My husbands company managed one of the buildings around the towers. The thing I will never forget is the property manager having to go to the roof and remove human remains from the jumpers.
I will never forget and honestly, never forgive. Murdered for going to work.
Almost as horrifying as October 7, when peace-loving leftist Jews were murdered while at home with their families.
I remember being in school and didn't understand the gravity of it at the time. I remember the combination of worry and somberness in my teachers mannerisms as we watched the news was very unsettling.
I was thinking about this the other day. The sadness I feel for the America we lost is sometimes overwhelming. And infuriating because we let them win by giving up that beautiful country.
23 years ago today I was living as an American expat in Shenzhen China, and had been for the previous seven years. At just after 10pm I got a call from another expat telling me to turn on my tv to CNN International because something was happening back home. My wife and I sat there transfixed as we watched the one tower on fire, then the plane crash into the second tower, and we knew then that America was under attack. We didn’t know who or why, just the visceral reaction that my home was under attack, and here we were 10,000 miles away, unable to do anything about it. It was a mixture of fear, rage and confusion.
Early the next day we convened a crisis management team as we had responsibilities for roughly 50 other American and UK expats and their families working on our project. We knew the world as we knew it was gone, but no clue as what was replacing it. Every airport was shutdown, armed security around expat communities and our project offices was increased by the local Chinese government, fear was everywhere including the Chinese people working with us, as no one knew how far and widespread the threat was.
The world in general and America specifically, were never the same after that, the reality of the world of September 10th, 2001 was now a foreign country you could no longer visit. I stayed another three years in China before repatriating back to America. The country I left in 1993 was a militarized country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan when I returned in 2004, and remained so for the next 16 years.
Now reading your article and reflecting back on that fateful evening in China, there are times it seems like that was someone else’s life I read about, decoupled from the reality of the Western world today. Whatever the intent of the terror tactics conceived by Osama bin Laden for that September day, have been far surpassed by the reality of the West’s reaction to them.
My husbands company managed one of the buildings around the towers. The thing I will never forget is the property manager having to go to the roof and remove human remains from the jumpers.
I will never forget and honestly, never forgive. Murdered for going to work.
Almost as horrifying as October 7, when peace-loving leftist Jews were murdered while at home with their families.
I remember being in school and didn't understand the gravity of it at the time. I remember the combination of worry and somberness in my teachers mannerisms as we watched the news was very unsettling.
I was thinking about this the other day. The sadness I feel for the America we lost is sometimes overwhelming. And infuriating because we let them win by giving up that beautiful country.
23 years ago today I was living as an American expat in Shenzhen China, and had been for the previous seven years. At just after 10pm I got a call from another expat telling me to turn on my tv to CNN International because something was happening back home. My wife and I sat there transfixed as we watched the one tower on fire, then the plane crash into the second tower, and we knew then that America was under attack. We didn’t know who or why, just the visceral reaction that my home was under attack, and here we were 10,000 miles away, unable to do anything about it. It was a mixture of fear, rage and confusion.
Early the next day we convened a crisis management team as we had responsibilities for roughly 50 other American and UK expats and their families working on our project. We knew the world as we knew it was gone, but no clue as what was replacing it. Every airport was shutdown, armed security around expat communities and our project offices was increased by the local Chinese government, fear was everywhere including the Chinese people working with us, as no one knew how far and widespread the threat was.
The world in general and America specifically, were never the same after that, the reality of the world of September 10th, 2001 was now a foreign country you could no longer visit. I stayed another three years in China before repatriating back to America. The country I left in 1993 was a militarized country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan when I returned in 2004, and remained so for the next 16 years.
Now reading your article and reflecting back on that fateful evening in China, there are times it seems like that was someone else’s life I read about, decoupled from the reality of the Western world today. Whatever the intent of the terror tactics conceived by Osama bin Laden for that September day, have been far surpassed by the reality of the West’s reaction to them.