I remember rollding down the road late for work driving past the flight line and all the run stations and seeing a massive roadblock going into the gates of Lockheed Martin. This happened often because some idiot would try to drive a tour bus or an ice cream truck through the gate and then try to turn it around in place....I put it in park and waited.
After moving a car length at a time I got close enough to see the guards normally armed like barney fife with a single bullet in their shirt pocket were carrying M16's and were searching each and every car as it stopped for inspection
I got the feeling something had gone terribly wrong and turned on the radio to hear the news talking about how right that feeling was. I spent the morining sitting in a windowless cold war era secure building scouring the web for news and trading information with people all over the world through the wonder of public message boards. Its a spooky thing to hear your off site co-workers say that they have been ordered to stay away from the very campus you are sitting at having been told that it was much too dangerous. it was a surreal experience and one that none of us ever recovered from. Distance did not lessen the sting that much.
Still nothing can compare with the horror and shock that our people in New york and the pentagon felt. I can't pretend to imagine what that was like in any way shape or form.
this is a sperate issue. We are not talking about Iraq, we are not talking about troop build ups, or who lied to who or who voted for what.
We are talking a single terrible act and the innocent lives lost, people who risked and lost everything doing nothing but their job to protect and save lives. None of these deserved that fate that date, no matter your politics.
My thoughts and prayers are with the survivors, wherever and whoever they are.