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In September 2001, I worked as a purchasing officer for a company that made mining equipment . As such, I was the general gofer and spent a fair amount of time most days in the company truck running errands. I was coming back from the lumber yard when I heard the news of the first plane striking the first tower.

I know a lot of people who say they immediately knew soemthing was wrong, but I was blissfully ignorant. The first news descritptions made it sound as though the plane that struck the building was a twin-engine Cessna or something that size. It could happen on accident.

When the second plane struck, I was waiting to pick up one of our truck drivers at a local garage where he was dropping off one of our big trucks for cleaning and service. I still didn’t get it. I was mad at the FAA for not diverting air traffic around that area.

While I was stillw aiting for Jerry, just a minute or two later, they announced a plane had sruck the Pentagon. Then, with tears streaming down my face, it finally dawned on me: “We are under attack.”

When I was an infant, the country was still fighting in Vietnam, but other than that, the conflicts we were in during my lifetime were short and far away–Grenada, the Falklands, even the first Gulf War were relatively quick and painless–so I had no frame of reference for an attack on Americans on American soil. That and I am an eternal optomist, I want to believe the best about the world around me.

From there, my memories at least of the first hour or so of the 9/11 attacks are similar to most everyone elses, but in the days that followed, well, beginning that very afternoon, my perspective was changed by my job.

See, that afternoon a client from Pennsylvania called us asking if we had some materials they needed. It was a coal mining operation and remnants of Flight 93 were strewn across their property.

Then, a few days later, another of our major clients called asking if we could create a diamond-tipped drilling bit to drill into the rubble of the subway station under the World Trade Center. we made tungsten carbide bits. On the Moh’s hardness scale, our bits could cut through things with an 8 or 9 hardness, but the debris under the towers was chewing through the hardened steel and carbide like nothing. The fires burned so hot that the remnants formed were nearly as hard as diamonds. Men who normally drilled through the toughest things mother nature had to offer were stymied by this debris.

So don’t talk to me about conspiracy theories and rigged explosives designed to make the towers collapse. Jet fuel, tons of it, caused the buildings to collapse and their remanants to create a virtual lava of steel and rock in the subway tunnels below.

Mostly, I believe in the right to free speech and to say and think what you want, even if you are an idiot, but on this day, don’t tell me about the needlessness of the war in Iraq or your theory that George Bush is the worst president of all time. Today, remember the pain and pride of that day, remember the way Americans stood in line across the country to give blood and send supplies, remember a nation that set aside our differences for a day to sing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps. Remember that we can be “One Nation” under God, Allah, and any other diety of your choice when push comes to shove. Remember the heroes who willingly gave their live to save others. Remember what it means to be an American. I know, I will never forget again.

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