It was a morning that made you think about back-to-school: sparkling sunlight with just a touch of chill in the air. I thought “you can see forever” and I knew I was right, sitting in a wall of windows thirty-four floors above Broadway, almost half way up the Empire State Building. The Human Rights Watch committee meeting droned on. I watched a plane come up the Hudson River and crash into the World Trade Center.
Our meeting stopped. We watched the fire on the side of the building and decided that it must be a rare pilot error. The meeting resumed, but I had lost all attention. I was watching again as a plane made a lazy left turn into the body of the second tower. This was no coincidence, and when one member of our group said “This is an attack,” we realized just how vulnerable we were – 2.5 miles line of sight to the Trade Center. Some members decided to look for another site. I took advantage of my chance to leave.
I took an elevator to the ground floor and caught what turned out to be the last subway car to my apartment, arriving just in time to flip on the TV only to see what we quickly learned to call the Twin Towers crash in a pyre of smoke and ash. The next few weeks were a blur, as New Yorkers absorbed the fact that we were living at what we now dubbed Ground Zero.
I was a recently retired naval officer, and I had brushed against revolutions, coups and warfare. But it took some adjustment to realize that the United States was not the secure bubble we thought we knew. This was different. The axis of our world had shifted.