www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOPxcK06BH0&t=190sWe will always remember. We will never forget________________www.spiritwatch.orgAm I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth? Galatians 4:16
On 9/11 I was a pastor in Alexandria, VA – our church was 2 miles south of the beltway on Telegraph Road, about 10 miles from the Pentagon. My dad and stepmother were in town to sightsee, and the day before we had been downtown passing the Pentagon going and coming. We were getting a late start to return downtown that Tuesday morning. Cindy and I had been appointed to Alexandria just four months earlier due to the death of a pastor (panarctic cancer) who had only been there a short time. Not a large church, but most of the people were government employees, including some at the Pentagon, as well as intel, military and law enforcement. That day changed the life of that church, for years to come.We also had a large daycare with mostly non-church families, some of whom also worked at the Pentagon. It was a long day, because as was said above, the phones (land lines and cells) were down, traffic was at a standstill and at the daycare we were not sure there would be parents to pick up all the children. The daycare went on lockdown, we moved the kids to an area where there were no windows, and tried to keep the news, and our dismay, out of sight. As the day progressed, both church and daycare families began checking in and kids were being picked up. The side of the Pentagon which was hit was being remodeled, so most employees were working over in Crystal City. Thank the Lord the Pentagon is a reinforced concrete structure which is really five building, each inside the next. Even at high speed – and the jet (the terrorist who was piloting) was heard accelerating the engines as it came down by the Navy Annex, crossed the parking lot and hitting the outer wall – but the aluminum of the jet – even at speed – was really no match for the walls of the Pentagon. That’s why the entrance wound was so limited. (I was down there the next day with my deacon).Our church and daycare suffered no loss that day, but one of my members lost his cousin and wife, as they were fight attendants on the plane. Their names are Ken and Jennifer Lewis. One of the deacons of my church was a state police captain stationed at the top of the hill where the Navy Annex is. One of his troopers, who was gassing his car at the time, saw the jet dodge a hotel at the top of the hill, heard it accelerate and saw the impact. He jumped into his car and raced to the impact area, running in following one of his fellow troopers who went in first. The second trooper had to drag the first out of the building, due to the heat and smoke – his vest melted on him. I visited both these men in the hospital, and the first trooper to go in told me the inside of the building looked like a circular barbeque grill, where the coals are red hot. I’m sure the jet fuel had much to do with this. Most of the people who died at the Pentagon that day were on the jet, including a group of 11 and 12 year old student who had won a trip to CA for their achievement at school. There were from a poor part of DC called Anacostia, so this was most likely their first and last time on a airliner.
9/11/2001. I was hammering away on an assembly line at the old Maytag plant. I was living in Cleveland, Tennessee. I was a bivocational minister, supporting myself and my now ex wife Joy as we were engaged in ministry there. It was a beautiful, cloudless blue skied day at the Maytag factory. We were the best line in the plant and we had stuff to do. Our track was humming.Then one of the part supply workers said they heard on their walkie talkie that a plane hit the WTC. It chilled me to the bone and I zoned out and went on automatic, cold and machine like firing screws and wiring even as my heart and mind felt a black stirring of dread. Up and down the line the word was passed and when one woman yelled that another had hit it a cloud fell over everyone’s face of sheer bewilderment. But I knew war had begun. This is no accident, people, I told my team as I banged another backguard down the tables. A corner was turning in my spirit and I sensed in the world .. it was a scream beyond pitch and volume that totally seized me. Then the fear hit me. What was going on in Chicago?
9/11 – Warning – there are some graphic details in this account.My wife and I were pastors in Alexandra, VA, on September 11, 2001, so I thought I would again share my account of that terrible day. We had just moved to Alexandra five months earlier, after the church had tragically lost its previous pastor to cancer. On 9/11, my father and stepmother were visiting us from Tennessee, and were preparing to take the Metro (their train would have passed right under the Pentagon) downtown that morning for some more sightseeing. All of us had been in D.C. on Monday, but I could not go with them Tuesday due to church responsibilities.As they waited for the morning rush hour to end, my wife was upstairs when she felt a light shaking and rumbling, which she thought was an earthquake. It was in fact, the impact of the plane slamming into the Pentagon. We began getting horrifying news and images via TV, mostly of the Twin Towers. Shortly after the news began our church daycare phones, along with my office and cell phone, began ringing with frantic calls from parents and church members. We “locked down†the daycare, moving the children to what we thought was the most bomb resistant part of the building, as we were just 12 miles from the Pentagon. I started making calls concerning our church members who worked in the Pentagon, as well as others who often worked as contractors there. However, not long after the attacks cell phones and landlines were overloaded and stopped working. It took most of the day to account for everybody’s safety. One of those we were concerned about was an Air Force officer, and father of five, stationed at the Pentagon (the plane hit the “Air Force†side of the building) whose newborn, Timmy, was in our daycare. It was well into the evening before we knew that Timmy’s father was safe. He had been in the Pentagon, and like the others, he heard and felt the impact and had seen the fire and smoke. By that evening, I thought no one related to the local church had been lost or injured and we rejoiced as parents kept coming late into the evening to take our daycare children home to safety (traffic was horrendous for those escaping D.C.).The next day, Wednesday, I contacted one of our church deacons, a Captain in the Virginia State Police, and we met at the command post near the Pentagon. He took me down to the impact site and around the various security measures. He asked me to visit a couple of his officers in the hospital, who had been the first of the first responders, and who had both suffered burns in the fire as they helped lead victims out of the building. The officer who was the very first on the scene had been writing a speeding ticket on Columbia Ave., next to the Pentagon when the plane hit. He was the first to enter the building after the impact, and he described what he saw to me. He said the inside of the building where the plane hit looked like glowing red coals of a barbecue. He was overcome by the heat, with his vest melting on him, and had to be carries out by a fellow state trooper, who was the second one in.The heavy walls of the Pentagon shredded the airliner into such small pieces that inside the building there was nothing that looked like a plane. Once the plane had passed through the outer wall, the fuel and debris spread out in a large circular pattern that collapsed the five floors of that section (the outer ring) and ignited everything and everyone within its radius. The construction and design of the Pentagon kept the damage limited to the Air Force side of the building, which thankfully was being remodeled and had limited personnel working there that day.Many in my church knew someone who had died on 9/11, but one of our members lost family. A cousin of one of our members and the cousin’s wife (Ken and Jennifer Lewis) were working together as Flight Attendants on the flight that hit the Pentagon. Their names are on the memorial which honors those who died at the hands of evil men intent on taking away our freedom to serve Christ.