Ten Years After

World Trade Center Attack Revisited on Tenth Anniversary

by Robert Falcione

September 11, 2011 — “The World Trade Center just collapsed,” said my youngest sister from the other end of the telephone. Her husband worked there, so I had a sense of personal dread that I didn't hear in her nonetheless urgent message.

“It fell into the ocean?” I asked. The World Trade Center in Boston on the waterfront — in fact, over the water on a pier, I believe — was a familiar place to me. That summer, I was embedded for days with a Hopkinton company as they transformed their flagship business. And that part of town — the trade center, the Moakley Courthouse, and Boston Harbor — were the itinerary on three respective days as the company courted investors and technical writers.

“No, the one in New York,” she replied as I looked around me at the photographers' convention in Sturbridge that I attended annually and realized that other people on their phones had the same shocked look. Some people who had come from New York had apparently already packed their bags, having been privy to the news minutes earlier. I sought the nearest television. It was an event that people of my generation can compare to knowing exactly where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and where they were when the lights went out all over New England and New York. The generation before had their moments: when Pearl harbor was attacked; when the war ended.

There it was on the television in the lounge of the Sturbridge Host Hotel, over and over again, the images of the planes hitting the towers, and then of the buildings collapsing. Then reports of the Pentagon being struck, and of a downed flight in Pennsylvania. The photographers' organization did not advise us of the attack immediately, assuming that they could end up with an empty house. I can't recall if I stayed.

One of my cousin Jerry's three daughters worked in one of the towers, but had the day off, because of renovations to her company's offices. His wife is a Hopkinton native. Other people with Hopkinton connections weren't as fortunate.

Darren Bohan, whose fellow-musician brother, Gary, worked across Main Street from my office for years, was working on the 102nd floor of 2 World Trade Center that day in a space where he spoke of something terrible that had happened there before. He is one of the more than 3,000 people who lost their lives that day. In 1995, my now late brother Charles, a transplanted New Yorker, took me through the space where that terrible event occurred, the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers with a bomb in 1993. It gave me a sense of the enormity of the tragedy that television lacks the ability to convey.

Hopkinton resident Christopher Zarba, Jr., who would have turned 48 years-old four days later, was a passenger on Flight 11; but a madman flew his graceful flying machine into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York at over 400 miles per hour. He left behind a four year-old son and a wife.

His wife, Sheila Zarba-Campbell, who has since remarried, recently wrote a belated thank you letter about two weeks ago to Hopkinton residents through HopNews, extending appreciation for the warm support that people expressed following her loss (click on this paragraph to read it). She will instead be at Ground Zero on Sunday, when Hopkinton veterans will lead a commemoration of the attack at 6:00 pm at the Veterans Memorial Gazebo, which faces her home across the town common.

Hopkinton resident Ted English (recent Herald story) became a hero to the employees at TJX Corp, where he was CEO at the time. TJX, which owns TJ Max and other companies, sent seven female employees of the women's apparel purchasing department to New York. They also took Flight 11. The Herald story does a fine job relating the warmth and caring he expressed to his employees as he broke the news. His humane and caring actions following the tragedy are also legend.

Comedian David Letterman, a few days after the event, spoke for a lot people when he said he wondered if we would ever laugh again.

This writer penned an opinion in 2003 called, "A Time to Imagine" about 17 months after the attack, inspired by people protesting our invasion of Iraq; and if sarcasm is at all laughable, well, then I guess there was humor in it. But things have changed in America since that dark and evil day.

There hasn't been a joint session of Congress since then when I haven't worried that they might be attacked while I watch. Ditto with the Boston Marathon and the World Series.

The images of that day are too horrific to forget easily: graceful airplanes flown into majestic buildings by religious fanatics, killing thousands in the process; people screaming, others jumping out of buildings, still more running for cover; buildings that took years to build, reduced to rubble in seconds.

On September 11, 2001, ten years ago, a group of barbaric people declared war on infidels, and America in particular, as well as on modernity itself, and attacked our peace, our property, our prosperity  and our way of life. That war continues today, but on their soils. Our government is doing its best to keep it off of ours.

Let's hope they continue to succeed.

*Photo of USS JFK and Twin Towers from the collection of Robert Hole.