A Corner Office View on 9/11
About 8:50 AM on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, my secretary alerted me to the smoke streaming from the World Trade Center tower. I had scheduled a weekly review, and staff members were assembling. They pondered the bizarre scene wondering if it was an errant traffic helicopter or an amateur’s Cessna.
From the Citicorp Building at One Court Square, Queens, my 26th floor corner office windows faced south by southwest and down Jackson Avenue. Sitting behind an oval shaped conference table, I could raise my arms and then extend vertically my pointer and middle fingers to approximate the height of the two iconic buildings that stood six miles away. It was a wonderful panorama bounded by the 59th Street Bridge on the north and all lower Manhattan to the south. The East River’s constant barge traffic added to the scene’s dynamic energy.
The dark smoke billowed out and rose westward. With naked eyes you could see the diagonal scar caused by the impact of the yet to be determined projectile.
Just after 9 AM, we saw a dot in the sky emerge into our field of vision just west of the burning North Tower. The United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 wide body, banked to the left. For a moment, on what the aviation industry calls a “severe clear” day, the sun was low in the sky and glinted off the plane’s wings. You knew it was too close to the towers and could only believe -pray- it was a not what we feared it was.
In what seemed like slow motion, roughly ten thousand gallons of aviation fuel erupted into a black and red fireball. There was a spray of sparks. It was parts of the building and the 350,000-pound plane exploding through the north side of the doomed South Tower.
Like everyone else, the cold reality of an attack -of a state of war- immediately struck me. Within an hour, both World Trade Center towers would collapse, and we would learn about the attack on the Pentagon and the crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
In the days that followed, I traveled as a volunteer with the Salvation Army delivering supplies on an ATV from Citigroup’s 111 Wall Street building to their “ground zero” location that offered rest and refuge. They had located near to St. Paul’s Chapel on Church Street. Exhausted police and firemen received food, drink, and counseling from Salvation Army professionals.
The scale of the catastrophe was hard to describe as the “pile” and twisted remnants stood several stories high. Stuck in the trees in the adjacent cemetery were venetian blinds drifting from the two 110 story towers and fabrics of unknown origin. Coating every surface…tombstones and iron picket fences…was pulverized concrete from the wrecked noble towers.
Since those traumatic days, we have struggled with the horror that instead of that black and red jet fuel fireball, radical terrorists or “death to America…” threatening Iran might somehow deploy a nuclear weapon. In a blinding flash, all lower Manhattan would disappear. Remember, each of the primitive 1945 atomic bombs, which decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had the explosive force of approximately twenty thousand tons of TNT … and today’s weapons are many times more powerful.
When a president declares that Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon or when he destroys Iran’s nuclear factories, he deserves unqualified praise. When America secures our borders and controls malign access to our people and critical assets, those responsible warrant respect and support. Anyone who opposes these commonsense actions are useful idiots.
When indifferent and ill-informed people elect leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani whose focus has been on post 9/11 Muslim victimhood, we must question how we came to forget the 3000 Americans murdered. When Michigan Democrat voters chose Abdul El-Sayed who is allied with Nasan Piker who said, “America deserved 9/11,” we must ensure people not drop their guard and allow naïve virtue signaling to distract them from the realities of a very dangerous world.
Treat 9/11 as a warning, and act accordingly.
