18 Years (and some links)

On 2nd street in Old City Philadelphia there is a small museum dedicated to the history of the Philadelphia Fire Department. A few years ago while visiting the historic district of the city with some friends and our kids, we decided to check it out. It’s a great museum. There are a lot of hands on things for the kids to do and the exhibits are well laid out. While I was wandering, I came upon their exhibit that paid tribute to the firemen that served and lost their lives in New York on September 11th. My oldest son walked up next to me, looked at the pictures and said, “what’s that?” It took me a minute to process this. He wasn’t born when the towers came down. He wasn’t even planned for. It’s a little hard to reconcile the time. Those events are as clear in my mind as if they happened yesterday. Yet I have a ten year old son who wasn’t alive then, and has no real frame of reference for it. It’s like Pearl Harbor is for me. I know it happened. I’ve seen video. I’ve heard stories. But I don’t have the emotion of witnessing it firsthand to imprint it into my mind and make it part of who I am.

Five days after the towers came down, me and one of my friends from the local rescue squad took an ambulance up to New York. New Jersey and Pennsylvania were sending crews to help run EMS in lower Manhattan.  Everyone met up at a Salvation Army station in Hoboken or Jersey City, I can’t remember which. We ended up spending 24 hours in the city.  When I remember it, it comes in still pictures, like I was looking through a magazine.

• Fifteen or twenty ambulances riding into Manhattan through an empty Holland Tunnel.
• The skeletal remains of one of the towers from a block away to the North.
• The fire still burning in the remains of one of the smaller buildings.
• A group of utility workers running past us because their was some worry about the stability of the several of the surrounding buildings.
• The dust caked all over everything.
• An IV stand by the side of the road as we approached Ground Zero from Battery Park.
• A parking lot full of crushed cars and emergency vehicles that had been cleared from the road.
• People sorting debris at the site until they were too exhausted to continue.
• The building that we parked next to.  Three quarters of the way up the side facing the Twin Towers, all of the windows had been blown out by the concussion of the falling buildings.
• A kiosk covered with pictures of missing people.
• The throngs of flag waving, unhyphenated Americans that greeted every ambulance, fire truck, police car, or military vehicle that left the site.

Back at the museum. When I had thought about it for a minute, I told my son that some really bad guys had taken control of planes and flown them into buildings, killing a lot of people. “Why?” When asked this question, I felt like responding with the eloquence of traditional New Jersey descriptors. Luckily for me and for him I didn’t. My wife would have been so mad. I just told him that evil exists, and we as Americans will forever be battling it. Why us? Because if we don’t, no one will. Like John McClane said in Live Free Or Die Hard (which by the way was robbed when Oscar time rolled around) when he was asked why he was fighting the bad guys alone. “Because there’s nobody else to do it right now, that’s why. Believe me, if there were somebody else to do it, I’d let them do it, but there’s not. So we’re doing it.” America is John McClane in many ways. An imperfectly perfect hero. So, whether everyone likes it or not, America will be here fighting evil because we are the last best hope, and as someone recently said, “God’s not done with us yet.”

Every September 11th I try to revisit the events of that day in 2001 one way or another. A lot of people say “Never Forget.” There’s nothing wrong with that. Personally I prefer “Always Remember.” It implies the positive effort of keeping the memory alive. So, today I take a minute to make sure I either always remember or never forget those that passed on 9/11/01. Casualties in a never-ending battle for freedom and Western civilization.

LINKS

• The official New York 9/11 Memorial website.
• The official Pentagon 9/11 Memorial website.
• The National Park Service website for the Flight 93 Memorial.
• The website for the Philadelphia Fireman’s Hall Museum.