The Exercise of Vital Powers

I was working at Naviant as a contractor. They had laid off most of the office and I was brought in to decom the Datacenter. To stave off the silence I’d listen to the radio. I was listening to WSB, Boortz had just begin his local half hour, when they broke in to say a small plane hit the WTC. My thought was “Oh, a general aviation accident, whatever, it might make for an interesting picture”. A few minutes later a friend IMs me saying check out CNN.com – the WTC exploded. Being from New York, I remember the stories of the B25 crashing into the Empire State Building in the 40s, there was no explosion and little loss of life. Most of the ESB was unoccupied because of the depression.

Well, I went to CNN.com saw the pictures and said to myself, “that’s no small plane, what the fuck?”

We had a TV in the break room, but no cable or dish so we were only able to get a fuzzy feed of NBC. NBC was already on the national feed, and the few people left in the office crowded in there.

I remember watching the live feed from further up downtown, when I saw a dark spec behind the other tower. I saw it again and realized that a plane was flying awfully low. I’d flown in to LGA many times, and one landing pattern takes you right over the WTC, so that didn’t seem out of the ordinary. When I saw the second tower explode I first thought what kind of fucked up weather pattern would cause a jet to lose altitude so fast (there are cases of turbulence causing aircraft to lose thousands of feet of altitude in seconds). Then the anchor said something about terrorism and I realized this shit was bad.

I spent the next few hours glued to the TV, NBC was reporting a car bomb went off at the State Department, then there were 5 more planes unaccounted for. Then the footage of smoke coming from the direction of Arlington, and rumors of the White House and Capitol being evacuated. Being right where 17th St would cross the Interstate I had a perfect view of all of Downtown Atlanta, and kept an eye out for the dark speck that would mean the terror was here.

At one point they said that most New Yorkers were unaware of whats happening because all the TV and radio stations had their transmitters on Tower 1. So I called my mom who hadn’t turned on the TV and told here to go into the living room where there was cable. I’m not sure when my Grandmother first saw the footage as she didn’t have cable.

When I saw the first tower collapse my first thought was, “Wow, the NY skyline will look so weird with only one tower”, followed quickly by, “Holy shit, I think about 20,000 Americans just died”. When the second tower went down my estimate went up to 50,000. I knew at that point we’d be invading someone. There was no way cruise missiles would be a proportionate response. It didn’t matter who the President was, this called for blood.

At about 11am I realized I wasn’t going to get any work done, so I headed home to watch the coverage on Fox News, CNN and the broadcast networks. I saw 7WTC go down at about 5pm.

For several months afterwards I wanted blood. I knew a few of the guys who worked in the FDNY and while thank God none of them died, they didn’t come out unscathed. My favorite Post-9/11 joke went something like this:

A father and his son are walking the Manhattan streets when the father stops at a vacant lot takes a deep breath and tells his son: “To think that at one time here on this very lot stood the Twin Towers.”

The son looks at his father and asked: “Dad, what are the Twin Towers?”

“They were buildings with lots of offices that was the heart of the United States, but approx 31 years ago, several Arabs destroyed the buildings.”

The boy then thought for a minute and then asked his father: “Daddy, what are Arabs?”

I remember thinking “Oh shit, its happening again” when that plane went down in Rockaway a few weeks after 9/11.

Flying back to LaGuardia 11 days later we went right over ground zero. We went down to Ground Zero and you could just smell the acrid smell of burnt building. I’ve got several pictures, the most touching of which are all the spontaneous memorials that cropped up all over the city. Those picture are here.