9-11 2001
Why I Will Never Forget
By John Vitale
On this day 23 years ago, the most prolific attack on the United States took place. I remember that morning like it was yesterday. I had meetings in midtown Manhattan, so I left early to make the drive from my home in NJ. Usually, I would drive to Jersey City and take the Path train over to the World Trade Center and then grab a taxi to wherever I needed to go on the island. Well since it was a beautiful September morning, not a cloud in the sky, and traffic was light since it was early, I decided to drive straight in and parked in a garage in midtown. I was meeting one other person from my company and some customers for the typical day of a salesman. My engineer, Bill, decided to park at Port Liberty and take the ferry over from NJ. I was already at the venue for the meetings when he called me from the ferry terminal on the NJ side and told me they just saw a plane hit one of the WTC towers. They all thought it was a small private plane. He boarded the ferry and came across. Just as his ferry docked, the second plane hit.
Now, being it was 2001, I had a pager and a cell phone. Soon my pager was going off constantly with news updates. My phone was initially working, and my wife called and told me to just come home. In my usual fashion, I said I will figure it out and let her know when I was leaving. We turned on whatever TV we could find and began watching the news with our customers and watched live as about 50 blocks south of us, the world as we knew it was changing forever. Then we watched the unthinkable happen, the first building collapsed. We stood there in shock and awe of what we just saw. We were devastated at the sight and all we could think is how many people were in that building. Shortly after, the second building collapsed. Now the cell phones stopped working. Pagers were still feeding us info but since most of the main communication lines were right around the corner from the Towers, the main telecom carrier’s facility were destroyed. The only phone that was working was Bill’s. I called my wife with his phone and told her we were working on a plan to get off the island.
Now it may seem simple and say just leave. Well it was not easy at all. We first floated the idea of just camping out in a hotel room since our only options to leave were to either walk across one of the bridges or walk down to the ferry. There was no way to drive off the island, so my car parked around the corner was useless. Our closest exit was the ferry terminal next to the USS Intrepid museum. We started walking out of the building just before noon.
As we walked out onto the street, something very eerie was presented to us. Anyone that has been to NYC knows it is a noisy place. It is the sound of a large city with cars and trucks, horns blowing, people on the street. The sound is unique, like a constant white noise, and is something that you may not notice until it’s not there. There was no noise, no cars running, no horns blowing, no people on the street talking, no white noise. Cars and trucks were abandoned right in the middle of the street, just sitting there. It was so quiet you would hear the occasional bird chirping from the park across the street. It was like we walked out onto a movie set of Manhattan and it was fake. This within itself made us a bit nervous and anxious. There was barely anyone on the streets. It was like we were the last people on the island. We immediately began our walk to the ferry.
About 15 minutes or so we made it to the Westside Highway and across the street we saw thousands and thousands of people in line waiting to get onto a ferry and get off the island. We got in line and for the next 3 and a half hours we watched fighter jets circle the island at low altitude, we watched police, fire and EMS vehicles drive south to lower Manhattan. Responders from all over were driving in to help. We continued to stay in queue and watch the massive amount of people and equipment heading downtown to help. Eventually, we saw some vehicles heading back from the site. Faces of firefighters and police covered in soot with a frightening look of despair on their faces. What we saw in their faces just brought a greater sense of reality to us of what happened just a few miles down the road.
While in line, people, thousands of people, were quiet. Nobody was really talking, everyone just stayed in line and kept moving forward. Except for one guy. There is always that one guy that thinks rules do not apply to them. Well as he tried to cut the line, the rest of the people systematically removed him from the line and handed him to a couple of police officers. Then it was quiet again. Nobody was pushing, nobody was arguing. It was an example of what we always knew growing up in the tri-state area; the people here are helpful and band together when a crisis hits us. Having the stereotype of being from NJ or NY meant people outside of the area thought we were rude and mean people. That is not the case, those people are from Philly. We all just waited our turn and did not give anyone a hard time and helped anyone who needed help. We finally got onto the ferry and began sailing across the river to NJ. As we crossed the river, we all stared in horror down the river at the large plume of smoke billowing out of lower Manhattan.
Now that we were off the island, we thought it was easy sailing from there. Bill had his truck parked there so we had transportation. But all the main highways were closed for exclusive use for emergency vehicles. So here we are now trying to figure out how Bill was going to get me somewhere so someone can pick me up and he can drive back to Pennsylvania where he lived. Being born and raised in NJ, there is always about 15 different routes you can take to get from point A to B in NJ. So, we began our back roads quest through town after town to wind our way down to the Piscataway area. There Bill was able to drop me off at a Hilton and then he headed towards Pennsylvania. My father in-law eventually made it up to the hotel to pick my up. I made it home at around 9PM that night. A day that started at dawn was finally coming to an end.
The next morning, I think, was worse than being in NYC on September 11th. The horror of the devastation and lost lives filled the news stations and we watched in disbelief that something like this could ever happen to Americans on American soil. As the days went by, more and more news didn’t make anyone feel better. But it did do something to all of us. It made us band together as Americans and what we saw was an attack on our way of life and innocent people tragically died because of radicals thousands of miles away act as cowards and prey on the innocent civilians by justifying it is all in the name of their god. What they really did was piss off every American alive.
Where I lived in NJ was a popular area for people who worked in NYC to live. In the coming weeks and months, our towns were overcome by daily funerals of residents who died on 9/11. It was like it was never ending. The pain our communities endured only etched the memory of all of this into our minds until we die. Therefore, I will never forget that day and what those animals did to our fellow countrymen and our way of life.
About a month later I was in NYC again for a meeting and it was in lower Manhattan. After my meeting, I walked as close as I could to ground zero. Even though I was still a few blocks away, the devastation and destruction I saw was staggering. It sickens me to this day that so many people lost their lives on 9/11 in NYC, DC and PA, but it also showed us how to be Americans again. Does it need to take a tragedy like 9/11 to bring this country together and remind us that no matter where we came from, how we grew up or what we believe in, at the end of the day WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. Let’s start acting like it. Never Forget and do not let the world forget.