Tuesday,
September 11, 2001

911

Normally I'm not in the office until 8:30 am at least. But today I'd gotten in early because I was supposed to turn in some preliminary on-line help pages to a review board tomorrow, and I really needed to get a jump on the work. So at 8:00 am CST, I had already been at my desk for a half hour, and was busily describing a tool screen when I heard the words, "A plane hit the North Tower."

My office building is a few minutes from DFW Airport, and we have a clear view of Terminal B and some of the runways in the distance. I automatically turned to the window and looked out at the airport, expecting to see flames or smoke streaming from the control tower and wondering why I hadn't heard explosions.

The view was normal. No fire, no crashes.

The voices were getting more excited. Confused, I left my cubicle and went around the corner to the next corridor where a group of men were clustered around one cubicle entrance.

"What's going on?" I asked.

One of the guys turned to me. "Two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York. We're watching it on the news," he said, waving me over.

Some of the people in that corridor had cards in their computers that turned the monitors into televisions. As I joined the cluster, I saw the first replay of the 767 slamming into the South Tower. My first thought was, "Wow, that looks like something out of 'Armageddon.'"

No, the reality of what was happening didn't sink in immediately. How can you comprehend something of this magnitude when all you can do is watch it on the television? I later found out that I wasn't the only person to compare what I was seeing to disaster movies.

From then on, all work in the office stopped while we clustered around the available TV monitors. At first, the mood was more amazed than anything -- "Can you believe two planes just flew right into the WTC?" Then we realized that two planes crashing into the WTC couldn't have been an accident -- one plane, just maybe, but not two. It had to be deliberate.

And then the news came through that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. And one was somewhere over Pennsylvania and wasn't responding to ATC. The amazement turned to shock, then to horror as we realized that terrorists were attacking the US.

The final injury was hammered home as the South Tower, then the North Tower collapsed in huge gouts of smoke and dust. At that point thousands of people, among them entire squads and teams of New York's Bravest and Finest who were doing their jobs despite the horrible danger looming above them, lost their lives.

It wasn't a movie. It was real. Bruce Willis wasn't going to come swinging in on a helicopter and stop this. Harrison Ford wasn't going to ride to the rescue. It was real, it was in our face, and nothing would ever be the same again.