9/11, A Brother Remembers

 

I have many thoughts and feelings about 9/11. We all do, of course. I remember being glued to the TV, wrought with worry because I couldn’t reach Mac Daddy, who worked in the Wrigley Building in downtown Chicago at the time. No one had any idea what was happening, and skyscrapers and landmark buildings were being evacuated everywhere. We had a dear friend who worked right next to the Twin Towers, and luckily, his lollygagging while burning a CD that morning made him late for work. He was stuck in gridlock traffic in a cab when the planes struck and the Towers fell.

I still get the chills every time I land in New York City. Like a lost limb that amputees can still feel, my eyes play tricks on me and I think the Twin Towers are still there. In a blink, they’re gone.

Alas, today I want to share the words of my good friend John Hollis, author, basketball fiend, and all around smart guy. On the sunny morning of September 11, John  thought he lost his brother at the Pentagon. John and his brother were good friends of mine in college. We shared many a memory and many a beer. While we partied and jaunted about like typical college students, we also connected on a much deeper level and we felt immediate admiration for each other. I count John among my posse, the kind of guy who would be on a plane to Raleigh if he knew I needed him to. Mac Daddy and I and John and his wife shared part of Obama’s inauguration weekend together. Awestruck, we watched history unfold. On 9/11, John and his family watched history unfold in the most horrific way imaginable.

These are his words.

 

By John D. Hollis
I’ll never forget the gamut of powerful emotions I endured that fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

So it’s only understandable that the marking of the 10th anniversary of the worst attack on our nation would only bring those same feelings of heartbreaking anguish, despair, jubilation and, ultimately, guilt back to the forefront of my own conscience. That’s because roughly 3,000 of our fellow Americans were brutally murdered in terrorists attacks at the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon and over the fields of Pennsylvania. For several excruciating hours, I was certain my older brother Andre was among them.

Andre had just begun his new job as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense only a month earlier and was happier than I’d ever seen him. He was normally at his desk by 7 a.m. each day. I could clearly see it on his face in the days just before the attacks, as I was in the D.C. area covering a Georgia Tech football at the Naval Academy for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on that prior Saturday and staying in nearby Alexandria with Andre and his family.

I was set to hop a flight back to Atlanta the following day on Sunday, Sept. 9th, but my older brother wasn’t about to let me go without my first checking out his new digs at the Pentagon. I was never so proud of him and personally thrilled for the chance for an up-close tour as I’d never been inside the Pentagon at that point. It wasn’t long before we had entered the Army side of the building near the helicopter pad and made our way to his office and other parts of the building.

We had just arrived in the large outdoor courtyard in the middle of the Pentagon when I asked Andre about the funny-looking hotdog stand located in the center with the words, “Ground Zero” scrawled above it. It had been a long running joke among Pentagon employees, he explained, dating back to the Cold War era when it was a known fact that many Soviet missiles had the Pentagon as their target destination.

Little did we know how prophetic that would be.

Still, there was no reason whatsoever to think that terror of an unimaginable scale would soon be striking that very spot within 48 hours, claiming the lives of many innocent American victims and wounding hundreds of others. I’d slept in late on the morning of Sept. 11th after staying up into the wee hours the night before to finish writing a story. The sound of the phone ringing next to my bed is what finally awoke me from my slumber. “Is your brother OK?” a friend of mine asked, her voice steeped in concern. “What are you talking about?” I shot back, still unaware of the morning’s cataclysmic events.
“Turn on the TV!” she snapped back matter-of-factly. I did, and immediately dropped the remote control on the floor in utter horror and shock. CNN’s live shot of the Pentagon burning hit me like a Mack truck. I had immediately recognized the most devastated area as the one where Andre’s office was located because of the helicopter pad.

Like everybody else with loved ones in either New York or the Washington, D.C. area, I immediately tried to call Andre, only to no avail as the lines were all tied up. No luck in trying to reach his family either. I paced back and forth and sobbed uncontrollably for the next two or three hours, although it seemed more like an eternity as I anxiously awaited any news from my home in the Virginia-Highlands section of Atlanta. I had already begun packing a bag in anticipation of a somber drive back to the D.C. area later that evening.

All I could think about at the time was that I didn’t specifically tell Andre that I loved him before I rushed out his home and sped off to the airport to make my flight. He knew it, of course, but, in my haste, I didn’t SAY it that particular morning, and the guilt was eating at me like a cancer.

I finally received word that Andre was indeed alive sometime in the early afternoon. His life was spared only by the grace of God, as he had decided at 10 p.m. the night before to instead attend a conference at his alma mater at the University of Virginia Law School. So he was safely in Charlottesville when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, killing 189 people, including roughly 80 members of Andre’s staff, and wounding hundreds more. I was thrilled beyond measure to still have my brother among us, but my jubilation was tempered by the knowledge that so many other less fortunate Americans had just had their loved ones violently taken from them.

Now mobilized following the attacks on our country, the Charlottesville National Guard soon escorted my brother back to the Pentagon, where he immediately took part in emergency war meetings. Andre was understandably emotional when he later called me several times throughout the day, telling me how he was helping pull out body parts (not complete bodies, mind you) of his colleagues from the charred rubble.

It was truly a day none of us will ever forget.

 

Read more John in his book, Life in the Paint: The Story of a Black Man Fighting for His Identity.