story1067.xml
Title
story1067.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2002-08-19
911DA Story: Story
This is a hard story to tell, and I'm sure that even now (August 18, 2002) as we approach the first anniversary of that day, I have yet to fully deal with my grief. I did not lose anyone I knew among the many who died that day, nor have I ever lived in New York, but I have always felt bound to New York City in some way. Somehow that city is the soul of our nation; the strength, pride, diversity living together as one people. The Twin Towers were a symbol of our achievement as a free and prosperous people. The Pentagon has long stood as a sign of our country's might and determination.
I live on the west coast of the United States, in California, and I was awakened by my husband. He sat down on the bed beside me and said, "You need to get up. Something bad is happening."
I rolled over, half-awake. We often had conversations in the morning about current events or the morning's newspaper headline, but something in his tone was different that day. There was no amusement, no wry humor, just a flatness. He said, "A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center."
I could only think it was an accident. A terrible one to be sure, but an accident nonetheless. The Towers had stood all my life, completed the year my birth, and I had always been fascinated by them. I knew they were designed to withstand the impact of an airplane.
I said, "Ok, let's go look."
The TV was already on. That was bad. My husband doesn't watch TV in the morning and neither do I. The sound was muted, and I sank onto the couch, dumbfounded at what I was seeing as the first tower burned.
We learned that a second plane had hit the other tower.
Not an accident.
An attack.
We watched the live broadcast, and I kept thinking about how enormous the buildings were. They held the population of the city of Santa Clara in their steel frames during the day. Tens of thousands of people. How long had they been burning?
Then there was a sudden shower of debris from one tower, and a huge column-shaped cloud of dust and smoke. Even the newscaster echoed my disbelief. Where was the building? Was the smoke that thick? The smoke began to clear -- revealing only sky behind it -- and I realized I had just seen a mighty brother of the city fall. Over 100 stories collapsed in less than 3 seconds. Every floor of that building weighed 14 million pounds. Gone in a breath, with thousands of people inside. Then the next building fell, a little later. All I could think of was the people inside and the people who had to be in the streets below. A tawny cloud engulfed Manhattan, boiling through the streets to the sea where it covered the water.
My beautiful city is burning.
What do you do in the face of something like that? How do you act out your next moments, the next hours, the next days? I wept against my husband's leg for a few moments, silent, grappling with what I had seen.
I went to work, knowing I had to keep busy or I would simply drift numbly. In traffic, I couldn't see sometimes through the tears that fell silently. I could tell by looking who else in traffic knew about the attacks, and who didn't. Those of us who knew, we all had the same shell-shocked, horrified expression.
I work for AeA, the American Electronics Association, and there were clients of ours who had offices in the Twin Towers. We kept the radios and the TVs on all day, listening for word of survivors, for word from our government. Word from our clients. It looked so fake, the buildings falling like that. I had never seen such huge destruction in real life. Very few of us have, even though we think we know what it looks like. Now we know that the special effects in the movies got it right.
We got snatches of rumors and information tidbits from our contacts on Capitol Hill, which I won't repeat here, but while many were false, some were not. The Pentagon had been hit, as well. All non-military aircraft were grounded. The President was airborne and his location was classified. It was every bad thriller movie and Tom Clancy novel come to life, too surreal to be believed.
Our building was under lockdown, and exits normally left unlocked were secured and opened only with card keys. We scrutinized everyone we met, searching their eyes for evidence of some damnation. /Is he the enemy?/
We learned that suspicion had fallen to a man named Osama bin Laden. /Who?/ And an organization called Al-Qaida. /Who are those guys?/
When I went home that night, I drove past the San Jose International Airport. The tarmac was deserted, the airplanes all idle and dark in their parking stalls. The FedEx area by the freeway, normally bustling with activity, was silent. The parking lot was empty. All day long, the normal rhythmic roar of departing airplanes that went over my building had been absent. It was as if the nation held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The next day, it was apparent that whoever had been in the Towers when they fell, was dead. There were no wounded, no injured. You either escaped, or you burned. The Pentagon looked surprisingly intact (it was designed to withstand a huge bomb), but people had died there too. In Pennsylvania, everyone on Flight 93 perished in a heroic attempt to prevent that plane from finding its target. We will never know how many lives were saved by that bravery.
At work, I searched for a map of the Twin Towers, to show me what companies had been in there. A company called Marsh had offices there, a major business affiliate with my company. Many people in our offices had personal ties to Marsh people. Marsh occupied the floors that the planes had struck. Almost their entire office population, over 700 people, had died in flames.
It was part of my job to identify who had been affected, to find names in my company's database. I found several, marking their records and attaching a brief note: "Deceased. Victim of World Trade Center attacks on 9/11/01."
One of the names I found was Thomas E. Burnett, Jr. He was the COO of a company called Thoratec. He is believed to have engineering the passenger revolt on Flight 93 that brought the plane down in an open field. He had lived in a town close to me. I marked his name as I had the others, feeling the respect and pride that I could not record in the database.
When I was finished I was so choked with rage I could barely breathe. I had never experienced emotions like this. Their magnitude dwarfed anything I had ever known. I was ready to kill Osama bin Laden myself. I would have put a gun to his head and gladly shot him in cold blood. I would still do it now, from sheer justice if not fury.
Suddenly I knew what it meant to want to fight for my country, to be willing to die for it. During my lifetime, the wars America fought meant little. They were politically motivated, poorly fought and without moral or rational purpose or design. They existed for the convenience of a corrupt politician or to curry favor with another government.
But to defend my liberty, to defend it for others who cannot fight; that I understand now.
I have learned what patriotism is, what it feels like. The knowing of the greatness of my country and what freedom means, feeling it in my chest like a swell of fierceness and unwavering desire. That spirit means more than my life. It is greater than money or power or fear. Obviously others know what it means too, more keenly that I before now. They were willing to die to destroy it.
That second night, on September 12, the airport was running again, and FedEx was busy as usual, frantic to make up the time they had lost in being grounded.
I will never be able to describe the feeling I had when I saw a jetliner pass over me as it took off from the runway. America cannot be cowed. We are indomitable, fearless, righteous in our certainty, our justice, our liberty. We are unstoppable.
And I saw something else amazing happen.
In the years to come, younger generations will not be able to comprehend a time that existed so recently; when the flag was not flown here. In this part of California, to display the American flag was to declare oneself a conservative racist in the land of the America-hating, tree-hugging leftists. It was in bad taste at the very least, and not even the most diehard patriots dared to show the Stars & Stripes on their car. Some houses flew it on holidays, but only then.
But after 9-11, I saw it everywhere. That simple emblem was no longer a sign of conservatism, or religion, or being a redneck or a gun nut or a white supremacist. It meant only one thing: we are American, and we are strong.
Stickers and flags on cars, draped on houses, from overpasses, buildings, flying on every flagpole in the city. Someone went around and covered the pedestrian overpass lights with colored plastic so at night they glowed red-white-blue. Elsewhere I saw rows of colored plastic balls hung in the flag design on train trestles. Red-white-blue Christmas lights hung in the flag design over the backs of sound walls facing the freeway.
I began to see old, beat-up cars with flags painted on them. One van near my parents' house has its entire side covered with the design. Bumper stickers with declarations; "These Colors Don't Run", and "United We Stand". Someone hung a huge flag on the fence outside the San Jose Jail, facing the freeway. It is still there as I type this, almost 1 year later.
I am still seeing the flag, even now. It has not disappeared like a fading trend, as so many people said it would. It is still on my car, and will remain there. Before 9-11, this did not exist here in San Jose. You would not have found a single flag displayed on a car anywhere, and precious few on homes.
Maybe this helps people to understand the mind of our nation before 9-11. We lived in a fantasy world, where the most important news of the day was Chandra Levy's disappearance and her affair with Gary Condit, and whether mad cow disease was on the rampage. The President was seen as a stupid fool by many, an untried greenhorn by others.
But the President has risen to the occasion, and history may show him to be one of our country's greatest presidents and statesmen, whose name will be revered for many generations. He understands the war we are in -- the war that we must fight even though we don't want to -- and he knows how to win.
With liberty and justice for all.
August 18, 2002
I live on the west coast of the United States, in California, and I was awakened by my husband. He sat down on the bed beside me and said, "You need to get up. Something bad is happening."
I rolled over, half-awake. We often had conversations in the morning about current events or the morning's newspaper headline, but something in his tone was different that day. There was no amusement, no wry humor, just a flatness. He said, "A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center."
I could only think it was an accident. A terrible one to be sure, but an accident nonetheless. The Towers had stood all my life, completed the year my birth, and I had always been fascinated by them. I knew they were designed to withstand the impact of an airplane.
I said, "Ok, let's go look."
The TV was already on. That was bad. My husband doesn't watch TV in the morning and neither do I. The sound was muted, and I sank onto the couch, dumbfounded at what I was seeing as the first tower burned.
We learned that a second plane had hit the other tower.
Not an accident.
An attack.
We watched the live broadcast, and I kept thinking about how enormous the buildings were. They held the population of the city of Santa Clara in their steel frames during the day. Tens of thousands of people. How long had they been burning?
Then there was a sudden shower of debris from one tower, and a huge column-shaped cloud of dust and smoke. Even the newscaster echoed my disbelief. Where was the building? Was the smoke that thick? The smoke began to clear -- revealing only sky behind it -- and I realized I had just seen a mighty brother of the city fall. Over 100 stories collapsed in less than 3 seconds. Every floor of that building weighed 14 million pounds. Gone in a breath, with thousands of people inside. Then the next building fell, a little later. All I could think of was the people inside and the people who had to be in the streets below. A tawny cloud engulfed Manhattan, boiling through the streets to the sea where it covered the water.
My beautiful city is burning.
What do you do in the face of something like that? How do you act out your next moments, the next hours, the next days? I wept against my husband's leg for a few moments, silent, grappling with what I had seen.
I went to work, knowing I had to keep busy or I would simply drift numbly. In traffic, I couldn't see sometimes through the tears that fell silently. I could tell by looking who else in traffic knew about the attacks, and who didn't. Those of us who knew, we all had the same shell-shocked, horrified expression.
I work for AeA, the American Electronics Association, and there were clients of ours who had offices in the Twin Towers. We kept the radios and the TVs on all day, listening for word of survivors, for word from our government. Word from our clients. It looked so fake, the buildings falling like that. I had never seen such huge destruction in real life. Very few of us have, even though we think we know what it looks like. Now we know that the special effects in the movies got it right.
We got snatches of rumors and information tidbits from our contacts on Capitol Hill, which I won't repeat here, but while many were false, some were not. The Pentagon had been hit, as well. All non-military aircraft were grounded. The President was airborne and his location was classified. It was every bad thriller movie and Tom Clancy novel come to life, too surreal to be believed.
Our building was under lockdown, and exits normally left unlocked were secured and opened only with card keys. We scrutinized everyone we met, searching their eyes for evidence of some damnation. /Is he the enemy?/
We learned that suspicion had fallen to a man named Osama bin Laden. /Who?/ And an organization called Al-Qaida. /Who are those guys?/
When I went home that night, I drove past the San Jose International Airport. The tarmac was deserted, the airplanes all idle and dark in their parking stalls. The FedEx area by the freeway, normally bustling with activity, was silent. The parking lot was empty. All day long, the normal rhythmic roar of departing airplanes that went over my building had been absent. It was as if the nation held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The next day, it was apparent that whoever had been in the Towers when they fell, was dead. There were no wounded, no injured. You either escaped, or you burned. The Pentagon looked surprisingly intact (it was designed to withstand a huge bomb), but people had died there too. In Pennsylvania, everyone on Flight 93 perished in a heroic attempt to prevent that plane from finding its target. We will never know how many lives were saved by that bravery.
At work, I searched for a map of the Twin Towers, to show me what companies had been in there. A company called Marsh had offices there, a major business affiliate with my company. Many people in our offices had personal ties to Marsh people. Marsh occupied the floors that the planes had struck. Almost their entire office population, over 700 people, had died in flames.
It was part of my job to identify who had been affected, to find names in my company's database. I found several, marking their records and attaching a brief note: "Deceased. Victim of World Trade Center attacks on 9/11/01."
One of the names I found was Thomas E. Burnett, Jr. He was the COO of a company called Thoratec. He is believed to have engineering the passenger revolt on Flight 93 that brought the plane down in an open field. He had lived in a town close to me. I marked his name as I had the others, feeling the respect and pride that I could not record in the database.
When I was finished I was so choked with rage I could barely breathe. I had never experienced emotions like this. Their magnitude dwarfed anything I had ever known. I was ready to kill Osama bin Laden myself. I would have put a gun to his head and gladly shot him in cold blood. I would still do it now, from sheer justice if not fury.
Suddenly I knew what it meant to want to fight for my country, to be willing to die for it. During my lifetime, the wars America fought meant little. They were politically motivated, poorly fought and without moral or rational purpose or design. They existed for the convenience of a corrupt politician or to curry favor with another government.
But to defend my liberty, to defend it for others who cannot fight; that I understand now.
I have learned what patriotism is, what it feels like. The knowing of the greatness of my country and what freedom means, feeling it in my chest like a swell of fierceness and unwavering desire. That spirit means more than my life. It is greater than money or power or fear. Obviously others know what it means too, more keenly that I before now. They were willing to die to destroy it.
That second night, on September 12, the airport was running again, and FedEx was busy as usual, frantic to make up the time they had lost in being grounded.
I will never be able to describe the feeling I had when I saw a jetliner pass over me as it took off from the runway. America cannot be cowed. We are indomitable, fearless, righteous in our certainty, our justice, our liberty. We are unstoppable.
And I saw something else amazing happen.
In the years to come, younger generations will not be able to comprehend a time that existed so recently; when the flag was not flown here. In this part of California, to display the American flag was to declare oneself a conservative racist in the land of the America-hating, tree-hugging leftists. It was in bad taste at the very least, and not even the most diehard patriots dared to show the Stars & Stripes on their car. Some houses flew it on holidays, but only then.
But after 9-11, I saw it everywhere. That simple emblem was no longer a sign of conservatism, or religion, or being a redneck or a gun nut or a white supremacist. It meant only one thing: we are American, and we are strong.
Stickers and flags on cars, draped on houses, from overpasses, buildings, flying on every flagpole in the city. Someone went around and covered the pedestrian overpass lights with colored plastic so at night they glowed red-white-blue. Elsewhere I saw rows of colored plastic balls hung in the flag design on train trestles. Red-white-blue Christmas lights hung in the flag design over the backs of sound walls facing the freeway.
I began to see old, beat-up cars with flags painted on them. One van near my parents' house has its entire side covered with the design. Bumper stickers with declarations; "These Colors Don't Run", and "United We Stand". Someone hung a huge flag on the fence outside the San Jose Jail, facing the freeway. It is still there as I type this, almost 1 year later.
I am still seeing the flag, even now. It has not disappeared like a fading trend, as so many people said it would. It is still on my car, and will remain there. Before 9-11, this did not exist here in San Jose. You would not have found a single flag displayed on a car anywhere, and precious few on homes.
Maybe this helps people to understand the mind of our nation before 9-11. We lived in a fantasy world, where the most important news of the day was Chandra Levy's disappearance and her affair with Gary Condit, and whether mad cow disease was on the rampage. The President was seen as a stupid fool by many, an untried greenhorn by others.
But the President has risen to the occasion, and history may show him to be one of our country's greatest presidents and statesmen, whose name will be revered for many generations. He understands the war we are in -- the war that we must fight even though we don't want to -- and he knows how to win.
With liberty and justice for all.
August 18, 2002
Collection
Citation
“story1067.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed January 10, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/4860.