<p>For all who lost friends, family, or colleagues, and for all who grieve for the tragic events of five years ago, may God bless us all.</p>
<p>I was preparing for a meeting where I was a key person. My husband called my cell and said I should turn on the TV. Within minutes I called and cancelled my engagement…I recall saying: “this just seems too trivial right now…I can’t do it.”</p>
<p>The local-ness of this was brought back into focus by the local newspaper which provided obituaries and photos of all the local people who were killed either in the towers or on the planes. It was page after page filling an entire section. What struck me about them was that almost to a person, rather than the “little Eichmans” as the SOB Ward Churchill slanders them, they were giving members of the community: little league/soccer/football coaches and volunteers of all sorts.</p>
<p>It was a morning of horror that was only to get worse. It took hours to contact all of my immediate family. We lost a few family members, several friends and many, many business colleagues of my H. The chaos and pain of that day, and the months that followed, will stay with me for the rest of my life. </p>
<p>I’m watching CNN Pipeline which is showing their coverage of that day “in real time”. I admire the job that Aaron Brown did that day. Listening to the chaos and uncertainty of what was happening, and the quickly diminishing innocence, is heartbreaking. I’ve often tried to remember what it was like on that morning before 8:46 a.m., what my frame of mind was, my outlook on the world and the future. It’s sometimes difficult to remember without thinking of it through the filter of what happened that day.</p>
<p>I lost 2 mentors - one of them I was particularly close to. They were my bosses at work but I cared about them a lot. I am in touch with their families now. Most of them have NOT moved on. How could they? I also lost many acquaintances and people I knew from my town.</p>
<p>Driver,</p>
<p>Like you, I pulled the plug on an “important” meeting. </p>
<p>After the two towers fell, live on the radio as we were listening, the project manager said “well, we need to put this distraction behind us and go through the agenda for today.”</p>
<p>Told everyone the meeting could wait and everyone needed to juggle their travel plans to get home to family. </p>
<p>Then the plane went down at Shanksville. My wife called in a panic. I drove 20 hours straight from Dallas to Pittsburgh. So strange to drive on a virtually deserted series of interstates, under a cloudless, vaportrail free blue sky.</p>
<p>A relative lost his brother on this day 5 yrs. ago. God rest his soul and all the souls who perished on that day.</p>
<p>This is a really sad day in New York City today.</p>
<p>The first thing that struck me today in the NYC vicinity is that it is another perfectly beautiful, cloudless day in NY, same as it was 5 years ago. A sad but beautiful day, if that makes any sense at all.</p>
<p>It’s a day that changed America, and quite probably the world, forever. As a result, the definition of “War” has changed, and the designations of “soldier” and “combatant” have shifted like sand on the tide. It is into these murky waters that the military, our politicians, and intelligence agencies must wade. Normal assumptions and conventions don’t apply when dealing with such a shape-shifting enemy. We are confused and divided, and that’s exactly the way they like us. Question is: Are we going to continue to play into their hands?</p>
<p>We went to two memorial services today, as we have every year for the past five. I sometimes ponder how the five years since that horrible day could possibly have unfolded as they have, for everyone: personally, nationally and internationally.</p>
<p>“The first thing that struck me today in the NYC vicinity is that it is another perfectly beautiful, cloudless day in NY, same as it was 5 years ago. A sad but beautiful day, if that makes any sense at all.”</p>
<p>It makes a ton of sense. The clouds are even similar today. I remember the sky and clouds so well from sitting on the window ledge in my office while watching the towers burn and fall and watching the crowds run by and watching the smoke continue for days and days. My office has a great view but I can’t stand to look out the windows anymore.</p>
<p>We have family members and close friends who were there that day, right in the middle of it as it all happened. They survived, saw unmentionable horrors and have not been the same to this day.</p>
<p>This morning I was thinking about the difference between learning about the first tower being hit and the second tower. For the first tower, I instantly thought, “What a horrible accident? How could that have happened?” When the news came that a plane had crashed into the second tower, I thought “Oh my God. This is no accident.” It took me a long time to wrap my mind around that second idea.</p>
<p>Now whenever I hear of a disaster, my first thought is “probably no accident.” I have not given accidents the benefit of the doubt since the second tower crash. </p>
<p>It’s a subtle but significant and suprisingly permanent shift in perspective for me, and a sorry one, too. Every boom and bang and strange happening (space shuttle sonic boom in the middle of the night, airport blackout) is sinister first, only with more information do they become just out-of-the ordinary happenings.</p>