Most mornings, I pulled into my office’s underground parking garage around 6:00 a.m. On September 11, 2001, I was listening to a radio broadcast from a station in New York City. An excited caller, calling into the radio station from his phone, was describing a plane that had hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. The radio host seemed to hardly believe it, but my thought at that moment was that it was a terrible accident.
Just as I pulled into the garage, the caller became hysterical as he described, live, a second plane plowing into the second tower. At that moment, I knew it was not an accident, but terrorism. It was a sinking feeling. I listened to the broadcast as long as I could and then grabbed my lunch and headed to the elevator. In the large cafeteria on the fourth floor, where I left my lunch in a refrigerator, there were groups of people clustered around several different TV sets that were mounted into the ceiling. This was a financial services company and people normally watched the business news throughout the day to keep track of the financial markets.
Today was different. There was no banter. You could have heard a pin drop. The groups of people just stared silently at the awful image they were seeing. There was a sense of disbelief and anxiety and tension at that moment. I watched quietly with the others for about 10 minutes and then began walking to my desk. Everywhere in our suite of offices, there are TV’s everywhere protruding from the ceiling. I stopped by another TV near my cubical. More people watched in horror and the comments were made as if in a library.
By this time, it was nearly 6:30 a.m. and the uncomfortable feeling had intensified. No work was getting done and it seemed like the phones had grown silent and the focus of everyone had shifted completely from what might have been a routine morning. Just then, word came over the news broadcast that the Pentagon had been struck by another passenger jet. We all began to feel vulnerable. The uneasiness was nearly stifling.
Here I was on the fourth floor of a financial services company in Phoenix and I was witnessing a day that would serve to be an inflection point for every American. It wasn’t only a matter of seeing what on folded on TV, but it was an awareness that any sense of security, from earlier in that morning, had vanished.
As we continued to watch the TV monitors quietly, and the clock had nearly struck 10 a.m., the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed straight down. At that moment, there were screams and crying from others in the room about 20 feet away from me. Three people, from New York, who had family members who worked in lower Manhattan, ran out of the room. You could hear the crying and screaming as they disappeared. I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that was uncomfortable and there was an unspoken horror among my colleagues.
Minutes later, the news broadcaster reported that the control tower had lost touch with another plane that was flying over Pennsylvania. I called my wife to make sure she was okay.
At about the same time, a senior member of management and a security person called everyone on the floor together for an important announcement. There was a genuine fear that our building, as a financial services company, may be rigged with explosives by the terrorists. Bomb-sniffing dogs were about to be brought in, but everyone must head for the stairs and make it out of the building in an orderly fashion. As we were about to exit the building, the horror of the north tower collapsing was playing out on the TV.
The pit in my stomach had wound even tighter and the reality of the terrible events on the TV had just become more personal. Waiting on the sidewalk, near the street, none of us were quite sure what might happen next. We wondered if our colleagues had just lost family members.
One of my friends incredulously recounted while we were outside, that he had just been to the top of one of the towers less than two weeks before. You could see the emptiness in his eyes as he realized that if the timing were different, he might have lost his life. There was a palpable fear that a bomb might explode any moment. After what seemed like a long time, the police officers came out with the all-clear and allowed us to re-enter the building.
I don’t remember if we were required to work that morning, but I do remember that we were not allowed to leave work immediately. I just wanted to get home. I knew there was no escape from the horror of that day, but it just seemed like a time that anyone would prefer to be in their own home. The terrorists had managed to create an atrocity and the resulting terror was visited upon every American within an hour’s time.
The days afterward remained tense and empty. We were glued to our TV sets that day and during the days that followed and it still did not seem possible. It was surreal in every way. The terrorists had succeeded in striking terror in the hearts of every person. For one day, on September 12, there was national unity. But, in the years since, no person living in America on that day, will forget a single moment.
There will always be a sense of vulnerability that cannot be reversed.
