I woke up just after the first plane had struck the WTC....That enough was shocking....My hubby was in Dallas with others at a meeting. I sat stunned, as we all did...and then the 2nd plane hit....Then I think I knew it was an attack.
The anxiety of that day started then. NO ONE knew if there were other planes....no one knew if there were, how many there were...The Networks started to check, and then started to see how many planes were missing on radar....No one knew if the WH or the Capitol would be hit....The President and VP and leadership in Congress whereabouts were unknown....None of us knew how many people were in those two buildings and all the side buildings next to the two....On a given day, the newscasters said between 30,000 and 50,000 could be the numbers of people in those buildings that were now on fire...
When the Pentagon hit happened, as I recall, the first reports were that a small plane had hit the grounds....the cameras weren't there, but we could see smoke coming from the front of the buildings....It wasn't for a few minutes that we realized ANOTHER plane had hit the Pentagon....
And by that time, my own personal anxiety was raging....Was this another Pearl Harbor...Where were all my family members? We didn't have a meet-up plan if the location for any of us was attacked...
By then all planes had been grounded from takeoff....they were trying to find a missing plane .....that one eventually landed in a PA field....The people on that plane had to have been terrified, as they knew what would happen....but they still did what they had to do, especially if the plane was headed for the WH or the Capitol.....
There was NO pain injection like we give our condemned death row inmates. These people were murdered, and had time to know who their attacker was... their last minutes had to be just a living hell.
My hubby and the men he was with realized that when the planes were grounded there would be no way home via air for awhile. They finally rented a car (lots of people had the same idea), and thought they would drive to Denver.... They did. Planes still were grounded. They drove from Dallas to Seattle, each of the 4 of them taking a 2 hour shift around the clock.....It's a long way between Dallas and Seattle via ground, when they were as shocked as we all were....
The whole day and the whole week was surreal for all of us, including me. The weather was like it is today, beautiful, sunny, no clouds, warm with a little crispness in the air. And we were here on the West Coast. We saw the pictures of the crime scenes. Their weather was the same. We only saw the mayhem. They had to deal with the actual mayhem.
And all of us still have to deal with the worldwide killers, and our children will have to as well.
|
