The Day We'll Never Forget

Like so many of my friends in broadcasting, I was on the air live when the first airplane hit the World Trade Center; I remember the confusion and uncertainty, and then the dawning realization, confirmed when the second plane hit the other tower, that these were deliberate acts and that our nation was at war.

Broadcasters, particularly news anchors, are trained to deal with getting information to the public and putting their emotions on hold as best they can.  You need all your powers of concentration to deal with disseminating accurate information as it unfolds in front of your eyes, gathering facts from multiple sources, synthesizing the information, and relaying it to your audience.

On this day 11 years ago, our son was a freshman at UW-Madison and our daughter was a senior at LaFollette High School.  Far in the back of my mind, as I did my best to serve the audience, were the nagging questions “what’s next – are the kids safe?” and “how is this horrible attack going to change the world they will inherit?”

I’m struck by how many of the friends I was working with that day – friends who have in so many cases done what the broadcasting industry demands and moved hundreds or thousands of miles away, to take another step up the career ladder – have posted remembrances of the day on social media sites, and how clearly they recall the events of that horrible day, and how it has affected their lives so markedly.

My first awareness of the events came from the TV monitor in my studio.  I did TV newscasts on Channel 14 at 7:00, 7:30, and 8:00 AM, and suddenly the picture switched from the program usually airing on Channel 14 at that time, to a live CBS news feed.  I looked at the smoke streaming from one of the World Trade Center towers, and saw the secret news hotline extension light up at nearly the same time.  It was a call from the director at Channel 14, saying they were switching to the live CBS feed for coverage of - whatever was going on in New York - and he had to get off the line.

Why would there be flames coming out of that building and so much smoke streaming into the sky?  Some sort of explosion or fire?  I switched my headset to "TV Audio" and....the world changed forever.

I have saved hours of audio from what our on-air teams did that day; I’ve never listened to it, but I’ll never be able to part with it.  I remember the numb feeling I had as I walked from the news studio a few steps down the hallway to the studio of Q-106, where my friends John Flint and Tammy Lee  were doing their top-rated morning show (which they've since taken to San Diego), and saying “there’s something going on in New York City this morning – I may need to break in quite a bit.”

As that unforgettable morning wore on, I wondered in the back of my mind if our son would be drafted to serve in the military, to fight whichever nation had attacked us, in the war that was certain to follow. There are still well over 80-thousand troops in Afghanistan right now and countless others deployed in foreign lands in the aftermath of the attacks 11 years ago, and on average, one American soldier is killed every day in the ongoing war.

I remember the kindness and generosity of so many of our local emergency responders and emergency government officials, who, of their own volition, called the newsroom to offer their expertise to help our audience better understand what the NYPD, FDNY, Port Authority, and the scores of other NYC public safety officials were facing that day, and what preparations and precautions were being taken locally.  I recall the manager of the Dane County Regional Airport calling in to help explain what was going on with the air traffic system, and what was being done here to deal with the events in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania.

As the morning progressed to mid-afternoon,  we had a full contingent of news people and volunteers helping in the news room, and the big boss came into the studio and said “great job – we’ve got it covered now – go home and get some rest and prepare for another long day tomorrow.”

Early the next morning, long before I was scheduled to go on the air with the first newscast of the day, while I was writing copy updates, I remember a call to our secret newsroom “hotline” phone from a friend in the local emergency government structure (I’m still protecting him as a news source 11 years later by not giving his name or specifics) telling me “my God, Tim – New York is asking us how many body bags we have available – you can’t use this on-air but if the subject does come up, here’s my cell phone number and I’ll go on with you if this becomes an open question”.  We still, at that point, were getting widely varying estimates of how many people actually lost their lives at “ground zero.”

We all have our own special, vivid memories of that day.

In some ways, our nation has still not “recovered” from those horrible acts of terrorism eleven years ago; and every American’s life has been touched directly in some way by the events of 9-11. 

I’m confident none of us who lived through that day and its aftermath will ever forget.

9-11-01 Redux

No, I haven’t forgotten; and I never will.  I was anchoring news for a group of five Madison radio stations that fated September morning ten years ago, and I have a CD of our coverage in case I ever want to live it again.  But I don’t.

I guess I’m not an overtly sentimental person about death; I’ve told my wife that when I kick the bucket she should just chop me up into pieces and throw me in a (big) hole in the ground in the huge raspberry patch along our southern fenceline, somewhere near the two pet cats we placed at rest there after they passed on.

I will never forget, and I doubt any American over the age of 10 who was alive that day will forget. That date is as burned in as December 7^th, 1941 was to the prior generation, and as the murder of JFK is, to my generation.  (November 22^nd, 1963 – but most of us don’t remember the date, just where we were and what we were doing when we got the news.)

In my opinion, the vast coverage of the tenth anniversary (or, as far too many network dweebs said, “ten-year anniversary”) lacked one critical element.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

I knew Sunday’s coverage, no matter which network or cable news outlet you watched, would be over the top with sentimentality and that even our sporting events that day would be interlaced with maudlin references to the day and all the innocent and unsuspecting – and all the incredibly brave – Americans who died that day.  That was to be expected.  It’s the way the TV folks are.  Excess is the default position.

But, as far as I’m concerned, one of the most important elements of the 9-11 story was missing in all the coverage on all the stations I saw yesterday.  The missing element was the capture and killing of Usama bin Laden, which we found out about Sunday night May 1^st.

To me, you can’t tell the story of 9-11 without telling the part about how our brave and dedicated military and intelligence community tracked down that bastard, and how a phenomenally intrepid US Navy Seal Team stormed his compound, ended bin Laden’s life, AND were able to get away safely after their duty had been done.

The story of 9-11 is far from over, but – to me – you can’t tell the story without saying we got the bastard who was behind it and arranged for him to meet Allah.

It would be fitting to honor our military – those who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq, regardless of your feelings about those missions – to acknowledge their contributions, right along with the brave firefighters and police officers who gave their lives trying to help their fellow Americans on 9-11.