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Remembering
Sep. 11th, 2004 08:07 amThree years ago right now...
I was at work at the police academy, and one of my coworkers got a call saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought it was a light plane, maybe a Cessna or something. I recalled the story of how, during World War II, a bomber got lost in the fog and collided with the Empire State Building.
It wasn't until the second plane hit that I realized this was something bigger. When the report came in about the Pentagon, I remember thinking that this was the first salvo in a war.
Then I remembered that I knew people who worked in the financial district, good friends, people close to my heart, and I freaked out from worry. Then came the gasp from the radio ... and the announcement that the first tower had fallen.
The day was spent cancelling a conference of chiefs of police, as every cop in the state was being recalled to emergency duty.
Coming home that afternoon, I reached a point, a high hill, from which I could see the New York skyline on a clear day. The atmosphere was crystal clear. Not a cloud in the sky, not a wisp, not a single airplane contrail ... not a blemish other than the three-mile-high plume of smoke rising from the section of New York we would come to know as Ground Zero.
I feel less safe right this minute than I did then, the moment I saw the Towers were gone...
I was at work at the police academy, and one of my coworkers got a call saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought it was a light plane, maybe a Cessna or something. I recalled the story of how, during World War II, a bomber got lost in the fog and collided with the Empire State Building.
It wasn't until the second plane hit that I realized this was something bigger. When the report came in about the Pentagon, I remember thinking that this was the first salvo in a war.
Then I remembered that I knew people who worked in the financial district, good friends, people close to my heart, and I freaked out from worry. Then came the gasp from the radio ... and the announcement that the first tower had fallen.
The day was spent cancelling a conference of chiefs of police, as every cop in the state was being recalled to emergency duty.
Coming home that afternoon, I reached a point, a high hill, from which I could see the New York skyline on a clear day. The atmosphere was crystal clear. Not a cloud in the sky, not a wisp, not a single airplane contrail ... not a blemish other than the three-mile-high plume of smoke rising from the section of New York we would come to know as Ground Zero.
I feel less safe right this minute than I did then, the moment I saw the Towers were gone...
