DAC - Memories Of 9/11

[00:00:29] [SPEAKER_00]: Hello everyone, I'm Thur in Internet Radio Land. This is Dave Jones, the NBC guy. How about those tips?

[00:00:36] [SPEAKER_00]: Are you listening to the tips? Well, this is a daily audio cache because it is September 11th.

[00:00:47] [SPEAKER_00]: Yep, September 11th we had we had some kind of threat to the schools in our areas.

[00:00:57] [SPEAKER_00]: So I got a day off from school.

[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, Marie is working my butt off the warden and I got so much to do.

[00:01:08] [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, that's not why I'm doing this daily audio cache. I wanted to remember September 11th.

[00:01:16] [SPEAKER_00]: I started teaching it to the sixth seventh and eighth graders yesterday, knowing that I would see the rest of them today.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_00]: But it didn't happen but we're going to go over it.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_00]: I told them I gave him a homework assignment. I said anyone over the age of 25, talk to them about where they were when 9-11 happened.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_00]: And then I told them my story. I was in Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency as a watch officer.

[00:01:54] [SPEAKER_00]: People would ask me, what do you watch? I said, well, mostly CNN and the weather channel.

[00:02:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Which was true. We had like eight big screen projection screen TVs.

[00:02:07] [SPEAKER_00]: One of them was on CNN and one was on the weather channel and two people were on duty 247 in that emergency operations center.

[00:02:16] [SPEAKER_00]: But this day was a day shift and it was my eighth day on the job.

[00:02:24] [SPEAKER_00]: And we were getting reports about a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, one of the towers.

[00:02:32] [SPEAKER_00]: And they said it was a big jetliner and I'm like, oh, that can't be right. They have warnings.

[00:02:38] [SPEAKER_00]: They have pilots that can see that thing for miles. There's no way a big jetliner flew into one of the World Trade Center.

[00:02:47] [SPEAKER_00]: They must have been mistaken. Maybe it was a small engine plane take off and the guy had a hard attack and it just kept flying until it hit one of the towers.

[00:03:01] [SPEAKER_00]: Well, as we're watching this because it's on CNN and we're watching the tower burn.

[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_00]: We can see the next plane come right in and hit the second tower.

[00:03:19] [SPEAKER_00]: And for what seemed like a half hour, which I know is only a fraction of a second.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_00]: There was silence, total silence in that room.

[00:03:32] [SPEAKER_00]: There were like eight or nine of us in there. It was a day shift.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_00]: The supervisor was looking over the report that we produced, you know, over the incidents for the past 24 hours in the state of Pennsylvania.

[00:03:47] [SPEAKER_00]: There was dead silence.

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_00]: And then all of a sudden, give me the governor, give me the lieutenant governor. We have to activate everybody new when that second plane hit we were under attack.

[00:04:04] [SPEAKER_00]: And we were activating. We activated the emergency operations center. We brought in all the heads of the agencies Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, corrections, the state troopers and I had a list of people to call.

[00:04:23] [SPEAKER_00]: And on my list was the secret service.

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_00]: See in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, there's a federal building and the federal agencies are all there, you know, the federal courthouse, the FBI, they're all there.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_00]: So I called this guy and I said, hey, we're activating.

[00:04:41] [SPEAKER_00]: And I said, man, isn't this crazy? He said, yeah, I know.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_00]: Then he said, hey, I got to let you go. My boss is calling me and his office is in the world tradesenter.

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. Now, I don't know if he died. I don't know anything. I just know that that's what he said.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_00]: And then we heard the Pentagon had been hit.

[00:05:11] [SPEAKER_00]: And I, everybody was probably in the same boat as me. What is next?

[00:05:19] [SPEAKER_00]: And at my console came a call from Somerset County.

[00:05:27] [SPEAKER_00]: And the lady on the other end said, hi, I'm so and so I'm the dispatch supervisor for Somerset County 911.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_00]: We have a guy that's on a cell phone and he's calling us to say,

[00:05:42] [SPEAKER_00]: he's playing being hijacked. What do we tell him?

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_00]: And before any kind of an answer could be formulated, she said, never mind.

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_00]: We have smoke on the ground reports that the plane crashed.

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_00]: And of course today, we know that was flight 93.

[00:06:06] [SPEAKER_00]: This was my experience of 9-11. Something I'll never forget.

[00:06:13] [SPEAKER_00]: And I was born and raised in Somerset County.

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_00]: And my cousins are all still there. All my relatives are in Somerset County.

[00:06:24] [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's where I go for the reunion.

[00:06:27] [SPEAKER_00]: And one of them was volunteer fireman in Shanksville of all places.

[00:06:34] [SPEAKER_00]: And his brother was over visiting that day.

[00:06:37] [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't have the TV on, but they heard and saw an explosion.

[00:06:43] [SPEAKER_00]: They said it shook the windows in their house.

[00:06:47] [SPEAKER_00]: And they, you know, because of the coal mining,

[00:06:50] [SPEAKER_00]: they thought it was a mining accident.

[00:06:52] [SPEAKER_00]: But they jumped in the pickup truck and they drove over there.

[00:06:57] [SPEAKER_00]: And he recounted to me what he could see.

[00:07:02] [SPEAKER_00]: Just debris everywhere, a big black hole.

[00:07:09] [SPEAKER_00]: There was no fire left. It burned out already.

[00:07:14] [SPEAKER_00]: But there were different things.

[00:07:19] [SPEAKER_00]: Like there was a meat hanging from a tree or a driver's license sitting there.

[00:07:25] [SPEAKER_00]: And then just a suitcase.

[00:07:30] [SPEAKER_00]: Like someone had just placed it right there.

[00:07:34] [SPEAKER_00]: It was strange. And he said within a few minutes,

[00:07:39] [SPEAKER_00]: federal agents showed up and told them to leave.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_00]: They don't need any volunteer fireman that, you know,

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_00]: it's a crime scene investigation.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_00]: So they left.

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_00]: And I impress upon my class how everything changed that day for the United States.

[00:08:01] [SPEAKER_00]: That there were no locks on the cockpit door.

[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_00]: It almost seems absurd that they were the same lock that you had on the bathroom door.

[00:08:14] [SPEAKER_00]: Anybody could go through there and hey, how you doing?

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_00]: You're flying to play?

[00:08:20] [SPEAKER_00]: So many things changed that day.

[00:08:24] [SPEAKER_00]: So many things.

[00:08:27] [SPEAKER_00]: And for my life,

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_00]: it changed in ways I couldn't even imagine.

[00:08:34] [SPEAKER_00]: The events of 911 put me on a trajectory that was totally opposite of where I was going.

[00:08:43] [SPEAKER_00]: Because six months later,

[00:08:46] [SPEAKER_00]: the army recalled me to active duty.

[00:08:50] [SPEAKER_00]: And for the next 22 continuous months,

[00:08:54] [SPEAKER_00]: I traveled to 16 different countries,

[00:08:58] [SPEAKER_00]: doing anti-terrorism force protections surveys.

[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_00]: But that's not what changed.

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_00]: I met my wife in a man Jordan.

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[00:09:12] [SPEAKER_00]: Yep.

[00:09:15] [SPEAKER_00]: I had given up hope of ever having children.

[00:09:19] [SPEAKER_00]: I just figured it wasn't my lot in life to have kids.

[00:09:23] [SPEAKER_00]: You know, some people can, some people can't.

[00:09:25] [SPEAKER_00]: I was 50 years old when my first child was born.

[00:09:32] [SPEAKER_00]: And 55 when my second one was born.

[00:09:37] [SPEAKER_00]: So the events of 911 will always, always be with me.

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_00]: When I look at my wife,

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_00]: my kids,

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_00]: oh, and where am today?

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_00]: P.B.N. family,

[00:09:56] [SPEAKER_00]: take a moment.

[00:09:57] [SPEAKER_00]: Take time to recall.

[00:10:01] [SPEAKER_00]: Where you were and tell someone.

[00:10:05] [SPEAKER_00]: My second anniversary.

[00:10:09] [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my first anniversary of 911.

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_00]: I was in Qatar.

[00:10:15] [SPEAKER_00]: And in a hotel when I was on active duty.

[00:10:20] [SPEAKER_00]: And we all set there at the table.

[00:10:23] [SPEAKER_00]: And just went around the table and told each other,

[00:10:27] [SPEAKER_00]: where we were and what we were doing for 911.

[00:10:34] [SPEAKER_00]: One of those days that's burned into your memory.

[00:10:38] [SPEAKER_00]: And I can only imagine the memories that the kids I'm teaching right now.

[00:10:47] [SPEAKER_00]: What will be burned into their memory?

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_00]: The space shuttle, Challenger, accident.

[00:10:57] [SPEAKER_00]: And I go all the way back to the JFK assassination.

[00:11:02] [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was in the first or second grade and a teacher came into our room.

[00:11:10] [SPEAKER_00]: She didn't even knock, she just came in.

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_00]: And she went over and whispered something in our teachers' ear.

[00:11:17] [SPEAKER_00]: And our teacher just started crying right there.

[00:11:21] [SPEAKER_00]: And we're like, whoa, why would our teacher cry?

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn't much longer after that.

[00:11:28] [SPEAKER_00]: The principal said, we're dismissing for the day.

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_00]: Well, in Somerset County, you only get out of school for snow.

[00:11:37] [SPEAKER_00]: And it was not snowing.

[00:11:40] [SPEAKER_00]: Now, remember walking to the bus to go home and seeing the flag at half staff.

[00:11:48] [SPEAKER_00]: And I wondered why they didn't pull it up the whole way.

[00:11:56] [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, PB and family, I just thought I'd share these memories.

[00:12:02] [SPEAKER_00]: Take care and prep on.