REMEMBER

It was a brilliantly sunny day, remember?

The sky was blue and cloudless, and the promise of Fall was in the air.

The kids were back at school, and in New York and New Jersey it was the first day for many.

People went to work, as they always did, and got on trains, and into their cars...and some got on airplanes.

I sat in a radio studio in Manchester, New Hampshire with Marga Lynn, Mike Ball and Darrin Root. We were doing a morning show, and there was so little happening that day that we spent much of it talking about nothing.

When Mike and Darrin, who were in the control room which had a television mounted on the wall, started pointing and gesturing for me to look up at the television just before 9 AM, for a moment I did not process what I was seeing. That was the World Trade Center in New York wasn't it? On fire?

At that moment a bulletin passed across the A.P. wire on the computer screen in front of me about a plane hitting one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and I immediately reported it to the audience. Marga, who was seeing the same bulletin on her screen, immediately began working furiously to change her copy for the newscast she was about to give. As soon as we went to a commercial, I shot up and went into the newsroom, where I could watch the TV and hear the audio as well.

It was a brilliantly sunny day, remember?

The sky was blue and cloudless, with the promise of Fall in the air.

I began thinking out loud (a talk show host habit, I think). I talked about the cloudless sky, how a pilot could not fail to see those buildings on such a day, about how the city was socked in fog back in 1945 when the pilot of a medium Army bomber flew into the Empire State Building.

Is that video of the plane heading toward the towers?

No, one of the towers is already afire. A second plane?

When the flames shout out from the other side of the second tower, I knew what to say.

"We are under attack".

Remember?

I have often thought about that morning in the nine years since. I have often talked about the ramifications of what happened that day to audiences here in New Hampshire, in Rhode Island, and across the country when on WBZ at night. I still maintain one unshakable conviction. It was an act of war, perpetrated by a non-state actor, to be sure, but an act of war nonetheless. I wonder how many others still share that conviction with me. I suspect the President does not.