9/11 Ping!
Nashville, after the first and before the second. Woke up to news of the attack and headed out I-24. Aircraft were already ordered down and the sky was full of planes coming in. I was super pissed and new it was the Islamo-Facists. I left work when the south tower fell and decided to be home to try and understand the gravity. Work was not possible for anyone.
I got a phone call before the second plane hit,,,
Woke-up in the fog of war,,,
I was at work. My coworkers came downstairs and said something bad had happened. They were trying to get information on the internet, but were not having any luck because the sites were overloaded.
They asked me to check... on my very right wing sites... Sure enough, Free Republic was up and running and had the news.
I looked out and saw a crowd gathering in the street looking towards the direction of the WTC. I walked to that side of the building with everyone else on my floor who heard it and there was a huge hole in one of the towers with black smoke coming out of it. We all figured a wayward plane had just hit it (no thought at that moment that it may have been deliberate).
A few moments later I saw the second plane flying low. Even before impact, we now realized that the first one was no accident. I will never forget the sight of that plane making contact with the building and seeing the flames shoot out. It looked the way it does in all the action/disaster movies. They told us to evacuate the building and head north.
I hope I never have to see anything like that again.
Woke up 5:00am PDT. Went to get coffee, and the rest of my breakfast sat down turned on the TV. Coming to life, I saw the first tower on fire. SHOCKED awake, I was listening to the reporter saying what a terrible accident it was as I saw first hand the second plane curving toward the second tower. I said to myself, “ THIS IS NO ACCIDENT!!!!”
Forgot to mention, the Captain of the Pentagon Plane, Chic Burlingame was my classmate in high school.
RIP Chic!
We had hitched a small pine tree branch to the gable peak when we finished topping her off and I gave one of the laborers the money to go get a large American flag which we placed on the peak in place of the pine.
An awful day, one which only a simpleton or a leftist could forget.
My first class was at 9:10. Before class I was reading Free Republic and came across the thread, “Plane Crash - World Trade Center” - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/520260/posts
I emailed the thread URL to my son, who had recently started working in midtown Manhattan. Then about two minutes before class I checked Free Republic again and found that another plane had hit.
When I came back to my office at 10:00 I received the following email from my son: “We have a clear view of the towers from our building and we didn’t see the
first one, but as we watched we saw the second. This is crazy.” From the email I knew my son was OK, but I didn’t know about my future daughter-in-law, who had just moved to New York to be closer to my son. And it was her first day of work.
When my wife and I came home for lunch, we listened to 10 or 15 messages on our answering machine saying people were thinking about or praying for my son and his fiance. Either before or after we turned on tv and watched the pictures of the towers falling. Both of us had tears in our eyes.
By the middle of the afternoon my son reached me by phone. He told me how he was with one of his coworkers when she found out her boyfriend had died in the towers. (Her boyfried had placed a cell phone call to his parents, telling them he loved them.) My future daughter-in-law was fine. She showed up for work and was promptly sent home. I think both of them walked to Brooklyn.
I’ll never forget that day, the video of the towers falling, the flags, and the feeling of unity across the country. I’ll also never forget something I read soon after, I think on another free republic thread: There are no unsinkable ships. There are no invulnerable nations. The only eternal security is Jesus Christ.
