An Evening With Ed

9/11 Memorial

Most trips to New York find me taking time to wander down to the financial district to marvel at the wonderful new World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial.  The memorial is both beautiful and sad.  Nearly 3,000 lives taken by a heinous act of third world lunatics is breathtaking in its stupidity.  I say a little prayer as I stare at the names on the low wall surrounding the cascading waters falling into nothingness.  Every American should visit this sacred place at least once.


The new Trade Center buildings are a magnificent testament to our American resilience.  It's inexcusable that because of our overly litigious society it took more than fifteen years to rebuild this New York icon.  After all, in the depths of the Depression, this country built the Empire State Building in a little over a year.  Why was it impossible to cut through all the legal red tape to demonstrate to the world that America could get off the mat and show those who hate us that we are still a can do nation?  This used to be a given.

In the summer of 2003, I got a call from an old Army buddy of mine.  I was living in San Diego and Ed and his wife were in town for a couple of days and wanted to get together.  The two of us had met in officer's training at Fort Gordon, Georgia in 1971 and had stayed in touch through the years.  We were only in Georgia for a few months but, like it is with some people, we had enough in common for a friendship to have endured long distance.  He's a good guy.

Ed made the Army his career.  I thought he was nuts, but he was made of sterner stuff than I.  He retired as a Colonel after thirty years and continued to work at the Pentagon as a civilian employee of a government contractor after that.  He became an expert in satellite communications and, though he would modestly deny this, is a leading expert in that area.

My wife had a school function that evening so I joined Ed and his wife, Ilse, at their hotel and we headed for dinner at a quiet little place on the water at Shelter Island.  It was going to be fun catching up with them.  Somewhere between the main course and dessert it suddenly hit me that Ed was most likely to have been at the Pentagon when American Airlines flight 77 crash-landed
 there on 9/11.

For the next hour or two, I hardly said a word.  (Rare for me, I know.)  Ed looked out over San Diego Bay and slowly began to tell me of that horrible afternoon of September 11, 2001.  "First of all," he said.  "The best place to be on that day was the smokers' area."  "There is a courtyard type place deep inside the 'puzzle palace' where smoking is allowed."  "That day it was the safest location in the building."  He went on to tell me of the jolt and tremendous noise everybody felt and heard when the plane struck the building and the shock and disbelief of walking through the smoke and chaos to get outside.  It was a nightmare from which it was impossible to awake.  When he escaped the structure there were emergency vehicles and medical personnel everywhere.  His first thought was to call his wife who also worked in the area to see if she was alright.  She was.  For the rest of the day, he volunteered to help the rescue workers.  He spent all day holding plasma bags for the wounded and lending a hand with stretchers while he tried to make sense of it all.  He did what he could.  Unlike me, Ed has seen war and yet I could tell that this day had left a profound impression on him.  Just listening to the story made for an evening I will never forget.

This story has been on my mind lately for obvious reasons.  It seems, and I hope I'm wrong here, that it's eighteen years on and some of us are already starting to forget what happened to this country on September 11, 2001.  If that's the case, we're in real trouble.  The biggest problem with being the best country in the history of mankind is just that.  It's easy to relax and take everything for granted.  We delude ourselves into thinking that the rest of the world likes us and shares our values.  Mostly, they don't.  This may come as a surprise, but most don't care about who wins the Super Bowl or the World Series.  Hell, they don't even have high def!  There are far too many in Washington and in the population in general who embrace the wrong-headed philosophy of "Be nice to everybody and they'll be nice to us."  Realists know that the world doesn't work that way.  Most of the world would gladly back the car over grandma to score a ham sandwich.

On September 11 let's all pause to remember our fellow Americans who were murdered on their home soil just eighteen years ago and promise to keep them in our hearts forever and to NEVER forget.