9-11 Never Forget

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Anniversary #2 was the one that hit me hardest. #1 happened so quickly, it seemed, that everything was still fresh, especially the anger. #2 had let enough time to pass that I felt the anger again, but sadness, too.

#17? We'll see how the stories show up on the news tomorrow to see if anyone really cares anymore.
 
Thanks for posting it this I totally forgot
 
Matthew said:
Anniversary #2 was the one that hit me hardest. #1 happened so quickly, it seemed, that everything was still fresh, especially the anger. #2 had let enough time to pass that I felt the anger again, but sadness, too.

#17? We'll see how the stories show up on the news tomorrow to see if anyone really cares anymore.
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And that is the bothersome part to me...people have forgotten. Kids graduating high school this year have no memory of the events that day or the shock everyone felt. It is something to be read about in the history books and watch on grainy documentaries. Although I guess all events are subject to fade. My parents had Pearl Harbor, that was a major turning point in their lifetime. My dad even called me on 9-11 and told me this will be your Pearl Harbor.

The part that really bothers me is we lost how united we were as a nation that day. I will always remember that much. I would be interested to pull crime stats from 9-11 and the following days. I would almost bet crime all but disappeared at least for a short while.
 
midwestpa24 said:
...Kids graduating high school this year have no memory of the events that day or the shock everyone felt....
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why would they? they were between not born and 1 or 2.
 
Patrick Witty was the photographer.

He tracked down the guy in the center of the photo (glasses), he was supposed to be on a job interview inside one of the towers but was running late that day.

witp010911b0221.jpg
 
midwestpa24 said:
And that is the bothersome part to me...people have forgotten. Kids graduating high school this year have no memory of the events that day or the shock everyone felt. It is something to be read about in the history books and watch on grainy documentaries. Although I guess all events are subject to fade. My parents had Pearl Harbor, that was a major turning point in their lifetime. My dad even called me on 9-11 and told me this will be your Pearl Harbor.

The part that really bothers me is we lost how united we were as a nation that day. I will always remember that much.
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Yup. I won’t “forget” about the OKC Bombing or 9/11, but I never have personally known anyone affected by such tragic events. I see the obligatory re-telling of stories and video clips on the news channels for a day or two, and don’t pay them much attention. Pearl Harbor is one that, while I nor my parents were even alive, strikes me as an event of much greater magnitude. Not just in lives lost, but in implications if we did not prevail.

Dunno, I just don’t get sentimental on days of remembrance. National disasters normally bring out the best in us, but it’s generally short-lived.


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I was in New York this past July and went down to the memorial pools and Freedom Tower. I would’ve only been five at the time that it happened, but it’s a sobering feeling to be walking on the hallowed ground.

May they rest in paradise.
 
I remember that day, I was far away from the events but still remember. I was on my way to work on base at Eielson AFB. About a mile from the gate the highway came to a dead stop, so I asked what was up on my CB in case someone was listening. Sure enough a guy came on saying the twin towers have been hit and the base is closed until further notice. Drove back home and saw it on the news. Unbelievable sight, I could not imagine being there in person. The picture posted above shows the shock and emotion, sad times for sure!
 
I heard about it on the radio on the way to work. Not much at that time other than that a plane of some sort had hit one of the towers. We turned on CNN on the conference room TV and spent the rest of the morning watching.

Later, I remember watching F16s burning holes in the sky for several days. Then one day, not long after, I was doing yard worn and heard a jet overhead. Things were still very quiet at the time, so I was really curious to see what it was. It was a B2 heading to Guam. I think I saw a couple of them over the next day or two.
 
I was in college and sleeping through the entire morning (Standard). FBO woke me up to tell me my rental scheduled for the afternoon had been cancelled. I asked why, they seemed incredulous, I played it off like I had an idea why. I had zero clue. I turned on the TV and quickly realized the NAS was gonna be a no-fly zone for the rest of the week.

As to comparisons to Pearl, I understand the point, but still hesitate to make the comparison. Afg is a quagmire of millenia. Always has been. You can't nation-build in quicksand. Beyond driving the Taliban out in quick order, the place lost military relevance to the reasons we went in there. What it retained, like Iraq, is economic value to the chicken hawks and civilian profiteers of the perpetual war machine. Aaaand I digress.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
Here is something to think about - http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-al-qaeda-survive-20180910-story.html

So why is Al Qaida stronger than ever? The US military, the strongest military by far on the planet, and perhaps ever in the history of the human species, has been unable to suppress them. Why is that?

Sobering and perhaps informative to think.
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Not to turn this political, but we are fighting with a rule book limiting our actions, while the enemy laughs at our rules and do what they want. And our military is still designed as a fighting force for large scale warfare against other large armies and the majority of our doctrine still follows along those lines.
 
JB1842 said:
Not to turn this political, but we are fighting with a rule book limiting our actions, while the enemy laughs at our rules and do what they want. And our military is still designed as a fighting force for large scale warfare against other large armies and the majority of our doctrine still follows along those lines.
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One more reason to abandon ship and leave that place. We should gone scorched Earth on it to begin with, then bailed.
 
Reposted from my Facebook wall.

"What's on your mind, Ted?" asks Facebook. A lot, as there always is on this day, and particularly this year.

17 years ago I woke up and went to school. It was the beginning of my senior year at Brooklyn Technical High School. The skies were blue. Similar to what they are today here in Kansas, but clearer. There wasn't a single cloud, or even a wisp of a cloud, to be seen. The crisp fall air was refreshing on the walk from the Nevins Street station on the 4 train, down DeKalb Avenue to Brooklyn Tech. Smiles among friends as we started our senior year.

One of my favorite features of that school was the view of the World Trade Center. Room 5W15, where I had my English class that morning, faced the World Trade Center. From my seat I couldn't see the towers directly as the large heaters those classrooms had blocked the view.

Mr. Williams was an engaging teacher, but I still tended to look out the window. Out the west-facing window I saw a haze in the sky, floating south. I knew, seeing that haze, that something was very, very wrong. It did not belong, and only something very significant could create a haze like that. I also somehow knew that whatever was wrong, there was nothing I could do about it, and once I knew what it was that things would never be the same.

I'll never know how I knew those things, but I sat there for a few minutes, mostly looking at the haze until a girl towards the back of the class screamed and we all looked out the window. By that point both of the Twin Towers had been hit and were ablaze.

The school made us continue going through our classes, although there was no attempt at teaching for the rest of the day. Crying, sadness, hugs. During fencing class (on the 8th floor) the first tower fell, which we all saw out the windows. After that everyone kept the blinds drawn, and the 2nd tower fell during math class.

Nobody was certain at that point what was coming next or what the scale of attacks planned would be. As a school with 5,000 students, we were concerned that our school might be a target, and many of us wanted to leave. We stayed, though, at least most of us did. As upset and scared as we were, nobody panicked, and we moved quietly and orderly from class to class. Cell phone lines were overloaded, it was hard to get a call through. Televisions replayed the footage again, and again, and again. The towers being hit, collapsing. The people who opted to jump out of the buildings rather than be burned alive.

Routes into Manhattan were closed, meaning I couldn't get home when school let out. I spent a few hours at Foster Chen's house until subways reopened and I was able to get back home. The subway went faster through the tunnel than I'd ever seen it go before or since. The driver must have been thinking what the rest of us were thinking too - afraid that all bridges and tunnels would be targets as well. I made it home, and my mom never hugged me so hard before or since.

The smell. Just thinking about it I can smell the destruction still. From my apartment more than 6 miles north of the World Trade Center we could smell the collapsed buildings.

September 12th was in some ways more surreal than the 11th. The entire city was shut down and law enforcement from all the surrounding areas and the National Guard were all over to direct traffic and relief/recovery efforts. I got on my bicycle and rode as far south as I could, taking pictures, simply to see as much as I could. My church had a special service that evening. Episcopal New Yorkers tend to not be a particularly hugging or crying crowd. Everyone was hugging, everyone was crying.

When the general area was more opened up, Katrina K. Masterson and I went down to see the destruction. It felt like being in a movie. The sky was still obscured from the dust, the stench was overpowering. Cars parked on the streets were covered in rubble from when the towers collapsed, mostly untouched. Pieces of the towers collapsed.

There were some opportunistic people who tried selling "I survived 9/11" (with the 11 being depicted by the towers) t-shirts. I was surprised I never saw those people get the crap beat out of them, but it didn't last long.

The recovery efforts went on for months, along with the stories. In Grand Central Station, huge bulletin boards were placed, where thousands put pictures of their loved ones, asking for anyone who saw them to call. To me, that was one of the greatest signs of desperation. Almost all of those people were dead, but their friends and families held on to what little shreds of hope they could. Back at school, many of my classmates lost family members who worked in the towers. My local fire department lost 8 firefighters. I couldn't bring myself to walk past the station for months. Those of us who didn't lose friends felt guilty that we weren't somehow more directly impacted. One friend was in a Starbucks across the street when the first tower hit. He walked out, saw the tower ablaze, then turned around and started walking away.

Trucks lined the streets near the World Trade Center, waiting for body bags. Thousands of body bags. Many New Yorkers debated whether or not to leave the city after this realization of how much of a target it could be, but on the whole, we decided not to.

The sun rose, the sun set, time marched on, but none of us were truly alright, and many of us never will be. For years I hated airplanes, and simply hearing one overhead was enough to send me into panic mode. It was 4 years before I boarded a commercial flight again, and I never would have thought that I would become a pilot. The New York City skyline will always look wrong to me. What I will always remember is standing at the base of the World Trade Center, looking up at these structures so tall that they seemed to touch the heavens themselves, and from which you looked down on helicopters from the top floor.

Perhaps of extra significance on this day is the fact that it has been 17 years. A seemingly meaningless number, but for me that means that half my life has now been lived in the post 9/11 world. Not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about that day at some point. Mostly the sharpness of the memories have dulled, but they can and often are still set off. A year later in college, some particularly idiotic oaf said that it'd been a year, and I should "be ok with it." I'm still surprised I didn't punch him. Sometimes you don't get over it, you get on with it.

This morning Beatrix, who's almost 4, woke up early, and was downstairs in the kitchen with me as I was getting breakfast ready for the kids. "Daddy the sun isn't up!" she said, protesting it was too early. "Don't worry, the sun will rise. The sun always rises" I told her. The sun has risen 6,209 times since the World Trade Center was hit, and it will rise many times more. Time marches on, even for those of us for whom time stopped that day.

As we drove up the driveway, Beatrix exclaimed "Daddy! The sun is rising!" Yes, sweetheart, it is.
 
Normally someone from the MC would make a post on this from the MC account. In this case I'm going to opt to make it personally since, well, I was there and this is therefore extremely personal.

I don't think there's a single person in this country who has no opinion on the events of 9/11 or what it's meant for us in the years following. As a nation, things have changed. In aviation we see this more than anyone from how it's changed our landscape whether it's GA or airlines. Those in the military are also especially aware as that has shaped the landscape of the wars/conflicts/engagements that our armed forces have been involved in over the past 17 years. The country has changed.

But that is not what this thread was about. This thread was about remembering a day that our country was attacked, arguably the worst attack since Pearl Harbor, some would argue the worst attack for well over 100 years prior. It was about remembering the thousands of people who died a horrific death. One could argue the luckiest among them were the ones in the towers who died seconds after they saw their fate. One could argue the luckiest were the ones who were at least able to make the decision to jump and had an opportunity to call their loved ones first. All of them were unlucky.

It was about remembering those who, whether or not you agree with the decisions of our military leaders during that period (and still today), opted to defend our country. Some paid the ultimate sacrifice, others have returned scarred physically and emotionally.

It shouldn't be too much to ask that we take a day, minute, second of mourning, and let it be that.

Discussion of politics is not permitted on this forum. You know this, I know this.

This thread has been closed and will remain closed. Warnings with points have been issued.
 
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