I was living in Norfolk Virginia home of the worlds largest Naval installation. I've always felt comfortable and secure being surrounded by Naval, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, Air Force bases and Army Posts. I've always liked working for and with military personnel very nice and cordial. I remember moving into the area and having a Navy Wife bring me a cake welcoming me to the neighborhood. I was totally shocked when that happened. I was thinking "This would never happen in Jersey!" Anyway that was the beginning of a great 8 years of living in Tidewater.
Going back to that day I remember being on my computer and listening to 790 WNIS-AM and Tony Macrini on my day off. And I remember him talking to a couple of young ladies from PETA, cute and totally misguided. How I know this? I went to work for WNIS a few months later Tony became my boss and met them. How can anyone so cute be so insane? I remember all the fun ended at around 8:47 when Tony read a bulletin off of the Associated Press Wire about what happened in New York. Being from the area, I was thinking that it was just a small plane out of Teterboro that had hit the North Tower not a big deal. But as the minutes passed, it just got worse. So I turned on MSNBC and saw the North Tower with a hole in it smoking. I said Holy Shit? what in the world is going on? My media/history instincts kicked in and I popped in a blank video tape and hit record. I'm sitting there watching all of this when the second plane hit The South Tower. While everyone initially thought it was just an explosion I saw, it for what actually happened another plane hit. I'm sitting there stunned and my phone rang and it was my girlfriend who worked at Bell Atlantic as a 411 operator. She asked me what was going on because all the switchboards were going absolutely crazy at the time. I told her what I saw and at the time we left it at that as being a "New York thing" But as the minutes turned into an hour, come to find out The Pentagon was hit. Not even 5 minutes later I hear screaming coming from downstairs. A Marine who lived in a downstairs apartment that was running out the door into a waiting white van and his girlfriend standing there crying. Again the phone rang it was my girlfriend telling me to get her daughter out of school and bring her home. While I was getting dressed, I glanced over to the television just to see the South Tower Collapse. To be honest with you, I have never felt afraid of anything almost to the scale of like "the end of the world afraid" until then. While I'm driving to get the little girl who would eventually become my step daughter, I'm trying to figure out how to explain to an 8 year old what happened. I've always been pretty honest with her and never spoke baby talk. Driving along I noticed that security had been stepped up at Little Creek Amphibious Base along with Ft. Story. Barriers and sandbags were placed at every entry point . Sailors, Marines and Army Soldiers were posted with heavier than usual arms and uniforms. I'm thinking things are getting really serious now. The military was at Delta all hands had to report, there was a ground stop at Norfolk International Airport and businesses were closing. When I picked up my daughter she had asked me why she was getting out of school early. I gingerly told her what had happened and the reason why mom wanted her to come home. I had an easier time explaining human sexuality to her then death and destruction. We went to Wal-Mart and it was eerily empty like it was overnight. I avoided having her listen to anything on the radio on the way home but come to find out the plane in Pennsylvania. The importance of the military in the 7 cities of Tidewater became quite prevalent when the streets emptied that day and everyone was on alert. When we arrived home I had a message on my phone from my employer saying I was on standby in case there were any kind of evacuations being a city bus driver I understood. My girlfriend came home early and we continued to watch what was going on in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The total confusion and kaos was almost too much to bear but I had to show the girls I was there to comfort and protect them. My mother called me from New Jersey to see if I was ok and I asked her if she thought she would see anything like this in her life time and she said no this is crazy! This is the woman who told me before I was born that she thought the world was going to end during the Cuban Missile Crisis again with the assassinations of the Kennedy Brothers and Martin Luther King after I was born. We always had this false sense of security in this country that nobody is going to hurt us (me included)
That day our world had changed something I didn't want to see or experience and hopefully never again.....
