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The night of the 10th, I had fallen hard while horsing around with my sons and cracked a bone in my wrist. I met my doctor (my bro-in-law) at his office early the next morning and was being x-rayed when one of the nurses said that a plane had hit the Trade Center tower. We started talking about the bomber that had hit the Empire State Building and then heard that the second tower had been hit. It was then that we knew it was terrorist related. We wrapped the wrist, and I drove to work where I helped arrange to broadcast video over our ip network.

For the next couple of hours, I watched the news reports and then decided to be home with my wife and baby daughter. We only live 35 miles from Manhattan and are on the shore of Long Island Sound. On a clear day, you can see the NYC skyline across the water from certain locations, so we went to the beach. Sure enough, we could see the smoke from the burning rubble.

When the grim score was taken, my wife and I knew several business acquaintances who worked at Marsh McLennan and Aion who were killed, the mother of my son's schoolmate was killed, the son of a friend at church died of a heart attack during the recovery effort the next day. Our next door neighbors owned a day care a couple of blocks away from the towers. Although none of the kids lost parents, a disembodied arm and hand hit the window of their business, and ultimately, they lost their business as it was inside the closed zone. I know of two other men who made it out of the building in time as they were both on lower floors. Lots of people moved either jobs or homes from Manhattan to my CT town and occasionally you hear one of their stories. What happened that day was a very personal thing and although CT is a somewhat liberal state politically, the friggin' Al Queda navy would never make it past Norwalk. We would kick their ass.