Osama Bin Laden is dead. Good riddance!
It's almost 10 years since the terrorist attack on the US that was ordered by Bin Laden.
I stood at my office windows and watched that day as the WTC towers burned, saw the 2nd plane crash into them, watched the fiery holocaust consume the towers and, finally and in a state of shock and disbelief watched their collapse.
It's been almost 10 years that I've lived with those images in my mind. Still fresh, and clear, and shocking.
I remember it all. All the details of desperately trying to reach my son Andrew on his cell phone. Getting calls and emails from colleagues all over the globe asking me to try to get through to their family and friends to confirm they were safely out of the towers.
I remember scavenging my office for face masks and de-con suits and gloves and flashlights to send down to Ground Zero with the emergency engineer team AboveNet sent.
We had colleagues there, knew network engineers working in the towers' data rooms and PA project managers.
I remember calling Alan and telling him a plane crashed into the WTC just as I arrived at work. And him checking CNN on his computer because at that point there was nothing on the BBC news yet.
I remember standing at our huge office window wall with Allen our Security Director and staring at the flames and boiling black clouds of smoke.
And time - minutes and hours - passing but feeling like it was standing still, frozen.
And I remember the incredible feeling of relief, and release, when I answered my cell phone and heard my son Andrew say "Mom, I'm ok, I'm safe."
But it's been almost 10 years remembering those who never got to make their "Mom, I'm ok, I'm safe" phone call. Remembering that ordinary, decent, innocent people were slaughtered in cold blood by merciless terrorists on orders from Osama Bin Laden.
So now finally Osama Bin Laden is dead. A small measure of Justice for us all.
1 comment:
It surprises me to find that ten years later on, when I think of it, I still need to fight back the tears that are always waiting.
St. Vincent's hospital always kept their board up, with notices looking for missing people. Remember that? Everywhere you looked back then were "have you seen me?" pictures by the millions. St. Vincent's eventually put a thick piece of plexiglass over them to shield them. I always thought that it was the most touching, heartbreaking, and simply real of all the memorials. When St. Vincent's closed about a year ago, I was really upset to see that the memorial had been taken down. It was such a true reminder of what we all went through.
I go to work at my college. I realized a couple of days ago that incoming freshmen were in 2nd or 3rd grade when it all happened. It isn't, it cannot be real to them in any appreciable way.
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