I last saw the WTC on 9/4/01 from a window seat of a 757, on my way to a .Net Developer Training in Phoenix Arizona. I then took a three day hike around the Grand Canyon, and on 9/10 I flew to Vancouver BC arriving at 10:40PM. I awoke very early on 9/11, went down to the lobby where a large screen TV tuned to CNN was relaying the days tragedy from my home town. They were interviewing a man about the cost of a Cessna, and all the talk was of a “plane” that had struck the WTC, till someone said “767”. I screamed aloud “767”, in an instant the realization struck, I had flown across the Atlantic a hundred times in these enormously powerful machines.
A crowd begins to gather in the lobby as we watched the tape of the second 767 striking the second tower. I went out on the street walking; it was the morning rush hour in Vancouver but all my thoughts were three thousand miles away.
After walking around for hours I returned to that large screen TV in the lobby where a young crowd of Brits and Australians had gathered. CNN was saying 50,000 people may have perished in the collapse of the towers and the Brits and Australians cheered! It was like Christmas and all their birthdays had arrived on that morning. I was numb, completely numb. At one point they asked a young Chinese guy behind the desk if he wasn’t glad to see the Americans “get what was coming to them”, he shouted back “do you know how many Chinese are in New York”! Then he looked at me (we had spoken earlier in the morning) and asked if Chinatown was near the WTC, “it’s just a few blocks away” I said, identifying myself as an American. In the course of the day one then another Australian woman came up to me to let me know personally how glad they were that America had been attacked.
Two threads on channel9 this past week brought this ugly experience back to my thoughts.