Eight years ago today
Eight years ago today, I was working a routine assignment in the District of Columbia when my Blackberry went off with a three-word message: “Explosion at Pentagon.”
I arrived at the Pentagon after the plane hit and spent most of the day photographing the carnage and chaos.
A year later, a group of us who covered the events of that day were asked to produce short videos that reflected our thoughts. I produced one of still photos shot in Washington and another using footage shot by the networks and various other videographers in New York.
Today, the 8th anniversary of that tragic day, seemed like a good time to show one of those videos again.
I showed today’s post to several colleagues this a.m. and they asked about the other video. Could you also post the Pentagon video? Thanks.
…I no longer own the rights to it. It was produced for a cable network and they have the rights.
I wasn’t going to watch the video. I have seen it before in past years on your blog and I knew it would make me cry. But then I decided that I too, needed to remember. So I watched it. And sure enough tears fall down my face and won’t stop. Thanks for the catalyst, Doug.
Very powerful. I wasn’t ready for it this morning and shouldn’t have watched it ’cause I’m crying again. It was a terrible, terrible day. Thanks for the reminder, I think…
Doug, that was a wonderful video.
And I’m not sad, I’m mad. Mad that in the 197 years since the last successful foreign attack on the United States mainland we waver in our resolve to finish the job in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that the people who did this atrocity remain at large, and free to mount new attacks on a civilized world. The people who died at the Pentagon would know the cost of capitulation to this enemy. Al Qaeda and their friends must never find refuge.
I guess we will always remember where we were then. Myself sitting in an airline dispatch office looking in disbelief up at CNN and wondering what happened with airport security?, then calling my flights to tell them to get on the ground now to the nearest suitable airport. The crews would ask me why and I couldnt think how to put into words what I was seeing on TV. Just told them it was a national emergency.
I can’t even imagine, it was 8!!!! years ago, I was in school, and now I am in university, but as for me it was like yesterday. All of us remember what we lost in that brutality, smn lost their friends, relatives, parents, but most of us lost belief that we broke our enemy, for a while we lost our beliefe in victory against terrorism. We do not need to investigate that atrocity, and we do not need to make those research papers on “agressive US policy”, we have to continue our struggle!