Last Wednesday, firefighter Bob Welsh led a remembrance walk at Harbor Club in Greensboro, where attendees followed him on a mile-long walk from the golf course cart barn to the flagpole at the neighborhood’s entrance.
After a minute of silence in quiet prayer, the flag was lowered at 8:46 a.m., matching the time on Sept. 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower in New York City.
Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 was flown into the WTC South Tower at 9:03 a.m., confirming the first crash as a deliberate act of terrorism.
That was followed by American Flight 77 at 9:37 a.m., smashing into the west wall of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and United Flight 93 crashing at 10:03 a.m. into a field near Shanksville, Penn., after passengers launched a counterattack on hijackers aboard the aircraft.
The 9/11 attacks were the result of four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. On that fateful Tuesday morning, 19 terrorists organized into four teams and hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the East Coast to California.
On that terrible day, 2,997 peaceful lives were lost, more than 6,000 people were injured, and twice the number of those directly killed in these attacks eventually died from diseases related to dust and smoke from the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York.
Like those at Harbor Club last week, we must never forget.