Never forget.
If this is a copyright violation then I will willingly remove it. But Chuck Swindoll has said it better than I can when, in his book Why, God? Calming Words for Chaotic Times, Charles R. Swindoll, in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America wrote:
“It was not just one act of treacherous terrorism that stunned us on September the eleventh; it was several. To make matters worse, these several attacks were carried out in a carefully planned sequential strategy of brutal destruction. And before the smoke cleared, we were stunned to discover that there were other planned assaults on our national leaders that, gratefully, failed to materialize that same day. I shudder, literally shudder, when I pause to think of how much more terrible it could have been if the demonic plot had run its course as had been devised in the original scheme of evil, demented minds.
If I repeat just a two-hour-and-thirty-one-minute log of the events of that morning in rapid-fire fashion, you will have sufficient information to remember what transpired that frightening morning. The times I refer to are based on central standard time.
At 6:58 A.M., United Airlines Flight 175 left Boston bound for Los Angeles with 56 passengers, 2 pilots, and 7 flight attendants.
One minute later, at 6:59 A.M., American Airlines Flight 11 departed from Boston en route to Los Angeles with 81 passengers, 2 pilots, and 9 flight attendants.
Two minutes later, at 7:01 A.M., United Airlines Flight 93 left Newark, New Jersey, headed for San Francisco with 38 passengers, 2 pilots, and 5 flight attendants.
Nine minutes later, at 7:10 A.M., American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles with 58 passengers, 2 pilots, and 4 flight attendants.
Thirty-five minutes later, at 7:45 A.M., American Flight 11 plunged into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan—a direct hit.
Eighteen minutes after the north tower was hit, at 8:03 A.M., United Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.
Forty minutes after the south tower was hit, at 8:43 A.M., American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. A hole at least two hundred feet wide was ripped open on the west side, and flames burst forth from the nerve center of our nation’s major military building.
Seven minutes after the Pentagon was hit, at 8:50 A.M., the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
Eight minutes later, at 8:58 A.M., an emergency dispatcher in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, received a cell phone call from a man who said he was a passenger locked in the bathroom of United Flight 93. The dispatcher quoted the man as saying, “We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!” The man then said the plane was going down and reported some sort of explosion and white smoke coming from the plane. At that moment the dispatchers lost contact with him.
Twelve minutes after that cell phone call, at 9:10 A.M., United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco crashed near Summerset, Pennsylvania, eighty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Representative James Moran of Virginia, after a Marine Corps briefing, said that hijackers evidently planned to crash the plane into the presidential retreat at Camp David or the United States Capitol.
At that same moment, 9:10 A.M., a portion of the Pentagon collapsed.
Only 19 minutes after the Pentagon’s west side collapsed, at 9:29 A.M., the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
I thought I had already lived through America’s worst disasters. How wrong I was. Many other significant events could be named, but that gives you sufficient evidence of how these atrocities happened back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Right on schedule, planned to the point of precision, the horrible events ran their course. “Why, God?” was the question most people were asking.
At 7:30 that same evening, as millions of Americans met in places of worship to pray, our president briefly addressed the nation, which we all saw, and tape recorded for later viewing. One statement he made stood out in my mind then and still lingers today: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundations of America.”
Excerpted from Why, God? Calming Words for Chaotic Times, Copyright © 2001 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. ”
Never forget.