I was sitting in my room, putting together some materials for a trade show. I’d been up all night and, habitually, I was watching CNN’s Headline News. When CNN went live to New York with pictures of the towers, I remember a commentator saying something about a small commuter plane. My pilot brain said: “No way that’s from a plane that small, it had to be a heavy.”
When the second plane hit, I thought that my sleepless night was making me see things.
To the sound of CNN’s shrill reporting staff, I watched the replay over and over again. My jaw dropped and I called for my roommate, Jake (a US Marine). He said. “What happened?”
I explained what I’d already seen and he sat heavily in the chair by my desk and said: “This is bad.”
“Twenty bucks says it was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed guy.”
“The WTC Truck bomb guy?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“No bet.”
After a couple more hours of TV News, I made my way down to the trade show at the Sandy Convention Center. I walked in, got the booth set up and joined a crowd that was glued to a television in the center lobby. Most of stayed there all day. The national vendors shut down their booths and foot traffic at the show was non-existent. There was a lot of anger and a lot of tears. There was also a lot of shoulder patting and hugging going on.
At some point in the day, around 2:00pm, the whole hall seemed to spontaneously break out in American flags and around 100 of us started singing the Star Spangled Banner, over and over again. It was a beautiful thing in the middle of a horrible day.