It was twenty-three years ago. Seems like yesterday.

Still doesn’t seem completely real.

It wasn’t the first attack on the Twin Towers. In 1993 a truck bomb was set off in the basement of the North Tower, killing six and injuring over one thousand. The towers would reopen in less than six weeks despite the heavy damage.

It was a deadly prelude to the September 11th attacks.

I had heard about the first plane just before leaving for work as I was running behind that morning. My manager and I spoke briefly about it on the phone. I knew of the plane that crashed into the Empire State Building in July of 1945, killing nineteen. I assumed that this was also a tragic accident.

Until our secretary informed us that the South Tower had also been struck.

I had reports to finish and patients to see – no, not a doctor and don’t play one on TV. Sporadically through the day I would get word of the tragedy taking place in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

We heard that the Red Cross was beginning an emergency blood drive. It would turn out that New York wouldn’t need the blood supplies, but it gave many of us something to do to help. We were all still praying for survivors.

There were a few, a precious few, from the buildings collapsing, but not the thousands we had hoped would make it. The remaining people trapped in those buildings would be receiving different prayers for their loved ones as the enormity and scale of the tragedy hit home.

We sent money and every first responder who could get there. We lined up around blood mobiles in a solemn silence. The Red Cross could still use the blood to help others and so many of us needed to do something.

Something besides raging at the already dead terrorists and the families that produced them.

Celebrations erupted across the Middle East and were very quickly suppressed. National leaders immediately recognized what their idiot populations did not. America wasn’t a sleeping giant – it was an enraged dragon.

The inspiring stories of heroism and coming together are still as heartwarming as they were that day. NYFD and NYPD would become legends as they rushed into the unknown. They were far from the only ones. Hundreds of watercraft would respond to the call to assist in the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, doing in nine hours what had taken the Royal Navy and the British people nine days to do more than fifty years before.

From across the country, firemen, national guard rescuers, policemen and utility workers flocked into New York to assist.

From around the world we received offers of aid and support. Flights diverted from the US too late to return to Europe were welcomed in small Canadian towns and cared for as they waited for news and to return home. People from countries with GDP’s lower than US corporate incomes offered their aid and sent floods of cards and letters. NATO invoked Article Five for the first time.

Far, far more people worldwide responded with love and compassion than ever celebrated in the streets.

Americans came together. The world came together.

There would be weeks of clean up and investigations. More and more tales of the heroism of regular people in the face of evil. A massive effort to repair the Pentagon, lay Flight 93 to proper rest and beginning the Herculean task of removing the debris of the Twin Towers even as we sought to understand exactly what had taken place to cause them to collapse. It would take months and millions to do that alone.

It would be completed in May of 2002.

All the planes diverted would be brought home. The Pentagon would be repaired. Things would return to normalcy.

But not to the way they were.

The instigators were still at large. Allowing terrorists to claim victory over the US is insanely dangerous. If they could do that to the most powerful nation on Earth, what might they do to those weaker than themselves just because they can?

No, we’re not the world’s policeman. More like the big, sometimes annoying Boy Scout. Whatever we are, we are Americans. We don’t respond to the love of others by ignoring what our inaction might cost them.

Nor do we take injury to our own lying down.

It took ten years but the man responsible paid the ultimate price for those three thousand American lives, having not known a moment’s peace in all those years.

Any who would try to harm Americans take note: We do NOT quit.

And we do not forget.

We don’t forget those who kill our people. We also don’t forget those who come to our defense. We don’t forget those who send their aid in our time of need. We don’t forget the little ones that sent their very best drawings so New Yorkers would know how much they cared.

Americans don’t forget.

We refuse to forget the evil done. We refuse to forget our honored dead, whether in uniform or civilian. We refuse to forget that which cost us so dearly.

We won’t ever forget you. The office workers who just wanted to have a good day at work. The first responders who charged into the deadliest of burning buildings, skyscrapers. Those who made it out alive and those who died that horrible day.

We never forget.

Rest in peace, heroes. You are not forgotten.

We never forget.

Thank you again, Little Ones from around the world, now all grown up, for those cards and letters. They don’t get mentioned like they should be but we promise you, we never forgot.

Twenty-three years. Seems like yesterday.

We won’t forget.