Thursday, September 8th, 2011 12:08:23

Service: The Legacy of Sept. 11

It was slightly more than six weeks after my second child had been born by way of emergency C-section. Sleep-deprived and tired, I had left my two under the age of two at home with a sitter to get out and get some exercise.

Walking by the muted television in the workout facility, I saw out of the corner of my eye a plane fly into a building. A small, private plane, I thought. What I did not know was that it was American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles, a Boeing 767 that had been taken over by five hijackers. The hijackers had deliberately flown the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center a few minutes before 9:00 in the morning.

A second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center 17 minutes later. Thirty minutes later, the Pentagon was hit by a plane, and after that, a fourth plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.