09.13 hours
September 11th, 2001
New York, United States of America
"Joe?! Where are you?!"
I heard that loud and clear. It was my dad. We were just walking around in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, on a sightseeing trip in New York, while my mom and little sister were at Central Park at that time. But then... it happened.
But as a commercial airliner crashed to the tower ten minutes ago, the whole thing changed.
Lights went out. Walls broke down. Windows disintegrated. Smoke and sparks blew everywhere. There were explosions everywhere.
People fell out of the building, plummeting to their deaths.
And now, here we are, trapped in the dark, under a huge pile of debris. If we weren't at the stairs on the ground floor, we would've been crushed instantly.
"Dad! Here!" I shouted.
"I'm coming for you. Hang on, son."
He made his way among the rubble and came over to me. I looked around, and there were no one else around us who are still alive. On my eleven, I saw a pair of legs, with the rest of the person crushed flat under a huge column. On my three, I saw a dead guy who had a metal bar straight through his stomach.
I was sure that somewhere else among this rubble, there were a lot more who died like that or worse. It was too violent for my six year old eyes, but on that fateful day, all that PG-13 blood and gore was before me.
When my dad arrived, I asked him.
"Dad?"
"Yeah, son?"
"All these people... dead. What just happened here?"
"I don't know for sure. Might be a freak airplane accident. For now, let's focus on getting out."
I followed as he walked around, searching for a place close to the surface. He saw a small opening to the outside, and a couple of loose metal pipes. He picked up the pipes, and started knocking them together.
"Dad, what're you doing?"
"Making sounds. We're close enough to the surface, and as you can see, there's an opening. This should get the attention of rescue workers who pass nearby."
"I wanna get out..."
"We'll get through this, son."
My dad paused, and sighed.
"We're gonna need more than these pipes..."
"What is it, Dad?"
"Hmm... hang on. Joe, see that mannequin over there?"
"Uh-huh."
"Get the orange shorts for me."
I crept over to the mannequin, and saw it had a white shirt and orange shorts on it. With a perfectly innocent mind – if I was at least 10 already I would've thought differently – I took off the shorts, and gave them to my dad.
"Okay, this should do."
"Yay..."
Dad took another pipe, about two metres long, and tied the shorts onto one end of the pipe. He was making a flag... for distress signal.
"Stick it out of the hole and wave it around."
"Sure."
I did as he said, and waved the shorts-on-a-stick like a flag, as my dad continued to knock the metal pipe with the concrete chunk. The next forty minutes felt like forever as we took turns waving the flag and knocking the metal pipes together. And we occasionally shouted for help.
But then, all of a sudden, we heard footsteps and machinery from the surface.
"Help! Over here!" my dad and I shouted as we noticed them in the distance. Three rescue workers pointed at our position and approached us.
"Hang on, we'll help you two out. Stay calm," one of them said.
They removed some of the rubble with heavy machinery, and got us out of there. As my dad carried me out of the place, I saw a lot of people outside us. Some were standing around. Others were searching for more survivors.
But a lot of them, are in body bags, those who lost their lives to... whatever happened in here.
We noticed that the north tower of the WTC was also reduced to rubble by another plane crash. Morevoer, a few hours after we got out, my dad got word from a friend in the Pentagon, that a similar thing happened there and he was lucky not to get caught in the impact. My uncle from Shanksville said a plane crashed in the fields. No matter how you look at it, it looks way bigger than a freak airplane accident.
"Joe, I got a bad feeling about this turn of events," my dad told me.
"What about it, dad?" I replied.
"Four airplane crashes, almost simultaneously, three of them destroying important buildings in the US. That doesn't look like an accident at all...."
"Somehow I thought so too. But... what could it be, then?"
"I don't know..."
"All those innocent lives... Whoever did this... Why did they do this?
Later, that day was known as 9/11. The day when three thousand innocent lives were mercilessly slaughtered by some really twisted cold-blooded murders. Later, the government spread the word to the populace that it was a terrorist attack by the Al-Qaeda terror group upon the American soil.
As the confirmation came out, I made a vow. I vowed that, when I grow up, I will make the bad guys pay for all this.
I am going to follow my father's footsteps... I am going to fight for the US Army. I am going to fight against our enemies, foreign and domestic...