Never Forget and Start of Revenge Tour

The Birthday Girl Yesterday

First I must take a moment to note yesterday’s birthday of my fabulous mother in law. She didn’t know what to make of me and my broken Spanish back in 1982 when I was trying to convince her to let me marry her daughter after a three day courtship. Fortunately she was able to overcome her better judgement and thirty-three years later she remains one of my favorite people in the world. Family gathered around her yesterday to properly recognize this extraordinary lady. Feliz Cumpleanos and thanks for the begrudging initial approval. I hope I’ve redeemed the chance you took on me all those years ago in that seafood restaurant.

PanaGal Supplied Cake

Birthday Brunch with Husband and Brother

The object of that permission, my favorite Panamanian, took up station next to me last night to watch the start of Tom Brady’s revenge tour through opposing teams begin. She did take a few moments to criticize the players I drafted for our fantasy football team, asking how our son obtained Antonio Bryant instead of us. It didn’t help that Bryant was running pell-mell around the Gillette Stadium last night. 

Other Teams - Be Afraid - Be Very Afraid
(Especially the Colts)

Brady looked like a man bent on exacting payment for the injustice and mean spiritedness he’s been forced to endure over the past few months. The Steelers defense was fortunately as bad as the Patriots’ was and Brady shredded them. It wouldn’t be Gillette if there wasn’t some controversy as the NFL supplied headsets were not working. A conspiracy theorist could opine that the NFL was doing this to stoke the flames against the Patriots. The Steelers coach whined after the game which only goes to show how much Belichek is in the heads of mere mortals.

The words below are the same I publish each year on September 11 to remember that day in 2001. With the rush and bustle of everyday life people have a tendency to soften or even twist what really happened that day. The Wahhabi fundamentalists that launched these cowardly attacks have been allowed to regroup and flourish in the last six years to the point they've carved out their own little pseudo nation. That’s good on only one front – they’ve provided a target rich environment. They cannot be reasoned with or rehabilitated, they can only be killed like the mad dogs they are. Never forget and continue to make them pay.

I was assigned to the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. I remember a beautifully clear day where the oppressive summer Washington, DC heat was finally gone. We had recently dropped off my daughter for her freshman year at Boston University, my son was a junior in high school, and my wife worked at an adult day care facility in Northern Virginia. I was actually in a satellite office in Crystal City while our Pentagon offices were refurbished. My morning routine was to head out for a run along the Potomac River where there was a nice running trail. I ran around the Pentagon and glanced over at the helipad where I had taken several trips out of and then wound my way down to the river. I had just reached the river, on the opposite side of the Pentagon from the helipad, and turned south when I heard a very loud bang. There was always a lot of construction going on in nearby Crystal City so I initially thought that someone had used a little too much explosive for a new roadway.

Red X is Where the Plane Went in, Blue Line is my Running Route that Day
Yellow X is Where I was When the Plane Hit

As I continued my run I heard police sirens blooming from every direction. I reached a gap in the trees and could see a column of smoke rising from the Pentagon. I had just about reached the point where the running trail nears National Airport and I was greeted by a truly surreal sight. The airport, in reaction to the earlier attacks in New York City, was being emptied. People, with their luggage in tow, were wandering down the running trail with no real sense of where they were going, only that they had been ordered to leave the terminal. I gave directions to the nearest hotel to some and then headed back to my office, by now the sirens were almost deafening and traffic had come to a complete stop in both directions on the nearby George Washington Parkway. When I reached my office I learned the true scope of the disaster and watched the towers fall on a TV someone had set up in their cubicle. There were a series of follow up explosions as transformers blew up in reaction to the Pentagon disaster. A couple guys and I made our way over to the Pentagon to see if we could help with any evacuation but the area was already cordoned off. We helped the rapidly growing casualty collection in the south parking lot; there were a lot of dazed civilian workers. The military, even those wounded were trying to help out; we all realized we had just gone to war. Eventually we were ushered away as more of the professional emergency workers showed up. I returned to my office and decided it would be a good idea to let my family know I was alive. I called my wife who had heard and was just about to go into full blown panic mode. I called Boston University because I didn’t have my daughter’s dorm room number with me and when I explained where I was calling from the operator connected me directly, even though that wasn’t usually allowed. I spoke with my daughter’s roommate who promised to find my daughter and let her know. A similar call to my son’s high school followed by a call to my mother’s house. I had to leave a message there since she out shopping and she later told me that was the best phone message she ever received because she had convinced herself I had been killed after hearing the news on the car radio.

All buses, my normal way home, were shut down at the Pentagon. Washington DC was shutting down and everybody was released from work at the same time. I went to the Metro station and waited while five different trains, packed to the gills, went by until I was able to squeeze into one. I rode it as far as I could and then walked up to a nearby mall where I could wait for my wife to come pick me up. I sat in a bar and watched the day’s events unfold on TV. One of the other patrons claimed to have been driving on I-395 and saw the plane plow into the Pentagon. He said he would never forget seeing the airline lettering so clear and so close. The plane went right into the area near the helipad, where I had run ten minutes before. After an hour the entire mall closed and I had to go wait outside a bookstore, also closed, for about two hours before my wife was able to get me. One of the most memorable and cherished things from that horrible day were the phone calls we received all that night as friends and family from around the world, knowing I was assigned to the Pentagon, called to insure I was okay.

My wife was a little shocked the next day when I told her I was going back to work but I needed to, I was so angry. It didn’t help when I arrived at the Pentagon, smoke still rising with bodies still unrecovered, that I was greeted by a group of protestors reveling in the destruction. It took a lot of self-restraint not to kick some serious ass at that point. I was so glad Clinton was out of office because I knew he would have been incapable of making the tough decisions required by this act. He would have thrown a few cruise missiles and called it a day. 

We as a nation learned that day that there are some people who cannot be reasoned with and needed to die; that was the only way to end the threat and that you couldn’t do it from a distance. I also remembered the way the country came together for a short time and I felt glad my kids were around to see it; to see what a united America was like. This eroded over time as the politicians felt safe enough to stop cooperating again, but it did happen. It was another object lesson for evil as well, don’t wake up the sleeping giant, when you do, be prepared to experience unprecedented wrath. These were my memories of the day when everything changed, but maybe not enough.