By Kristena Mears
Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash
That morning is seared into my memory. September 11, 2001. The day we saw evil. The day we watched in horror as lives were snuffed out.
I was still in bed when my hubby turned on the T.V. He would often turn on an old show if I was still asleep. Gunsmoke and Leave it to Beaver were his favorites.
But that day the old-time shows were interrupted by the News. A plane had lost control and hit into the North Tower of World Trade Center.
“What a terrible accident,” we thought. I had woken up to the news report and had begun getting ready for work.
The story hadn’t suggested yet that this was anything more than a horrible accident, but I remember thinking that a pilot should have been able to avoid that tower. In the back of my mind, I wondered if maybe… just maybe, this wasn’t an accident.
Then it happened. We both watched in horror, mouths dropped open, not truly believing what we were seeing, as the second plane blazes across the T.V. screen and hit the second tower.
I don’t remember if I screamed or just stared in wide-eyed shock. I remember thinking, “we’re under attach” then “No, this is all a fluke accident, this can’t be happening“
But it wasn’t an accident. It was real.
Here is a brief Timeline of the Events
8:46 a.m. et – American Airlines Flight 11 (traveling from Boston to Los Angeles) strikes the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
9:02 a.m. et – United Airlines Flight 175 (traveling from Boston to Los Angeles) strikes the south tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
9:38 a.m. et – American Airlines Flight 77 (traveling from Dulles, Virginia, to Los Angeles) strikes the Pentagon Building in Washington.
9:58 a.m. et – South tower of WTC collapses in approximately 10 seconds.
10:03 a.m. et – United Airlines Flight 93 (traveling from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco) crashes in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
10:28 a.m. et – North tower of WTC collapses. The time between the first attack and the collapse of both World Trade Center towers is 102 minutes.
2,996 died on 9/11, 2,606 were killed at the World Trade Centre and the surrounding area. 390 were killed in the hijacked aircraft. 19 of those were hijackers.
Today, eighteen years later. I still wonder how anyone could do such a thing. I also wonder how it can, so easily, be ignored. How it can be relegated to a page in a history book. Children who are adults now, don’t even remember the day it happened. Time passes on. To them, it’s just a story of a past event, much as Pearl Harbor was to me, when I was a child.
That’s history. It marches on and becomes stories in a book. Years from now this story maybe be the stuff of legend, as Troy and the Trojan Horse.
But not now. Not while we are alive and here to relay the events that affected so many lives. Not while there is potential that it can happen again.
We are here to tell of what we saw and not let the memory die.
We will remember.
We will fight any who try to make this happen again. This is our country, MY country, and I am proud of it. I’m proud to be an American.
Proud that my country is free.
We will NOT let others steal away our right to be free and to live in the land that our forefather died to protect.
We will fight all, both inside, and outside, who threaten our country and our freedom.
We will Never Forget
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