Many in our country are commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I am no different.
9/11 are among those few events we experience where everyone remembers where they were when it happened.
I was in Brazil at the time and have reminisced about that in this blog. Otherwise, I would have been in New York at the Colgate-Palmolive offices on Park Avenue. I would have experienced the chaos firsthand with everyone shocked, confused, and trying to get out of the city not knowing if more attacks were pending.
Tonight, I am in my home in Lake Forest, Illinois. I have chosen not to watch any of the commemorations airing tonight. It is not that I wanted to avoid the national commemorations, I simply wanted to be with my own thoughts. I wanted to think about this amazing and horrible event and its impact. I will read both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal perspectives over the weekend.
Most of the time, I think about the two planes running into the World Trade Center and the fire fighters rushing into the towers and passing people coming down the fire escapes trying escape the havoc. One entire fire station lost all their men that day. So, many others, many trapped above where the planes had crashed, perished. The attacks in New York got most of the press. The planes crashing into the towers, people rushing out of the buildings, others jumping, and then the collapse of the towers were something we could not stop watching and eventually, as in my case, I did not want to watch anymore.
I remember landing in New York on Saturday morning after 9/11. On our approach to JFK, we could the smoke still rising from the towers and being escorts by fighter jets. It was such a somber and eerie feeling. Our flight attendant on the American Airlines flight had friends that were working the flights that crashed. She did her job well, but we were all in a state of shock and sadness.
I do not think often enough about the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and the brave souls that took over the plane from the terrorists forcing the plane to crash in rural Pennsylvania before it could reach its target which I believe was also in DC.
Before leaving CT for Chicago, I visited the 9/11 memorial on Long Island Sound in Westport where all those who perished from the state were honored. Just the pandemic, we were in New York and visited ground zero and the memorial. Eighteen years later, the emotions were still so strong. The exhibits were so well done. They evoked the same emptiness and blunt thud of sadness and anger experienced back in 2001. I was amazed and touched by how much time everyone lingered in the gallery of photos and bios of all that perished. Honestly, I was hesitant about going and waiting in the rain for an hour to enter the museum, being there brought a good sense of closure.
So, I am sitting in the comfort of my home reminiscing and thinking about the events of 20 years ago and the impact they have had on this country. I had to wonder if the new rulers in Afghanistan were reminiscing in their homes. I imagine they are thinking about 9/11 too but from a much different perspective.
Every 9/11 for twenty years, the team that was in Brazil from the US that day exchanges emails checking up on each other and acknowledging what being together meant to us in those very trying days. This year was not exception.
Here is what I previously wrote reminiscing about 9/11 in this blog. Everyone has a story from that fateful day. This is mine:
On September 27, 2011, I wrote the following to commemorate the 10th Anniversary: On September 9th, I got an email from Luis Solana a friend and colleague from Colgate. He wrote, “Ten years ago on Sunday, we were in Brazil. How to forget!” How to forget indeed?
It has been ten years since the 9-11-01 attacks that brought down the World Trade Center towers in New York City, damaged the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the crash of fourth plane in Pennsylvania when the passengers fought and kept that plane from ever reaching its target in DC. It seems like ten years, and it seems like just a minute. These kinds of events when you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when it happened are like that.
In my lifetime, this was the biggest. It overshadowed the murders of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. It overshadows the death of Princess Diana, and our landing of a man on the moon. I did not live through the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese that triggered our involvement in WWII. That may have been equivalent. I will have to ask my parents, who experienced both.
Ten years ago, I was living in Connecticut and working in Manhattan. On that fateful Tuesday, I could have easily been in the city at the Colgate-Palmolive offices on Park Avenue. I wasn't. I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was part of a task force that was there to review the customer service and logistics operations of our subsidiary there. Stan Brothers, Jim Davis, Alberto Cardona, and I left on Sunday evening. Luis Solana joined us, but he travelled from Miami where he was living at the time.
We spent Monday preparing for the activity with the Brazilian team. We reviewed and revised the agenda and our roles and responsibilities. We asked for and analyzed more data. Stan was the supply chain finance person on the team. The rest of us were supply chain professionals. I had responsibility for Latin America, so I was very interested in the results of this task force.
We kicked off the meeting with the Brazil Team at 8:30 am on Tuesday morning. We had the VPs of Finance, Operations, and Customer Service and Logistics in the meeting along their key directors and managers. We were going through the overview presentation, basically their standard business review slide deck, by the Brazilian team when Luciano Sieber came into the conference room and blurted out that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. We were taken aback. We asked many questions, but Luciano had no more information. We just assumed that it was an accident due to poor air traffic control or a bad private pilot. We resumed the meeting.
What seemed like just a few minutes later, Luciano burst into the room again. He was more agitated and shouted that another plane had crashed into the other tower of the World Trade Center. This was clearly no accident. While we sat there trying to make sense of things with limited information, Charlie Catlett, the VP of Operations, got a call on his cell phone from his wife. She told Charlie that New York and Washington, DC were under attack and that planes had crashed into the White House, the Capital Dome, and the Pentagon. Under attack?? It sounded dire and wide scale. Our meeting fell apart. We were done for that day.
We immediately hit the internet looking for information only to realize that the attacks were nearly not broad as Charlie's wife had reported. We also realized the attacks were so unexpected, brazen, and shocking that the news machine was stunned and on its collective heels. There was almost no information the CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, and other websites. The whole country and whole world was stunned. The lack of immediate information in the immediate information age was amazing.
The media did catch up. Once it got revved up, it was relentless, 24/7, and our eyes were glued to the TV. We went back to our hotel and just watched CNN International. We called each other while watching the coverage. "Did you see that?" "Have you heard from your family?" There was a lot of "wows" and "OMGs!" One of us, got tired of watching, the news and calling home, and suggested that we go grab a quick dinner. We all agreed. And what did we talk about at dinner? What had happened in New York, there was no other subject.
Then we went back to our rooms and watched more. We looked at the same footage over and over again. The towers were forever engulfed in flame and smoke; people were jumping to their deaths; there were talking heads of every imaginable leader and analyst. There was nothing new and yet we watched. We could not help but watch.
The next day we tried to get back to business. We actually worked and accomplished our mission there. We worked to take our minds off the multitude of thought and worries that were on all our minds. We worried about the same things everyone else worried about. Would there be other attacks? How had these events changed our lives, our business, and our families? Did we know anyone that had perished in the attacks?
We also worried about something else. How and when were we going to head home? All travel was suspended. Indefinitely. I called our head of corporate security to get his take on things. There is something in such a crisis that became quite clear. No one knew what was going on. People were giving advice and opinion with imperfect information. They were setting policy because they had to. Then the policy and advice would change as events unfolded or in this case didn't.
We were told not to fly US carriers home. OK, that kind of made sense. Then we heard, while watching CNN so much at night, that if and when air travel resumed, it would resume internationally only for US airlines. We sought clarification and realized that we were basically on our own. It was no problem, we were in good hands with our colleagues in Brazil. But, Wednesday and Thursday, we had no clue how long we would be in Brazil.
On Friday, we heard the first flights to the US would be leaving. As fate would have it, we ended up on our scheduled return flight which was the first plane to leave Brazil for the US.
9-11-09: September 11th is an entirely different kind of day. It is one of those dates, 9-11-01, in which you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when the planes were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City.
While I worked in New York City back then, I was not in New York on that date. I had flown to Brazil that Sunday as part of a task force looking at Logistics and Distribution systems in the Colgate subsidiary there. I had other business there on Monday. The task force began its work on Tuesday, morning, September 11.
We were just in the middle of the opening presentations when Luciano Sieber came into the conference room and told us that a plane had just crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. After a few minutes of wondering how that could have happened, we went back to work. A few minutes later, Luciano came back in and said another plane had crashed into the second tower. As we were trying to comprehend this, the wife of Charlie Catlett, our VP of Manufacturing in Brazil, called his cell and told him that Washington, DC was under attack. Needless to say our meeting stopped for the day.
We did begin our meeting again the next day and somehow accomplished our mission and delivered a very good action plan. Each night, we had a quick dinner and went back to our rooms to watch CNN, call home, and read about the events on-line. It was surreal.
We did not know if and when we would get back to the States. At first, there were no flights at all within the US and, certainly, no international flights as well. I called our Security Office in NY, I was told not to fly any American carriers but to only take foreign carriers. So, if and when we were to fly home, it had to be Varig or TAM. As the week progressed, we learned that US carriers were getting priority over foreign carriers. At first, we felt like we were going to be in Brazil for a few weeks.
I had a wedding I had to play at in New Jersey that Sunday, September 16th. Would I get back in time to play? It was my band and I was a little worried. I called the groom who had hired us. I first asked if the wedding was still on. It was. Luckily, no one on either side of the wedding was killed in the attacks. Then I told him of my predicament and not to worry. I called Raffi Bandazian who was willing to fill in should I not get back.
We were scheduled to fly back on Friday night. On Friday, we packed and brought our luggage to the office. During the day, we called American Airlines in Brazil and in the US, trying to find out if our flights to the US were going to go or not. We kept getting maybes. They advised getting to the airport three hours early.
We did as we were told. Luis Solana and I were the first people at the counter… which, of course, were unmanned. We stood there and waited. The line formed behind us as time passed. At some point, just about when, the American Airlines employees were getting organized behind the counters, a CNN Portuguese film crew was there interviewing people. I got an email the next day from friends in Brazil saying they had seen me on TV.
Our flight was the first to leave Brazil for the US. We were two hours late, but we went. The mood on the plane was most somber. As it was American Airlines with a New York based flight crew, the crew knew their colleagues who had perished. I vividly recall landing at JFK the next looking out the window at both the smoke plume still coming from the World Trade Center site and the F-16s escorting our approach.
9-16-09: I played at the wedding on September 16th. It was at a country club in New Jersey. It was a most gorgeous, blue sky, and perfect temperature day as you can imagine. After all the chaos, fear, and angst caused by the attacks, people were more ready for a positive life affirming event like a wedding. It was truly a memorable wedding for everyone involved and we felt it at the moment.
