9-11 Recollections

Heather in To Love, Honor, and Blog recounts September 11.

Can you believe it's been almost a year since that fateful day?

My wife was pregnant at the time with our daughter and was on absolute bed rest. I had just come out of the shower when she told me that stuff was happening in NY and she wasn't sure what. She said it seemed like a plane flew into a building. What she said did not make sense to me even though I saw the pictures on TV, I could not process it, and so I went back to the bathroom to finish getting ready for work.

Then she saw on TV, the second plane fly into the second building. She called me and we knew that something was definitely wrong. I work in Washington, D.C. and it was a no brainer that D.C. would be a target. I called work but there was nothing about closing down the building so I had to go into work. BTW, we live about an hour south of DC and 20 minutes from Andrews Air Force Base.

On the way to work the radio shows were all speculation, no one seemed to know what was happening. Then we heard locally that the Pentagon had been hit. And then we heard that there was a fire at the White House. Panic had set in.

My wife called me on my cell phone and wanted me to come back home. I was closer to DC at the time and decided to go in because my workplace still had not closed our building and i was concerned about panic fleeing from the DC area. As far as I knew, downtown DC and all the sensitive areas were now live targets and had possibly been hit. I work in the NE part of the city which is a siginificant distance from the Capitol building so I felt relatively safe because I knew there'd be other targets before my work place area.

Finally, at work, we were able to get the scoop that two planes had crashed into the twin towers in NY, one in DC and then reports were coming in about another near Pittsburgh.

Even though federal employees and later, DC employees, had been asked to go home, we couldn't, so we had to work through all that. I got a call from my Dad who was anxious and fortunately he had heard from my sister who lives in Brooklyn and frequently got temp jobs at the twin towers.

Our other concern was my wife who was back in Southern Maryland. There were rumors that Andrews AFB was a target which made me supremely nervous. Besides Andrews, there are quite a few military related insitutions in the area. That, in addition to our proximity to DC made me concerned for my wife. But since Andrews was still standing at the time, I knew that whoever the enemy was had lost the element of surprise and unless they wanted a couple F-15s lodged all the way up their ____ (pardon my French), the area was probably as safe as any in the country.

NY received most of the air time as it should have, but the Pentagon hit was significant for the DC metro area. It seems that everyone could play six degrees to the Pentagon crash. I knew someone who worked on the part of the ring across from where the plane hit who saw the whole thing live. A daughter of someone we are acquainted with worked in the area that was hit and had just left her desk for a meeting. These stories are not unusual as you probably may have some yourself.

Weeks later I would drive past the Pentagon a few times and it absolutely blew me away. You could see the missing section and the huge American flag. I never got to see ground zero, but I understand the experience of actually seeing the ruins was unlike any other experience.

Crazy day, but grace came out of it. We just have to remember that in al this craziness Paul tells us in 1 Thess 5:17, "in everything give thanks."