It should have been just the same as any old September morning in the course of my life. It was not.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I got out of bed, made coffee, and sat down at my desk in the kitchen of my Wisconsin apartment. I was in tears. When I came home the evening before, there was a letter in my mailbox from my father telling me he had malignant melanoma and perhaps a year to live.
NPR news was, as always, on softly in the background. I switched on my computer and prepared to warm myself up for the day - with the major news from several sources, as is my habit.
Suddenly, NPR wasn't soft anymore. I turned it up and heard anxiety in the voice of the newscaster, who was explaining an airplane had crashed into a tower at the World Trade Center in New York City.
In the mid-1980s during the whole paisley power tie, big shoulder pads and even bigger hair, pre-personal computer era, I was working for an international computer corporation that designed and sold systems for newspapers. I installed editorial systems: Giant CPUs the size of refrigerators, disc drives the size of washing machines, plus upright tape drives and miles of wires. Each CPU could support about 20 terminals and each was fast as lightning. The Wall Street Journal was one of our best customers and they believed strongly in redundancy. My co-workers and I were installing a $10 million back-up system at the WSJ in lower Manhattan, right across the street from the World Trade Center where I was living that summer in a room at the Marriott.
I explored the World Trade Center and the basement mall and Top of the World cocktail bar on the top floor. I prowled the lobbies of the buildings, marveling at the architecture and feeling relatively protected from the big city streets out the big arched windows.
All that is gone now.
When I heard about that airplane crash, I assumed it was a small passenger plane, perhaps one of several that always seem to be flitting touring tourists.
I wiped my tears, drank some coffee and went to work. It was production day at my newspaper and I needed to lay out 20 pages.
At work, I flipped on the old television and started working. I glanced up at the screen just as the second airliner struck the other tower. This was clearly not just any old September morning.
I knuckled down and finished my layout while fielding calls from other editors. One had shot a picture of a jet that had abruptly made a 180-degree turn, leaving behind a contrail the likes of which none of us had ever seen. All planes had been ordered down out of that clear blue sky.
I ripped apart my front page to get that photo in. My press deadline was looming, but we made it.
The towers fell. Under the debris was a New York Post photographer whom I would soon meet and befriend. He survived, but barely. Firefighters found him screaming under a police car, broken to bits. All he cared about was somebody getting his cameras to the paper so they'd have the pictures of the towers falling on him.
Another close friend had just gotten off the night shift reporting at Bloomberg News. She was one of those people running down the street in her pajamas carrying her cat. She found shelter in a restroom at Battery Park, but her apartment, across another street from the WTC, was wrecked.
Back in Wisconsin, local firefighters were already planning to gather that evening. They would raise their ladders and string a giant American flag between them.
People were already talking about al-Qaeda. My phone rang. It was a public relations contact at the local hospital. She was crying. I went over to the hospital to meet with her in a garden and she told me about her parents, who were diplomats in Afghanistan while she was a child. I will never forget her telling me, "They are nice people there," and how Americans should withhold their hatred until more information could be gathered.
We all know what happened that day. We know 2,996 people were killed and more than 6,000 injured. On the four planes, we know 265 people died. We know 412 emergency workers who responded to the WTC died, including 343 firefighters. We know Fulton's own Byron Bagby, a retired major general, was in the Pentagon the morning the attacks occurred.
"I recall standing with one of my associates watching a CNN television report and seeing a second aircraft hit the other World Trade Center tower," Bagby told the Fulton Sun on the 10th anniversary of the attack. "We commented that we were lucky in the Pentagon with 26,000 people working there and probably 40,000 passing through on subway lines and buses that we had not been struck by a plane. Only five minutes later, we felt this huge Pentagon building shake when we were struck by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77."
At the Pentagon, 125 people died. Since that day, at least 28,000 civilian deaths due to war-related violence have been documented in Afghanistan. In July, United Nations officials and news outlets reported 2018 is the bloodiest year in 17 years of war, with 1,700 civilians killed in the first half of the year, and 3,430 injured.
Service members also have been killed there this year. It's difficult to get verifiable numbers of military deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq. The Military Times and other news outlets report the Pentagon scrubbed troop level statistics for Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria from its website.
My father died a year and a month after 9/11. I visited him the weekend before the first anniversary, then went home to give a speech in the town square. I talked about how my dad's illness and subsequent death will always be connected to 9/11 in my mind. I talked about my abhorrence to war and violence of all kind. I talked about kindness and honor and integrity.
I watched Sen. John McCain's funeral last week with the same intensity. I don't know where we're going, but I know McCain was right: We must be better than this.
As another anniversary of 9-11 approaches, I know what I'll be thinking about everything that has happened to me and the nation and victims of war. I will honor firefighters and first responders. And I hope nothing like this ever happens again.