An evening with Ed

Most trips to New York find me taking time to wander down to the financial district to check on the progress at the World Trade Center site. Anger is still the overwhelming reaction I feel each time I'm there. The hate and stupidity required to perpetrate this heinous act is so pervasive that it makes my stomach hurt. I want to take a sledge hammer to something every time. Not only do I want revenge for more than two-thousand American lives taken on 9/11, I also want to kick somebody's ass for not immediately rebuilding the twin towers just to stick it in the face of the morons who did it. Wouldn't that have been better?! After all, in the depths of the Depression this country built the Empire State Building in a little over a year. Why couldn't we cut through all the crap and show the world that America could get off the mat and was ready to dish some justice? We used to do things like that.

In the Summer of 2003 I got a call from an old Army buddy of mine. Ed and his wife were in San Diego for a day or two and he wanted to get together for dinner. He and I had met in officer's training at Fort Gordon, Georgia back in 1971 and have stayed in touch through the years. We were only in Georgia for a few weeks but, like it is with some people, had enough in common that the friendship has endured long distance. He's a good guy.

Ed made the Army his career. I thought he was nuts, but he was made of sterner stuff than I. He retired as a Colonel after thirty years and has continued to work as a civilian employee at the Pentagon since then. He became an expert in satellite communications and, though he would modestly deny this, is a "go to" guy in that arena.

Linda had a school function that she needed to attend; so I met Ed and his wife, Ilse, at their hotel and we headed for dinner at a quiet little place on the water on Shelter Island. It was going to be fun catching up with them. Somewhere between the main course and dessert it suddenly dawned on me that Ed was most likely at the Pentagon when the plane hit on 9/11.

I asked him.

He was.

For the next hour or so I hardly said a word. (Rare for me.) Ed looked out over San Diego bay and slowly began to tell me of that horrible afternoon at the Pentagon.

"First of all", he said. "The best place to be that day was in the smoker's area." "There is a courtyard type place deep inside the 'puzzle palace' where smoking is allowed." "That day, it was the safest location in the building."

He went on to tell me of the jolt and noise everybody felt when the plane struck the building and the shock and disbelief of walking through the smoke and chaos to get outside. It was a nightmare from which it was impossible to awake. When he got out of the structure there were emergency vehicles and personnel everywhere. His first thought was to call his wife who worked in the area to see if she was alright. She was.

For the rest of the day he volunteered to help the rescue workers. He spent all day holding plasma bags for the wounded and lending a hand with stretchers while he tried to make sense of it all. He did what he could.

Unlike me, Ed has seen war and yet I could tell that this day had left a profound impression on him. It was an evening I will never forget....nor, should I.

This story has been on my mind of late for obvious reasons. It seems, and I hope I'm wrong here, that it's eight years on and we are already starting to forget about what happened to this country on September 11, 2001. If we do, we're in real trouble.

That's the problem with having the best country in the history of mankind. It is so easy to just relax and take it easy. As a people who have it so very good, it's tempting to think that the rest of the world likes us and shares our values. Mostly, they don't. This may come as a surprise...they don't care about who wins the World Series or the Super Bowl. Hell, they don't even have high def!

The mentality in Washington these days is "Let's be nice to everybody and they'll be nice to us."

Realists know that it doesn't work that way.

Most of the world would back the car over us for a ham sandwich.

September 11 and an evening with Ed should make that clear.

Never forget.