Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22134 – 705:
I can remember walking over to the bus stop with my kids. There is quite a busy street that feeds into Fort Carson called South Academy Boulevard and they were young so I would walk them across the street to the college where the bus stop was. One minute everything was normal and by the time we got across the street the traffic had stopped and backed up two and a half miles in either direction. Fighter jets from nearby Petersen Air Force Base screamed overhead at speeds none of us had ever seen before. You hear the sound of them in one part of the sky and see them in another part as they travel faster than the speed of sound. There was no place for us to go and nothing to be done about it but cross back over and go home. Soldiers were parking on the side of the road and walking toward the base. The convenience store parking lot was full as soldiers walked on toward the gate.
“What’s going on?”
“The country’s under attack and Fort Carson and the other bases are locked down.”
This meant that every vehicle and every person trying to enter had to be completely and thoroughly searched and only soldiers were allowed in. We hurried to the house and fired up the old dial-up modem and waited for one of the news websites to show us what was going on.
It was incomprehensible. I’m told that no one has ever seen all of the footage that was taken that day because it was that horrible. People jumping out of windows and off the buildings, knowing there was no rescue. There was no equipment to handle the sheer enormity. People in some countries weeping and in certain countries there was dancing in the streets, praising the cowardly attacks, as a victory over the great satan, America. Osama Bin Laden saying that his plan had worked far better than he could have even dreamed.
It used to be, when I was a boy, that some radical would hijack a plane and demand to be taken to Cuba or someplace but nothing like this had ever happened. Terrorist attacks happened in other countries, not here, although the World Trade Center had been attacked by Al Queada in 1993.
Terrorism is a vile and cowardly act by bullies who know they cannot play fair.
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