Remembering 9/11 of 2001: The Day All Our Lives Changed Forever :: War on Terror

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September 11, 2008

Remembering 9/11 of 2001: The Day All Our Lives Changed Forever

Topics: War on Terror

On the morning of 9/11/01 I was an inpatient at the VA hospital in Tampa, Florida. Just after the first tower was hit the receptionist in the clinic that I was in at the time received a phone call from her husband, telling her about what had happened. After she told me what her husband told her, we talked briefly about just how a pilot could be so incompetent as to fly his plane into a tower.

A short time later, I left the clinic and wheeled my way back into the spinal cord injury wing, my assigned clinic whenever I'm in the hospital, and passed by the day room just as the second tower was hit and where a dozen or so fellow veterans were watching the mornings events unfold on the large screen television. The emotion all of us felt at the time is almost indescribable, it's hard to put such emotions in words.

As the day's events continued to unfold, the room filled with wheelchairs crowded together, and we learned of the Pentagon being hit; the indescribable emotion felt earlier when the towers were hit gradually gave way to anger. And when it became obvious that our great nation had been attacked, every single man in that room began trying to reach the recruiter's office of the Armed service in which he'd previously served.

These men, some paralyzed from the legs down, some missing arms and/or legs, all of us in electric wheelchairs, were to a man, desperately trying to reach their recruiter to see how they could help, they wanted to fight back against those who attacked the country they loved and had fought for.

By late afternoon the hospital administration began to receive calls from the various recruiting offices asking them to please try to get the vets in the hospital to stop calling so that others outside the hospital who were physically able to join could get through on the phones; the massive number of calls from veterans in the VA hospital were jamming the lines in the recruiting offices and able-bodied men and women could not get through to the recruiters. As a former Recon Marine I had tried to convince the recruiter that I could still be used in mobile recon, after trying for two hours to get through to the Marine recruiter. So I can attest to the fact that the Marine recruiting office telephone lines were indeed jammed.

Such was the love that the men and women at the VA hospital in Tampa, Florida on September 11, 2001 - particularly those in the SCI unit, had for their country, and such is the love that those who are still alive today, continue to have for their country. Lest America forget, the war with radical Islam that they began on 9/11 is still raging. It's not over, and may very well last for generations. Now is not the time to allow ourselves to become complacent.

God bless America, Semper Fi!

September 11, 2001began like any other day, just like today: 'Before The Bulletins':

... a collection of newscasts from the morning of September 11th that PRECEDE the initial "breaking news" bulletins, showing what some of the news of the day was BEFORE the world changed forever.

However, as all of us know now, it wasn't like any other day, a day like today, it was the day that America, and the world, was changed forever. It was the day that America was attacked by radical Islam, and over 2,973 innocent Americans were killed by Islamic terrorists.

9-11 tribute "The Beginning":