Like it was yesterday...
Hard to believe its been so long,... In my head, I can see it like it was just yesterday.
I was working from home that day, and had just finished doing the dishes from the previous nights meal. I was opening the windows in the house because the weather was stellar,...much like it is today here in MD. Sunny, 75 degrees, not a cloud in the sky,...perfect.
Then my phone rings around 8am, and my uncle says; "Dude,..do you have the TV on?", to which I said "No, not yet, why,... what's going on,...?". He was clearly distressed, and I could tell something was terribly wrong from the tone in his voice. His reply was "Turn on the news, dude,...we are under attack!"
I'll never forget those words. Attack? That's something you read about in history books, nothing that could happen here, right?
We live in the greater Baltimore area, and by 9am the cell phone network was jammed solid. My wife, Laura, was downtown in DC on sales calls that morning. When I heard about the plane hitting the Pentagon, and another still unaccounted for over the skies of PA, headed for who knows where. I tried to get a call to her to come home, but there was no chance. The system was unusable. Later that night she told me about being able to smell the smoke in the air as she was very close by, just over the river in Crystal City, and how long it took her to get home with no real form of communication other than her car radio.
We watched the TV for the next two days straight, hardly looking away. It was on all night, and all day, and the only breaks we took were to eat and bathe.
A lot of things in our lives changed that day, forever. Our sense of national security, our feeling of invincibility. We had been punched in the mouth for only the second time in our modern history, on our own soil.
Through out my 20's I did EMT/Firefighter work for my local municipality. The images of the brave men and women from the first responders running toward the towers as the public was running the other way, is burned into my psyche, and know I will never forget their sacrifice, or the losses their families will have to endure. True hero's, who showed resolve in the most extreme circumstances.
They may have knocked us down that day, with a cowardly sucker punch, but they sure as hell couldn't knock us out. When you poke the Eagle, sometimes you get the talons!