Do you remember where you were and what you were doing on that Tuesday morning in September, 25 years ago? Of course you do, and so do I. We all have stories. This is mine.
I was in the car, driving into downtown Fort Worth where I worked in communications for a national engineering and architecture firm. I was listening to a morning news show on the radio when the local headlines were interrupted by news from New York: An airplane had hit the World Trade Center. That’s all they knew, and I assumed it was a small private plane. By the time I exited the highway and turned into downtown, there was an update: It was a commercial airliner. I was in radio silence from the parking garage to my office on the 40th floor, where I learned two commercial airliners had hit both towers.
I don’t recall doing any actual work that morning. People were roaming the halls in a kind of fog of disbelief, asking each other, “Have you heard? What’s happening? Is this real?” It wasn’t long before I was in a break room down the hall with a crowd of engineers, marketing and support staff watching the nonstop reports from lower Manhattan. Nobody in the room was talking until the first tower began to tumble down. One of the engineers stood up and said, “Uh . . . that’s not good.” He left the room, and that seemed to be a signal for us all to do the same.
At that moment we didn’t know if other office towers in other U.S. cities – including ours – were going to be next. The head of our department put the word out that we should keep working, but most of us quietly ignored that directive and went home. For me, that meant driving 40 miles back to East Dallas and turning on the television to watch the news in silent disbelief.
I don’t recall if I returned to work the next morning, but the next time I was at my desk I remember holding my breath as I watched a cargo plane descend closely on the east side of downtown on its approach to Alliance Airport. Again, nobody knew if there were more attacks coming. And I remember well how during lunchtime on Friday of that week, a group of us walked the few blocks to St. Patrick Cathedral for a service of prayer for the victims and for our country.
We obviously returned to work, but it wasn’t “business as usual” for a long time after that. And then there was the day maybe six months later when I saw the beginning of the next chapter of the story: The response.
Fort Worth is a major national railroad hub, and from my window I could see freight trains rolling north and south along the edge of downtown all day, every day. But on this particular day, I saw one long train after another pulling flatcars loaded with military vehicles – tanks, armored personnel carriers, heavy construction machines – all painted a sandy color for desert deployment. They were headed south, presumably to the Texas coast to be loaded on cargo ships sailing to the Middle East.
Those are my memories of what I saw and heard. But what did I feel? Certainly shock, anger and disbelief. I didn’t fear for our safety here in the DFW area, but I dreaded the changes in the way we lived that would come, and indeed they did, especially regarding travel and gathering for large public events.
Nobody I loved or knew was harmed in any way, so I had no cause for personal grief. Still, I mourned the unimaginable loss of life that came without warning or provocation on that day. More broadly, I hurt for our loss of national confidence and the new sense of communal vulnerability that I’d never felt before.
At the time, I wondered if life would ever return to what we thought was “normal,” and it didn’t. Life changed forever, just as it did during the pandemic, the death of a spouse and a cancer diagnosis. Life never returns to the way it was after one of these events. But, by the grace of God, we get through them and look back later to find we adapted, regrouped, reprioritized and even grew from the experience.
We did then and we will again, by God’s grace and in God’s time. But, we should never forget; we should always remember.