Remember 911

September 11, 2001, is one of those dates that most people, especially in the northeast, remember where they were and what they were doing when we were attacked. My dream executive job had been eliminated a month earlier, and I was on my way to an interview when the World Trade Center towers were hit. When I arrived, I learned that daughter of one of the people that I was to meet with, worked in the World Trade Center. Needless to say the interview was cancelled.

Nearly three thousand lives were lost at the Pentagon, the two World Trade Center towers and on United Airlines flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We were under attack, not by a nation, but by a fanatical group of Islamic terrorists.

While we often focus our attention on the planes that flew into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, we need also to remember the untrained instant heroes on flight 93 who overpowered its hijackers enough to divert the plane from its intended target in Washington to crash in a remote Pennsylvania field saving perhaps thousands of lives. 

Almost immediately, American air space was shut down. Every plane was ordered to land at the nearest airport and those enroute to the United States had to turnaround or land outside the U.S. Forty international flights landed in remote Gander, Newfoundland, alone. Air Force fighter planes set up a perimeter around Washington, D.C., and were under orders to shoot down any plane, military or civilian, that failed to respond to communications.

Since then, we have been waging a war on terror, not only outside the United States, but within our own borders as well. My Utmost for His Highest author, Oswald Chambers, said in his devotional message for September 10, “Crises always reveal a person’s true character.” I wonder how many people who gave their lives helping others on 9/11 read those words before they went to bed on 9/10.

In the past day or two, there have been more than forty television specials reliving the events of September 11, ten years ago, and the heroic stories of those who lived and died that day. But we must never forget the more than six thousand of our troops who have died in action fighting terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since then.

I think one of the greatest tributes to those who responded to the call on 9/11 is that when we are in a moment of crisis, when we need a hero to help us in an emergency, we immediately call 911.