By Ernie Rogers
I remember September 11, 2001. It was a day probably not unlike Dec.7, 1941 in most of America. No treachery was expected. Lives weren’t likely to change in seconds.
National Archives and Records.
I was working on road data and drinking my third cup of ambition when I wandered into the secretary’s office to have the usual morning chat with our director that set the tone for the rest of the day. The television we used to monitor inclement weather was on Fox News – background noise was all it was.
Then the voices of the Fox talking heads changed from morning-show cute to wait – something’s happening here, and we don’t know what it is!
A plane, they said, has crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. We watched and listened until they showed the tape of the “accident.” A clear blue sky. Steel and glass monuments to American exceptionalism reaching into it.
Then a plane, a large plane, completely out of place flying into Tower One of the World Trade Center. A fiery explosion and black smoke poured from the huge gaping wound in the building. That was no accident, I thought. Our morning chat broke up. I was back in my office later when I heard the secretary shout, “Oh, nooo!”
The second tower had been hit by another plane – removing all doubt about what was happening in our country. We were under attack! Thousands would die as we watched the monuments burn and collapse in on themselves and on all within them.
Constant entreaties from the Red Cross for blood were broadcast. I didn’t think there would be that much need for blood. How could there be many survivors coming out of that rubble?
There weren’t. Only a few of the thousands.
We watched the modern ruins smolder. We saw the firemen working to rescue and recover anyone they could find. Mostly they didn’t find anyone. It was a smoking scene of pure horror.
MORE: 9/11 Retrospective: Photo Essay of Sept. 11 and Afterward
Our president came to the ruins. Stood on them with firemen and told our enemies who had killed our people and knocked down those buildings we were coming for them. They would pay, he said. We would not forget! Well, we went after them. They paid. Some of us forgot.
We recently surrendered an entire country to an amalgamation of the very terrorists who knocked the buildings down and whose leaders we once had imprisoned. When our feckless leaders ordered our military to cut and run, we left our own people, our allies and BILLIONS of dollars worth of war materiel for our enemies to abuse and use.
During a SNAFU of an evacuation process, these terrorists blew up 13 more of our finest young men and women and more than a hundred of our presumed allies at the gate to freedom. We pretended to go after them. We said we made them pay. We said we won’t forget!
Ernie Rogers is a former newspaper reporter, senior writer and city editor at The Moultrie Observer, The Valdosta Daily Times, The Augusta Chronicle and The Rome News-Tribune. He is a Vietnam War combat veteran, a retiree of Floyd County Georgia where he served proudly with fine courageous men and women of the Floyd County Public Works. He is married to columnist Sylvia Cooper.
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