BEFORE

In the summer of 1998, I had not yet met Sara in person. We were growing a bond over the Internet, talking every day. At the time, I was working at Mail.com Inc., an Internet messaging company at 11 Broadway on the Bowling Green in Manhattan. This is just several blocks from Wall Street, and right next to Battery Park at the South side of the island. I worked in the building where the owners of the Titanic had their offices.

I liked to tell Sara about where I lived and worked.

One day in September, 1998 I decided to go into the city and buy tickets for the observation deck of the World Trade Center (the South tower).

I took panoramic photographs (seen below) to show Sara the landscape near where I worked. The view from there was like what you would see from an airplane, and that never made me entirely comfortable. I knew people who said when they worked in offices high in the towers that they would feel the building swaying in the wind. I thought to myself, "I couldn't work for a company this high off the ground. Just not for me!" This was my second visit to the top of the World Trade Center, my first was around 1982 when I was a Junior in High School, visiting the city on vacation.

I mailed the photographs to Sara and she laminated them, as she did all the pictures I sent to her.

Two years later, on September 11, 2000, Sara and I landed together at JFK after a long flight from Taiwan. This was her immigration date.

Just two days earlier we had a Chinese Wedding, and in November would be our American Wedding.

We spent some time in Customs, and they weren't the most friendly sort. Sara had an unopened envelope from the INS which she presented to them, and they sent her into an office to wait indefinitely for an officer to review her. I wanted to be there to help her, as her English was shy of understanding the Brooklyn accent, but I had to collect our 8 large bags from the claim conveyer and drag them over to where I could guard them and help her at the same time. At first I brought them into the large waiting room with me, but a Customs officer tersely ordered me to take them out. Annoyed, I complied.

Fortunately Sara didn't have any trouble on her own, and her papers were processed. We went home.

After our American Wedding on November 25, 2000, Sara landed 2 jobs. Her first was teaching children Chinese language on Saturdays at a school for just that subject. The job was easy to get to - just a short drive from White Plains to Hartsdale. The second was a Monday-Friday job as a trainee to become a paralegal in an immigration attorney's office. This was a much longer commute. She rode the train in with me every morning to Grand Central Station, and then she would board the 7 subway train and ride it all the way to its last stop in Flushing, which is in Queens. There is a large Chinese / Korean community there, so she felt more at home, but the commute was awful.

At the same time, my own job was falling apart. The "Internet bubble" had burst, technology stocks were failing, and the rest of the world treated us like we now needed to go and get a "real job." If they only knew how hard we worked. They weren't laughing long, though, as the rest of the economy started sliding along behind it, and the focus widened from NASDAQ to the entire stock market.

My company, Mail.com Inc., did not go out of business. Our stock dove to under $1, and all my thousands of stock options were "under water" (worthless), but at least I still had my salary and benefits. Then the company decided to "reorganize". This began with a massive layoff, which included most of the people I managed in my own department. They put their consumer business (web based e-mail sites Mail.com, Email.com, etc.) on the market for sale, which included me, and offered me a generous bonus if I didn't resign until after the sale.

Months went by, a long puzzling winter into 2001 when I didn't know who was going to "own" me, or whether they would keep my salary. We mused that maybe we'll wind up working high up in the World Trade Centers, and my thoughts went back to the fear of working so high off the ground. "We'll just have to wait and see, the chances are slim that we'd wind up there." Internet and technology companies were located all over New York, and only a few in the World Trade Centers.

In April 2001, our buyer turned out to be Net2Phone. Their headquarters were in Newark, NJ, but they had a branch office in New York City in an old building just several blocks South of Times Square on Broadway. So I packed up my office, and with my only remaining staff member, we moved out of 11 Broadway up and to midtown Manhattan.

This made my commute a lot shorter. Instead of taking the horrible 6 train down to Bowling Green, which was a roller-coaster ride from Hell, I took the pleasant Shuttle train from Grand Central to Times Square and then walked down to 37th and Broadway. I no longer had an office. I was given a booth. But I got to keep my salary and title, and that was the most important thing. I continued my work on the back-end data management of the Mail.com network advertising operations and all was well.

Sara and I worked steadily, saving money for a house. It was a pleasant summer.

DURING

On September 11, 2001, I arrived at my office at about 8:40 am or so. We were in the highest floor of the building, which isn't high - just the 20th floor. But we had at least some view from there, and we could see the World Trade Centers if we looked South down Broadway. They were so much taller than all the other buildings that it was not easy to miss them. I sat down and turned on my 3 computers, thinking of getting some breakfast after I started my daily queries. But before any time passed, my boss hurried out of his office up to a window not far from me. He said, "My girlfriend just called and said a plane hit the World Trade Center."

"Get out of here," I said. We went to the window and sure enough, there was a pillar of smoke coming off of the North tower, which was what we could see the best. The South tower could only be seen slightly, as it was on the other side. Smoke pouring from smokestacks between us and the World Trade Centers contributed to the view, and it was a little heart sorting out how much smoke was coming from the tower.

"This is going to be on news all over the world," I said. I thought some idiot flew his small passenger plane too close to the building and crashed it.

As other employees started arriving to work, people began to crowd by the window to see what was going on. We heard sirens passing by on the street below. There was no TV in the offices, but there was a radio, and we started going to CNN.com and other web sites to see what was happening. The news sites were clogged and it was hard to get anywhere.

I called Sara at her office and I said, "Honey, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center." She said "Oh," She was very busy, and figured she could just read about it tomorrow, so I let her go.

As I went about my job, we started getting more information. Employees were on the phone with friends around the city. I looked out the window a bit, studying the scene, and could see a large plane flying near there. It disappeared at the other side of the towers. I figured it was probably activity related to news and rescue operations. So I returned to my seat. A few minutes later someone said 2 planes hit the tower.

At this point I thought this was clarification of the original accident - that it wasn't a single plane that struck, it was two. I didn't quite understand this. You mean they collided together into the tower at the same time? That didn't make sense. More and more of us crowded around our window and saw a lot more smoke coming from the towers than before. "What a mess!" I said. "How are they going to get people out of there?" At this point I was still under the impression that only the North tower was hit, because we couldn't see the South tower well.

Then I found out these were commercial airlines. That put a whole new edge on the thing, and at this point I started feeling a little anxiety. "I wish we had a TV. What caused this?"

Nobody could work after this news, we were all struggling to get more information. Nobody got worried until the next piece of news came in: A commercial airline crashed in Pennsylvania. Now people were getting very confused, but someone did say that these were probably hijackings. I started considering maybe I would go home and take the day off, this was big news.

I found on one of the news web sites that an unmanned American spy plane was just shot down over Iraq. At least I thought it had just happened. This timing didn't sound like good news to me. I'm a very imaginative person as it is, and I started piecing together possibilities in my head that didn't sound good at all. Possibilities that this was only the beginning of something unthinkably horrible. Finally, the next report we got was that an airline struck into the Pentagon.

That was about all I could take. I told my boss I was going home, and he said probably everybody was. There was news that the city's trains were going to be shut down. If that happened I would be stuck in the city. White Plains is a fair distance North of New York City, and the Metro-North railroad is my only way out without a car. And the bridges were also closing down!

I called Sara and told her to pack up and meet me at Grand Central station immediately. She said she was busy with clients, and I said, "Honey, don't you know what's going on? I think we're being attacked. Leave work now, and meet me at Grand Central. I'll be waiting for you in about a half an hour. Hurry."

She complained that she didn't want to leave work, but I couldn't stay on the phone. I left of the building with one of my coworkers. I'm not sure what time it was, but it was after 9. People were crowding into the streets because companies were letting everyone go home. Everyone was on their cellular phones. Street vendors didn't have any clue what was happening, and just stood about selling nuts and fruits with stoic faces like it was any other day. Some people seemed to have a sense for what was happening but they looked like zombies. They just walked aimlessly, staring at nothing. Others were more excited. And some were just well collected. Nobody was in a panic anywhere that I could see.

Already I found out the subways were shut down. I couldn't take the S train but that didn't matter, it would take just several minutes to walk to Grand Central. But how would Sara get there if the 7 train shuts down?

My coworker and I were walking East down 37th Street and were about to cross 6th Avenue. We looked South. We could not see the World Trade Centers from this location on any normal day, but I saw something that looked wrong. There was a gigantic wall of brown dust coming down the street. "What is that?" I asked aloud. It definitely wasn't smoke, it looked like dust to me, and it seemed to be coming from between distant buildings and rising to a great height.

There was a small pack of people on the sidewalk on cellular phones and several of them burst out crying. My coworker ducked into the crowd for a second and then returned to me as I waited for the Walk signal to cross the street. "The World Trade Center just collapsed," he said rather calmly.

At first I thought he was joking.

"What??" (I must've said that word many times that day.) "How do you know that?"

"That's what they're saying, it just happened."

I couldn't believe it, I really needed to go home and see what was happening on TV. After a few colorful words of expression, I said, "I'm getting out of here." And I started jogging for Grand Central Station. My coworker lived in the city, so he went on home a different way.

I tried calling Sara on the cellular phone again but couldn't get through. When I got to Grand Central, only one entrance was open, and it was terribly crowded. Once inside I went directly to the spot where Sara and I always met when we had to. She wasn't there yet. I kept trying to call her. Then I discovered that the 7 train was shut down. Where was Sara? Did she already leave the office? There were some nasty subway stations between here and Flushing, and I didn't want her stranded in a bad neighborhood in the middle of Queens.

Finally I connected with her office and asked for Sara. She was there. For once I was thankful that she didn't jump to my urgent demands! She was in the bathroom, but I told them to get her out to talk to me right away. I didn't know if I would be able to connect again, or how long this connection would last. Finally she got to the phone. I told her "Stay with your coworkers. The 7 train is shut down. I'm going home. I'll find a way to get you later."

"Okay," she said calmly. She still didn't know what the magnitude of the situation was, and her office was still in business-as-usual. They were all Chinese speaking paralegals, and Flushing is far enough from Manhattan that the spread of news didn't effect them so much. They didn't have a TV and their radio wasn't on. But I was surprised the main offices in Manhattan hadn't told them anything yet.

"Find a radio," I said. "You still don't seem to understand, this is a National emergency. The city is closing down. There is a nation-wide alert."

There was one train heading out toward White Plains and that was it. As I walked toward the track, I saw the newstand ticker was scrolling with headlines, and there were TV's mounted in there. Huge crowds of people were cramming the area so thickly, eyes pinned on the news, that I couldn't even get near it. But I didn't want to, I just wanted to get home to White Plains. I got into my train. I sat. Everyone was more or less like me. Stressed, worried, but not crazy. Then an announcement came over the speaker, "We are evacuating the trains and building. Walk quickly but calmly to the nearest exit."

I started to wonder that maybe a plane had hit the Met Life building. Or could. The Met Life building (years ago known as the Pan Am building) stands right over Grand Central Station. If that building were to collapse, not only would thousands more people would die, but a major commuting line in and out of New York would be shut down, seriously damaging the economic stability of the city beyond compare. This one station handles trains that take many wealthy business people to and from New York City. It would be impossible for all of them to attempt to drive into the city for work - there would be nowhere to park all the traffic.

And my mind kept going back to that spy plane that was shot down. Was this the beginning of what would lead to a nuclear strike in retaliation for the Gulf War? Collapse the World Trade Centers, and throngs of people head for the train stations. Trains and bridges shut down, everyone's stuck near the trains. Then nuke the Met Life building, or run another plane into it. Well, pretty far-fetched as far as I was concerned, but then if you had asked me on September 10 how far-fetched it would sound that 4 airlines would be hijacked and the World Trade Centers (both) be gone in 24 hours, I would have scoffed. So where do you draw the line between readiness and paranoia? Especially when you're in an excited state already, as the unimaginaeable just happened, and you have little access to current news?

Soaked with sweat, a throng of us walked out the north exit of Grand Central using the tunnels. When I got back outside I didn't know what to do. People were crowded all over the streets walking around and around the blocks. Most of them were in groups, probably co-workers, talking with one another. I started to feel very alone.

Nobody could leave. Businesses told them to go home, but nobody could go home (who didn't live in the city). It was a nightmare. All I could think about was trying to get to Sara so we could at least be together, but even by train we were a half an hour apart. So I went back to the office where at least I had phones, radio and an Internet connection. (And air conditioning.)

When I got there, the office was deserted. I looked out the window and was further horrified to see that BOTH of the World Trade Center buildings were gone. I found out later that the north tower collapsed while I was in Grand Central, and that's about when they evacuated it. Hanging in the sky where the twin towers used to stand was a mushroom of dust and smoke. It was surreal.

I contacted many family and friends on instant messenger. One of them said that they had been trying to contact their nephew who was on the 110th floor of the north tower. They were afraid they lost him.

I still didn't like being at the office. The Empire State Building was right outside our window, looming overhead. If that were to be attacked and collapse, we'd be in sorry shape here. In fact if that building fell it would be even messier, in some ways, than the World Trade Center, because it's filled with rock and concrete. I told myself that's also what made it more stable than the World Trades. The Empire State Building used concrete around its steel infrastructure to protect it from fire, whereas modern buildings use that ugly spray-on material that isn't nearly as effective. We just saw the consequences of that today. So it was less likely that intense heat would melt the steel skeleton of the Empire State Building, causing collapse. Also, the radio said all planes had been grounded, and any still in flight would be shot down. That made me feel better. But I was dying for a TV.

I then caught several pictures of the World Trade Center explosions on the Internet, and I was astounded. The rest of the world was getting a much better view than I was, and was much better informed.

I called Sara again, and this time she was a lot more upset. One of her friends had called her all the way from Taiwan to see if she was okay, and they had described what they were watching on TV. In Sara's native mandarin, she learned of explosions, fire, people falling, and buildings collapsing. Her friends had stayed up late and caught it on the news, as it was in the dead of night in Taiwan.

I said to Sara, "I was trying to tell you this was an emergency," and teased her that she needs to take her husband very seriously when he is upset. She also said their main office called and told them to go home. So she was going home with one of her coworkers. She might have to stay there over night, because Flushing (in Queens) is on Long Island, which is surrounded by water. With the bridges and subways closed down she was trapped there.

I waited for about an hour and decided to go back to Grand Central again. When I returned, they had reopened the station, and again just one train was heading out on my track. I managed to get on it. It was a long slow train ride, with standing room only. But I got out and safely back to White Plains. I watched TV for hours. Sara was stuck in Long Island. For the first night since our marriage, I slept alone.

And I didn't sleep well either. The phone rang all night as Sara's friends and family from Taiwan kept calling. Remember, it's nighttime there when it's daytime here, and many of them were just getting the news while I slept. They weren't clear as to where Sara and I worked in the city, and when you watch these events on TV you can't imagine that everybody in the city isn't running from dust clouds. But in fact New York City is so large that even two of the 1% tallest towers in the world could collapse and if you were fifty blocks away around a corner you wouldn't immediately know it.

AFTER

The next day I drove into Long Island to the house where Sara was staying and picked her up. Afterward I realized that I hadn't eaten anything since Monday night except a candy bar and a small bag of Doritos.

The memory that was most striking in my mind was the wall of dust down the street. It never reached me, but it was enormous as seen from that distance. And the World Trade Centers collapsed? My God. This wasn't just a BIG event anymore, this was the BIGGEST event I had ever known, and certainly the biggest on American Soil. I would qualify it to be bigger than Perl Harbor, which was a military strike by an identifiable enemy in the midst of a war we already knew was raging. This was a civilian hit by an unidentified enemy, literally "out of the blue." I was not close enough to see people falling out of windows or bodies on the ground, but the memory of the dust wall and the impact of knowing what just happened in that second left a scar in my soul for life.

We stayed home from work on September 12, but on September 13 I reluctantly let Sara go back to work. The city was operating again, and Sara really wanted to go back and return to normal. She also asked me to buy some American flags, bless her heart. She had only been here 1 year (as 9.11.01 was her 1-year anniversary of living in the U.S.), and she wasn't even a citizen yet, but she felt just as patriotic as any full-blooded American. I stayed home on September 13, but on the 14th I drove into our Newark office for work. Our office in New York City had lost its Internet connection because the towers damaged critical lines used by our ISP.

I couldn't help but think about my old office at 11 Broadway. If I had still been working there when all this went down, events would have been more traumatic. I would have been engulfed in the dust cloud. And worse, most of my staff commuted out of New Jersey on the Path train, which stopped in the World Trade Centers. They would walk to work from the twin towers at exactly that time every morning.

When Sara used to visit me in New York, she would come to my office at 11 Broadway while I was working, and then tour the city from there. She often would go the huge mall underneath the World Trade Centers to shop. There were hundreds of stores and places to eat down there. I used to get lost wandering around in those halls. And now it's all gone. That huge place is gone.

One week later we returned to work in the New York city office. Our view outside the window had changed, but otherwise we went back to work as normal. Aside from my friend's nephew, who was lost in the north tower, I didn't know of anyone who was killed or injured in the disaster. I found out that a distant Haviland cousin died in the World Trade Center: his name was Timothy Aaron Haviland. He was my 8th cousin once removed (we both descended from my 7th Great Grandparents, Benjamin Haviland and Abigail Mott). I never knew him personally. (You can also find a page on him at CNN, September11Victims.com, and Legacy.com.) (A couple years later his father, Rev. Douglas Brant Haviland, and I became penpals. Doug's sister's daughter was Commander Laurel Clark, one of the astronauts who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia accident. You can see their genealogy here.)

I managed to contact my former staff to make sure they were all okay. Everybody was fine.

A month later my employee called me from a class to tell me he heard that a plane crashed in Queens. Queens is where my wife works! "Oh no," I thought to myself. "Now what?"

I called up Sara and she was fine. She had heard about it long before me, but the crash was South of JFK. But JFK is in Brooklyn, which is South of Queens, and the news said the plane crashed in Queens. How could this be? I didn't really notice before, but Queens wraps around Brooklyn, and part of it is on the South side. This is where the plane went down, and authorities were mostly sure this was an accident. A terrible coincidence.

The Anthrax "scare" didn't make things easier. Most New Yorkers doubted anything would happen, and nothing really did, except for a few isolated incidents. My fear was that some knucklehead would walk down to one of the open buffet cafes (of which there are hundreds in New York City) with a syringe under his jacket and squirt poison into each of the food pans. Not likely you say? Well I've seen less likely things happen in my own city, so how can you really know?

THOUGHTS

Anxiety is what Terrorists really want. Their mission is to create fear. Whether they do it by threats or murder, it doesn't matter. Most of the time, it's a threat. Usually a simple threat will work if people think it could be true.

The question is, are you afraid that something will happen? If so, they did what they set out to do. They created fear. If you are not afraid, they take more and more drastic measures. But you must not show fear to a threat. Ever. Only caution.

Add to that the problem of Muslim Jihad. However it is interpreted, Muslim extremists such as the al-Qa'ida feel that attacking Americans is just, and they celebrate it. A great number of Muslims reject their motives for bloodshed, but on the other hand, there is a good population of Anti-American and Anti-Israeli Muslims, whether they wish death upon us or not.

Religious and political excuses do not justify attack on civilians. You wouldn't think this needs saying, but there is no exception to this. Nevertheless they are under the delusion that they need to kill people. That is their bottom line. That makes them an enemy of the world. And because they duck identification and flee when we turn on them, they are not only fiends but cowards.

Religious extremists with this agenda are nothing new. Islam is not so much to blame for the actions of Osama bin Laden any more than JudeaChristianity is to blame for the actions of David Koresh (Vernon Howell), Jim Jones, Ervil LeBaron, Jeffrey Lundgren, or Yahweh Ben Yahweh (Hulon Mitchell).

But in these days, the Muslim and Arab communities, especially in the United States, need to stand up and be extremely vocal about their position. They need the world to understand them, and they need to join the fight against terrorism even more actively than others, as unfair as this may seem. This is a matter of communication, because racial and religious stereotyping is going to be rampant if they don't. The difference between Osama bin Laden and the above characters is that he is part of a much larger body of organizations Hell-bent on the death of innocent people.