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| Wall Street Journal, from the Associated Press |
There are many thoughtful editorials on the events of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Peggy Noonan, as expected, writes about that day as well as anyone. The paragraph below is pulled from her piece, a link to it follows . .
"And there were the firemen. They were the heart of it all, the guys who went up the stairs with 50 to 75 pounds of gear and tools on their back. The other people who were there in the towers, they were innocent victims, they went to work that morning and wound up in the middle of a disaster. But the firemen saw the disaster before they went into it, they knew what they were getting into, they made a decision. And a lot of them were scared, you can see it on their faces on the pictures people took in the stairwells. The firemen would be going up one side of the stairs, and the fleeing workers would be going down on the other, right next to them, and they'd call out, "Good luck, son," and, "Thank you, boys.Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2011
They were tough men from Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island, and they had families, wives and kids, and they went up those stairs. Captain Terry Hatton of Rescue 1 got as high as the 83rd floor. That's the last time he was seen.
Three hundred forty-three firemen gave their lives that day. Three hundred forty-three! It was impossible, like everything else.
Many heartbreaking things happened after 9/11 and maybe the worst is that there's no heroic statue to them, no big marking of what they were and what they gave, at the new World Trade Center memorial.
But New York will never get over what they did. They live in a lot of hearts. They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can't bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it . . ."
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2 comments:
Thank you. Excellent article. I was sitting at the front desk in my office, fielding calls as the building's loudspeaker told everyone to evacuate the building. (We are two blocks south of the Bank of America, and cater-corner to the Federal Building, both of which could easily have been targets.) I had been on the job exactly one week. My daughter and her husband had planned to stop and say goodbye on their way to their new home in Florida. I drove home under a silent sky as Ray Charles sang "God Bless America" on my radio, wondering about my friend Howie who worked in NYC.
Thanks Lynn.
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