Five years gone by

I've been watching all the coverage of the recent terror plot in London. Thankfully, it didn't succeed. I've also been watching all the preview trailers for "World Trade Center." Surprisingly, it placed third at the box office this weekend. People in wartime tend to like funny movies, and supposedly, "Talladega Nights" fills the bill. It was number one.
I doubt I'll see either "World Trade Center" or the other 9/11 movie so far, "United 93." I was sitting in the newsroom on 9-11-01, a beautiful September morning. Fall arrived a little early that year, and we were grateful for a break from the heat. We heard about the first hit about 10 minutes until 8 (we're on Central Time), and I wondered aloud if New York was socked in with fog. Our webmaster pulled up CNN on the Internet, and finally, they posted a picture of the smoking tower. Beautiful weather there, as well. Must have been a computer or other mechanical failure. Had to have been. We were an afternoon paper then, and were on deadline, so we turned to the other deadline tasks. I finished readying the weather page, having said a silent prayer for the victims in the tower and on the plane.
About 8:15, one of our reporters said he had been on the phone with his mother-in-law and she said another plane hit the towers. We were sure it was just a repeat of the news of the first hit, but the reporter said no, it was live. The first whispers of "hijacked" started to make their way around the room, as we looked at each other in shock. When the plane hit the Pentagon, we knew.
When the news came of the fourth plane, still flying when everything else was grounded, and that hijackers probably were in control, and it was heading on a general path to the White House, my blood froze. I told my editor, "You know what they'll do--they're going to send fighters to shoot down that plane." He looked at me, dumbfounded, and told me that surely, I was mistaken. I knew I wasn't. About 15 minutes later, we got the news that United 93 had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, and that the fighters scrambled from Andrews were about 7-10 minutes from intercept. I was thankful those pilots had not had to follow through on an order to destroy a commercial aircraft with their own countrymen on board.
I have the newspapers from that day. We made our first edition deadline and were one of the first papers in the state to have it on the front page.
I was in something of a daze the rest of the day. Mike and I went to church that night for a prayer service. We live about 20 miles from an airport, and routinely hear jets flying over. I looked at the skies that had not been so empty in my memory.
I suffered from news overload early on, watching the endless commentary, the families of the victims, the victims themselves who barely escaped with their lives, walking, covered in ash and dust. I played a lot of computer solitaire that week. I prayed tearfully for the victims, their families, for those who were working the Ground Zero site, the police and Port Authority officers, firemen, and the hundreds of volunteers. I watched the memorial service on television and cried yet again when NYPD officer Danny Rodriguez sang in his beautiful tenor.
Please God, nothing like that will happen again in my lifetime. It was my generation's Pearl Harbor. Alan Jackson had the right idea in his song. My world did stop turning that week. I knew no one involved but still, I grieved.
Five years away isn't long enough. The images in my mind from the real story are still too fresh to want to see Hollywood's version of them.