didn't hear from for three days. I talked to a friend who sat in his car in New Jersey and watched the buildings burn and collapse across the river.
I kept thinking about the people in the building and how terrified they must have been. I kept thinking about their final moments and that no one would know what happened, that people were being brave and self-sacrificing, making each other comfortable, trying to help one another, that some people were panicking, some were resigned. It seemed especially terrible to me that no one would know all those stories.

The changes have all been intangible for me. I look at planes flying overhead differently. I wonder what's in the hearts and minds of the people around me. I put myself into the positions of people in the planes and in the buildings and I wonder how I would have acted. I wonder how long it will take to regain the sense of security we had before 9/11, or if we ever will. I wonder if my children will see the world as a more dangerous place than I did.

The heroism and self-sacrifice of everyone, both the rescue workers, the recovery and salvage workers, and the ordinary people who found themselves in terrible situations. I believe 9/11 should be a national holiday, and that it's focus should be on firefighters, rescue workers, police and EMS personnel. It should be a day to honor volunteerism and community work.

We flew the flag until the US started the attack on Afghanistan. In the days after the attack, flying the flag felt like the right expression of respect and pride in the best spirit of our country, expressed in the selflessness of the heroism on 9/11 and the days following. Every day afterward has seemed to add a layer of confusion and ambivalence about our national purpose and the rightness of our military and political response.