Today marks the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Though so many years have passed by since, I’ll never forget that morning, and the weeks immediately following.
I was working for the (now defunct) Casco Bay Weekly, and when I walked into the newsroom early that Tuesday morning my mind was so full of what was happening in my own life I didn’t notice the somber look on my fellow reporter’s face.
He was someone whose sense of humor I never quite understood, and I never really knew for sure when he was being completely facetious for a laugh or being completely serious. At any given moment it could be either.
In his typical emotionally-void voice he greeted me with a “good morning,” then, “someone crashed a plane into the Trade Center.”
At a loss, as always, on how to respond to his fluency in weirdness and distracted by my own little world to a fault, I just rolled my eyes at him and told him he shouldn’t say stuff like that.
“No, really.” Turning on the minuscule, ancient television he had in our office, he adjusted the antennas and turned the screen toward me. And there, on the static-filled screen was the first image I saw of the North Tower with its gaping hole where American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed only a few minutes before.
As the minutes ticked by and crashes were reported at the South Tower, the Pentagon and another flight destined for Washington but on the ground in Pennsylvania I stayed glued to that tiny TV, locked in with horror at the unprecedented attack on American soil.
Until that day, I had never given a second thought to the safety of our country from foreign attacks. Given the size and volume of our branches of military and modern technology producing ridiculous amounts of intelligence it simply never occurred to me in my sheltered, quiet world in little Maine to worry about such a thing.
Like just about every other American, my sense of security was destroyed that day. Those attacks fought against our sense of invincibility. Since then my generation has been introduced to what life is like while at war and recession has affected the daily lives of everyone I know. The memory of the Twin Towers, the very face of American power and strength being reduced to a smoldering pile of rubble will never fade.
While I sat their watching countless hours of news reports that day, my hands kept gravitating toward gripping my belly, like they could protect the baby I had found out was growing there just hours before. Just as I was starting to wrap my mind around bringing another being into this world our country, our home was being brutally attacked.
Unlike so many newscasts I’ve seen throughout my life of disasters, natural or man-induced, Sept. 11 remains etched into my memory like a scar that just won’t heal. The weeks and months that followed I remained glued to any and every media source available, searching for any sort of explanation for killing thousands of my fellow citizens.
And as we headed into the war in Afghanistan I, like everyone else, couldn’t wait for our country to wreak havoc on the terrorists who had caused so much destruction and destroyed countless lives. As the towers lay in ruins countless Americans rallied in support of our country and our troops in a mass wave of patriotism that I had never seen.
Yet here we are, nearly a decade later with so much of that patriotism waning and reports of deadly attacks against our troops hardly making page 3 of the daily newspaper. The war, it seems, has become old news. For me, that attack will never lose its sting. It changed the way I saw life and created a protectiveness I still employ today with my little girl.
As I begin my day today, September 11, I will bow my head in respect for each and every soldier who has served in either of America’s wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s because of their selfless acts of honor and duty that we are safe, secure and protected.
”“ Elizabeth Reilly can be reached at elizabethreilly1@yahoo.com.
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