World Trade Center

And the guy was a probationary firefighter, had just joined the FDNY in March of 2001 to follow in his uncle's footsteps.

The last thing he said was a voicemail to his dad saying, "Tell everybody I'm okay, but I'm heading to the World Trade Center." And then his brother found a note that he left in his drawer, bedside drawer, in case he ever passed away.

And just, you know, all the things that he was asking his family to do, like his longtime girlfriend, make sure she's okay, and all of this stuff.

So that's a new one that, uh, you can go and check out called, uh, Living On.

Um, one is the, the enormous loss of life that took place 25 years ago today, and the constantly recurring reminders.

There are people that are still dying of, uh, illnesses from that day, people who responded to, uh, the World Trade Center and the New York, uh, segment of that.

But then you have other people who, um, died with young children who have now grown up.

Uh, and then you have people who are, have been born who don't know anything about it and can't fathom what took place.

You know, before, before 2001, I wouldn't have been able to look out of my, my window, uh, the windows of my office, look out over the front lawn of the town hall.

And on a daily basis now, we have a, we have a, um, a statue out there with a piece of World Trade Center steel on it, and, uh, on a daily basis, there are visitors from other provinces and other countries out there poking around there and coming in the town hall.

And, and that's not just on anniversary years like, like this year.

I mean, it's, it's a regular thing.

A ceremony to commemorate twenty-five years since the September eleventh terror attacks is underway in New York City.

Crowds have gathered to honor the nearly three thousand victims who were killed when Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

President Donald Trump is attending a memorial at the Pentagon.

[short jingle]

That morning I was on my way to mass, and before I left the apartment, my roommate said, "Turn on the TV.

A little plane ha- A pla- a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center."

Oh.

I immediately thought, "Oh, some private pilot really screwed up." Didn't really think about it, went to mass, went to work, and then, of course, the horror is unfolding.

I think I was- Just, I had just gotten promoted in February from a police officer to detective.

Okay.

I worked in narcotic, in the nar- narcotics division, and our office was down on South Street in Lower Manhattan, which is pretty close to the World Trade Center, you know.

Okay.

Yeah.

We, th- the World Trade Center is on fire.

Oh my goodness.

Seriously, the top of the building.

My God, look at the skyline without the towers.

It is Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.

In one of the most audacious attacks ever, terrorists hijacked two airliners, crashed them into the World Trade Center in a coordinated series of blows today that brought down the twin 110-story towers.

Thousands may be dead.

Bin Laden's face adorned posters in homes, and kids in Pakistan wore bin Laden T-shirts.

But on the afternoon of September 14th, President George W. Bush visited the twisted, still smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers had stood, and megaphone in hand, promised that America would not be cowed.

"I can hear you," he said.

"The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon." And they did.

I couldn't believe it.

I was like, "Is this real? Is this-- What is going on? Is this..." I, I kept on saying, "This can't be real.

This can't be real." In the meantime, my husband told me that when he was in Limerick on the bus, they had just finished mass there, and they-- the, the people that were on the bus, one of the women worked at, um, the Twin Towers, and all of the people that she knew that she worked with had perished.

[sniffs] So, um, immediately, um, afterwards, um, they were invited to, um...

The American psyche has just been sobered as never before.

We have recently experienced a massive terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and against the Pentagon.

We've seen a lot of people go out and have prayer vigils, and even something that was more astounding, perhaps, we saw members of Congress, both the Senate and the House, singing from the Capitol steps, God Bless America.

Now we know that God has blessed America in the past.

So in all honesty, we should look at both sides of this Bible understanding.

and so that we can understand exactly what God says.

Now, I was watching live TV when the second plane hit the second tower of the World Trade Center, and I can tell you that it just made me feel physically sick because it was obviously a terrorist attack against this country that I love, and I think many other people felt the very same way.

But what is happening? What is the cause of all this? And yet, as sobering as it is, many people say, well, it's going to get worse.

The most jarring part for me personally, having grown up there, To go home from college for me, I would always go over the George Washington Bridge and cross the George Washington Bridge lots of times in my life as a kid.

And the cool thing when you were little, when you would cross over that bridge coming from the New Jersey side to the New York side, is that you could look down the city skyline and you could see the Twin Towers, right? That was always the thing, especially As a kid, we bus back from Pittsburgh.

Obviously, we realized once the season was going to be put on hold, nobody was flying.

And so we crossed the George Washington Bridge coming back from Pittsburgh.