It was a perfect sunny morning so I put the windows down in the car, did not turn on the radio, and drove in a good mood to work.

As I was parking in the lot, a coworker came over and said did I know what had happened? I said no, what? She said a plane flew into the WTC. I was surprised of course, asked if she was joking etc., then we agreed it seemed like terrorism because too many things would have to go wrong for that to happen by accident.

Then we went into work which happened to be a room with tall TV monitors on one side. All days we watched airplanes flying into buildings, etc. We wondered why the F-16's weren't scrambled to shoot these things down. Why they had been grounded. What the hell was going on, it didn't make sense.

Just six months earlier we'd been watching during the day as the news reported some guy fell asleep in his Piper or Cessna flying up the Mississippi Valley. Maybe he had a heart attack. Anyway his plane was flying itself, and it was intercepted by two F-16's that followed it for a couple hours until it ran out of fuel and crashed in a field.

Two F-16's for an obviously innocent plane in the middle of nowhere. No F-16's for big jets way off-course flying into important buildings in NYC and DC.

Around 5pm, with no time to investigate anything and NYC (where I was not) in historic chaos, Lawrence Eagleburger, who was once in a while on TV and was extremely fat, tells a TV reporter that al Qaida did it. How the fuck would he know that? GWB was flying around the country hiding and showing us how an apparently culpable CINC acts.

We never heard nor saw the face of Lawrence Eagleburger ever again.

A few days later I took calls from families and acquaintances of those missing in the upper floors of one of the towers, looked at the list of who had checked in at a police station and was otherwise accounted for, and (in every case or nearly every case) had to tell them that the name was not on the list. In other words their dad, husband, or business associate was very very likely dead -- no need to say it. It really happened. Real people above the plane strikes were trapped and died.