Sunday, September 11, 2011

Notes from a sad day

The Philippines lost 20 of their citizens in the 911 attack.

“Honey, I love you. I’ll see you when this is over.”


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Bush gives a speech in honor of the passengers who saved the USSenate:



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For me it's personal: One of my classmates was at the Pentagon...
more HERE:


Perhaps a dozen injured were on the lawn, most suffering from blistering, second-degree burns on the face, hands and arms. Some had inhalation injuries; almost all were in shock.

...Frost and Feerick appeared to be the first doctors on the scene. They began using the medical kits, putting in intravenous lines with saline and dextrose drips.

Someone with a badge began yelling that there was a threat of incoming aircraft. An FBI agent ordered the doctors to move. Frost just kept working...For about 45 minutes, Frost worked to stabilize the dozen to 15 patients on the lawn....

Feerick left to establish triage areas in the tunnels leading to the parking lots. Frost moved to treat those with inhalation injuries and those who had been hurt by debris. The stream of incoming patients began drying up.

"This began to bother us - were we in the right place?" Frost said. He began hearing stories about the World Trade Center. "I then understood this was a far greater tragedy than we'd hoped."

For the next several hours, Frost treated firefighters and other rescue personnel.

In late afternoon, Frost remembered to call his wife, Zan. She was frantic, having learned that morning that he had gone to a Pentagon meeting.

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Peggy Noonan says it best:

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."

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. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: "America You Are Not Alone." To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.

You've got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.

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