Never Forget: The Eighth Anniversary of 9/11

I was stationed in Korea at the Eighth Army HQ, Ballistic Missile Defense Division, in Seoul. I opened the door to my apartment to pick up the morning newspaper, and saw a picture of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center with the blazing headline: “Hijacked Jets Hit World Trade Towers in New York, Strike Pentagon”.

At first I did not believe it was real. I thought: My God, this has got to be a joke…or an accident.
I threw on my BDUs, and ran down the street to work. The whole way, which took only a few minutes, I kept reading the front page in disbelief.  By the time I got to the front gate of the post, the vehicle and foot traffic was backed up for blocks. I made my way to the gate at the MP shack, flashed my ID, and was waved through.

The entire military—South Korea and U.S.—was on high alert. When I got to the office, everyone was there, from the Commander on down. Sky News was on and everyone crowded into the conference room to be briefed on what had happened.  My disbelief soon turned to raging anger.

In the week that followed, there was brief unity between NATO and America. The Democrats even found a few nice things to say about the U.S.  ‘That will last about two minutes’, I thought. I was right. It didn’t take long for the government conspiracy moonbats and the ‘blame America’ morons to come crawling out of the woodwork.  There were photos and filmed reports of muslim fucksticks cheering and dancing in the streets in East Jerusalem, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, and Indonesia,  to accompany the gore of the terrorist atrocities.

I told my OIC the same thing I feel to this day: We should have wiped out at least half the Middle East the day after.  They wanted a jihad, we should have given them one.

Thanks to the Marxist milksop now occupying the White House, another attack is more likely than ever. Some people managed to wake up on 9/12.
Too bad there are too many assholes out there with a 9/10 mentality.

It’s been eight years since Islamofascist swine fired the opening volley in their war on Western civilization. Let’s see where we are:

Guess how Obama’s lackeys want to commemorate 9/11?

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/09/01/obamas-team-crosses-the-rhetorical-line/

As soon as their little campaign was publicized, they removed it.  The folks at the Heritage Foundation cached the page.

Hard-working Americans against Obama’s government-run health care proposal and socialist power grabs, are labeled  “nazis” and “un-American”.  Now, they pervert the memory of almost 3000 victims of Islamic terrorism, by adding “right-wing domestic terrorists” to the cesspool of leftwingnut pejoratives.

Some tributes and testimonies:

KOMO’s Tami Michaels, and her husband, Guy Rosbrook, were in their room on the 35th floor at the Millennium Hilton Hotel in downtown Manhattan as terrorists attacked New York City. Across a two-lane street from their room was the World Trade Center.
http://www.komonews.com/news/national/57611192.html?video=YLO&t=a
http://www.komonews.com/news/national/57611192.html

More of Tami’s eyewitness account on her webpage.
http://www.mynorthwest.com/index.php?nid=228&sid=86883

More tributes:
http://www.jontzen.com/tribute.htm

Allahpundit has a poignant, haunting recollection on his Twitter site.

Eight years ago, I remember opening my eyes at 8:46 a.m. in my downtown Manhattan apartment because I thought a truck had crashed in the street outside.

I remember pacing my apartment for the next 15 minutes thinking, stupidly, that a gas line might have been hit in the North Tower and then I heard another explosion. I hope no one ever hears anything like it.

All I can say to describe it is: Imagine the sound of thousands of Americans screaming on a city street It was unbelievable, almost literally I remember being on the sidewalk and there was an FBI agent saying he was cordoning off the street and then, the next day, when I went back for my cats, they told me I might see bodies lying in front of my apartment building (I didn’t).

We held a memorial service in October for my cousin’s husband, who was “missing” but not really. He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. They found a piece of his ribcage in the rubble not too long afterwards.

This is the guy who conspired to murder him: http://is.gd/38h7y

Had a friend from the high school speech and debate team who disappeared from the 105th floor. Had another friend of a friend who worked on the 80th floor or so, married six weeks before the attack. Speculation is that he was right in the plane’s path, and was killed instantly when it plowed through the building.

Did a bit of legal work for a couple whose son worked in the upper floors. Was dating someone else up there at the time I was told that she managed to call her parents while they were trapped up there and that the call “was not good”. Never found out if it was cut off by the building collapsing or not.

I remember opening my eyes at 8:46 a.m. thinking “I hope that was just a pothole.” Then I heard a guy outside my window say, “Oh shit”. Opened the window, looked to my left, saw huge smoke coming out of the WTC. Left at around 9:30, decided to walk uptown thinking that the buildings would never collapse and that I’d be back in my apartment by the next night. I never went back. It was closed off until December.

I remember thinking when I was a few blocks away that the towers might collapse, and so I walked faster although I sneered at myself later for thinking that might be true and for being a coward. Although not for long.

To this day, you can find photos of thousands of people congregated in the blocks surrounding the Towers, seemingly waiting for them to fall that day. When I got to midtown, rumors were that Camp David and the Sears Tower had also been destroyed. I remember looking around and thinking that we had to get out of Manhattan, as this might be some pretext to get us into the street and hit us with some germ I callled my dad — and somehow miraculously got through — and told him I was alive, then headed for the 59th street bridge. To this day, the scariest memory is being on that bridge, looking at the Towers smoking in the distance, and thinking maybe the plotters had wired the bridge too to explode beneath us while we were crossing it.

I remember talking to some guy on the bridge that we’d get revenge, but you had to see the smoke coming from the Towers in the distance. It was like a volcano. I remember being down there two months later. There was a single piece of structure maybe five stories tall of the lattice-work still standing. It looked like a limb of a corpse sticking up out of the ground.

They knocked it down soon after.

At my office, which I had just joined, I was told that some people had seen the jumpers diving out the windows to escape the flames that morning. There was a video online, posted maybe two years ago, shot from the hotel across the street and it showed roughly 10-12 bodies flattened into panackes lying in the central plaza. Maybe it’s still online somewhere. You have to see it to understand, though. You get a sense of it from the Naudet brothers documentary hearing the explosions as the bodies land in the plaza, but seeing it and hearing it are two different things.

I remember after I got over the bridge into Queens, I heard a noise overheard that I’d never heard before. It was an F-15, on patrol over New York. Very odd sound. A high-pitched wheeze.

……My only other significant memory is being in the lobby of the apartment building on 9/11 and trying to console some woman who lived there who said her father worked on the lower floors of the WTC. I assume he made it out alive, but she was hysterical as of 9:30 that a.m. Who could blame her?

……When I left at 9:30, I thought more planes were coming. I left because I thought, “Well, if these planes hit the building the right way, it could fall and land on mine.” I remember getting to 57th Street and asking some dude, “What happened?” And he said, “They collapsed” and I couldn’t believe both of them had gone down. Even after the planes hit I remembered that the Empire State Building had taken a hit from a military plane during WWII and still stood tall. So it was never a serious possibility that the WTC would collapse. I assumed that the FDNY would get up there, put out the fire, and the WTC would be upright but with gigantic holes in it.

It took an hour for the first tower to go down, 90 minutes for the second.

……So for many people, the choice probably quickly became: Hang on, endure the smoke, or jump. If you listen to the 911 calls, which I advise you not to do, some of them chose “hang on”.  Although needless to say, if you ever saw the Towers you know how dire things must have been up there to make anyone think the better solution was “jump”. They were ENORMOUS.

……I leave you with this, my very favorite film about the WTC. If you’re a New Yorker, have a hanky handy. No. 3 is golden http://is.gd/38qsT

READ THE WHOLE THING:  http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/09/11/quotes-of-the-day-remembering-91101/

Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs has a graphic video of people in the World Trade Center, who chose to die by hurling themselves out of windows, instead of incinerating.  Any asshole who doesn’t believe this war is worth fighting, should be duct-taped to a chair and forced to watch it, along with photos of the victims in the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/09/911-.html

September 11th galvanized troops in Afghanistan:

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan – Many of the troops at this sprawling U.S. air base were in their mid-teens when they watched the planes hit the World Trade Center‘s twin towers on television and vowed to join the military.

Eight years later, many of those who enlisted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are now part of a massive military effort in Afghanistan that some are saying has no clear exit.

Remembrances of the attacks started at dawn Friday, with more than 1,000 service members donning shorts and sneakers to run exactly 9.11 kilometers (about 5.5 miles) to commemorate the day and remember troops who have died in the fighting since.

Army Sgt. Joshua Applegate of Springfield, Mississippi, was in high school when the planes hit the towers, and enlisted two years later, though he said he had wanted to do it right away.

“I like my country too much not to,” said Applegate, who arrived in Afghanistan in April and now facilitates transport and other logistics at Bagram Airfield, the main U.S. base in the country, located just north of the capital, Kabul.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090911/ap_on_re_as/as_afghan_sept11

The good new is, during the Bush administration, we eviscerated Al Qaeda, the Talban, and stopped more attacks from happening in the U.S.

The bad news is, the war on Islamic terrorism is Obama’s to lose, and he’s doing just that.  We are saddled with a “president” pre-occupied with apologizing to the world, including Islamic nation states who laugh their asses off at Obama’s concilliatory gestures.

He wants to target CIA interrogators for extracting valuable information that saved American lives, instead of the terrorists themselves.  He’s disowned Iraq, and has fucked up big time in Afghanistan.  He will not give Soldiers the tools and the support needed to finish the job.  He has no intention of winning.

Need more proof?

Queen Nancy’s input on Afghanistan:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she sees little congressional support for boosting troop levels in Afghanistan, putting the Democratic majority in Congress on a possible collision course with the Obama administration over the future conduct of the war there.

The remarks Thursday by Ms. Pelosi (D., Calif.) make her the highest-ranking Democrat to signal opposition to the administration’s handling of the Afghan war, a top national-security priority.

The remarks also underscored the increasingly complex political dynamics confronting President Barack Obama as he considers whether to send additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Kabul, is expected to formally request as many as 40,000 U.S. reinforcements this month. He and other U.S. commanders there say they believe that they need more troops to successfully implement a new counterinsurgency approach that focuses on protecting the Afghan populace from Taliban violence.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125263545607902025.html?mod=djemITP

I say this every year:

It’s damned important that we remember not just the heinous attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the one thwarted by brave people over a field in Shanksville, Pa., but resolve that it never happens again.

You’d have thought that Pearl Harbor taught us a lesson, but 60 years had passed, memories faded, and complacency set in.

Our borders leak like sieves, our immigration policies are lax, and we have slid back into complacency.

The gutless refusal of the TSA and DHS to profile at our airports and scrutinize the muslim organizations in America, will probably result in another catastrophic attack. I hope for the sake of my country that I am wrong, but I don’t think so.

The problem is–and this cannot be stressed enough–is that the enemy has patience. They understand us better than we understand them. They will continue to exploit our openness and unwillingness to completely destroy the Islamic nation-states who breed, fund, train, and indoctrinate their terrorist spawns.

Unless or until we are willing to reciprocate with the same brutality, they will be back. Til then, this war ain’t over by a long shot.