It’s been twenty years since the fateful day that forever changed America’s history. Like most of you, I remember exactly where I was.
To be quite honest, I was asleep. I’d taken my first grader to school and returned home with my two-year-old son. He had an ear infection, so the night before was somewhat sleepless.
So, we decided to take a nap on the couch, the TV playing Bob the Builder as we drifted off to sleep. Then the phone started to ring. At first, I ignored it. But it rang and rang and rang. Finally, I jumped up to answer it.
My brother-in-law told me to turn the TV on. Then, I hit the button on the VCR and switched to the live news feed. Within thirty seconds of tuning in, I watched the second plane hit. I will never forget, there was another video the news played. It was from a small group of people standing on their balcony watching the events unfold. The woman cussed. F-bombs. Dan Rather cussed, too. That was a big deal! Of course, he apologized that they weren’t able to censor it fast enough, but asked that we understand the gravity of the situation.
Over the next several days, I was glued to my TV.
Along with every American I know. I watched the families seeking their loved ones. The debris falling from the sky. I truly hurt for the families touched by tragedy. As the daughter of a fireman, I really grieved for the first responders that ran into a building they’d never come out of.
One week later, my little boy said “Mommy, if the tv is going to make you cry again, we don’t have to watch it today.” That’s when I realized no America would go un-touched by these events. The only good that came from that terrible time was the unity America displayed. It’s a stark contrast to the division we see today.
Like you, I have my memories of that day. And like you, I can still see the images and hear the voices that cemented 9/11 inside me. Now, two decades later, lost tapes emerge to remind us of the very day we swore to never forget. And there’s a new generation here to take in the tragedy.
Second-hand Stories
Sometime after 9/11, a Houston man purchased some used computer equipment. Once he got it home and plugged it all in, he was shocked. Because what he discovered was a collection of 103 calls from a trading room floor just across from the World Trade Center.
Fox News explains:
As America approaches the 20-year mark since the September 11 attacks, “America’s Newsroom” co-anchor Bill Hemmer joined ‘Fox & Friends’ Thursday to reflect on “The Lost Calls of 9/11” — a one-hour Fox Nation special revealing never-before-heard calls from one of the darkest days in U.S. history.
“This is an amazing story because we will go over hundreds, if not thousands of stories over the next couple of days that we’ve all heard and we’re very familiar with,” ‘Lost Calls’ host Hemmer told “Fox & Friends” Thursday. “But this is a story you’ve never heard before.”
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“Most of these people are still alive because they got out of there. They were across the street,” Hemmer noted. “But the things they heard, and the things they saw, they can’t get them out of their minds.”
Hemmer explained how the calls tell a story of Americans seeing an attack unfold before their eyes.
“The workers at the World Financial Center…It was across the street from the World Trade Center. Their office was destroyed,” he described. “They take all the equipment out and move it out to junkyards.”
In the Fox Nation special, the Texas man who discovered the recording device remarked that, once he turned the machine on, he knew immediately that the calls were related to the 9/11 attacks.
“He searched the country to find somebody to help him literally splice the audio together, to string all the conversations back,” Hemmer noted.
“The story’s about going out and finding the people who are still alive today…they hear their voices for the first time, 20 years later.”
But it’s not just revisiting history.
It’s a story about the heart of America. Not the left, not the right, America. And the tragedy of our current political state should be more than enough to take us back.
