I have been around through fifteen U.S. presidents, WW II, Korea, Viet Nam, civil rights, assassinations, hijackings, Middle East conflicts, the wars in the Ukraine, Israel and 9-11. I guess you could say I have seen it all. I served my country in the Air Force. I have lived through good presidents and bad ones, I have gotten through life during the depression, rationing, gas shortages, rising prices, climate change and the COVID pandemic. Yet with all of these occurrences that have happened in my lifetime I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than right here in the good old U.S.A.

That all being said, today is the 23rd anniversary of the terrorists attack on the World Trade Center in New York City that took away almost 3,000 innocent lives, who began their day like any other, getting ready for work, getting kids off to school, commuting into the city on a late summer morning. Then at 8:46 a.m. that all changed not only for all those people, but for hundreds of millions in this country and around the world. In just a matter of minutes the World Trade Center had become the target of terrorists with one commercial jet hijacked and flown right into the building, with another to follow. In the meantime another hijacked plane was finally taken down in the Pennsylvania fields, while a fourth plane rammed into the Pentagon. It was a day where almost 3,000 innocent lives were lost, over 2,600 at the World Trade Center, 265 people on the commercial jets and 125 at the Pentagon, plus more than 6,000 injured, some permanently. It was a day that should have never happened, but it did and today twenty years later we still feel the impact of that fateful day. Like many I remember in vivid detail what I was doing on that day and time and will never forget it. Four days later it became very personal to me when I found out through a phone call that I had lost a close friend of almost forty years and his wife who were on one of the hijacked planes that hit the WTC. We had just recently made plans to get together over the coming Christmas holiday when they were coming to Florida for a short vacation.

I won’t get into the politics of this whole mess and the whys and wherefores. I just want to believe that we will NEVER EVER gto through something like this again. I pray on this day and every day that we will all remain safe and free from terrorists attacks on our soil. I want this to be a country that all the generations that follow from this point on can live a terror free life. It will take a lot of work from all of us from the White House on down, but it can be done as it has been many times before. So I ask all of you to please say a prayer for all those lost on that day, those lost after that day and for those still suffering from that day.

Let us never ever forget that day.  This is the United States of America and it is a time in our history where we must become united not divided any longer. As we have proven since this country was founded, we may bend but we will never break. I am proud to be an American. God bless us all.

Art Koch, National Features & DVD Editor, NightMoves Magazine and AAN