By Mary Beth West, APR

As the nation closes in on the 9/11 decade-mark remembrance this weekend, I’m trying to prepare for the emotion that undoubtedly will be part of the next two days.

My Sept. 11, 2001, experience mostly played out behind the wheel of a Chevy Blazer throughout Roane and Morgan counties, visiting rural bank branches that were part of the Union Planters Bank / East Tennessee Division, where I served in regional marketing at that time. 

The branch visits were part of a project that had been scheduled for several weeks, and as I listened in shock to all the events unfolding over the Knoxville-based radio stations in my vehicle, the entirety of that day took on a twilight-zone quality.

Looking back, it seems odd that I even attempted to continue through my scheduled visits with branch managers and staff, given what was transpiring.  Truthfully, I didn’t know what else to do, and I don’t think my co-workers did, either. 

Obviously, instead of focusing the meetings on branch promotions and customer service strategies, as had been planned, the conversations suddenly turned to more urgent matters of what was happening in our own backyard.  As I walked into one branch, someone was speculating that a plane might be headed to the near-by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex.  More close to our business at hand, bank customers were already starting to filter into the branches, pondering whether to withdraw large sums of money, presumably to keep in “safer” places. 

In the moment, no one really knew what was going to happen next or what the implications would be.  By mid-afternoon, I was back in my downtown Knoxville office, receiving and redistributing communications from UP’s Memphis-based corporate office to help guide branch managers and customer service staff in advising customers as to the security of their deposits. 

Throughout the day, I only saw through my computer still photos that were being posted on some of the national news sites of what had taken place that morning.  It wasn’t until I arrived home that night at about 6:30 that I saw the actual video footage of the WTC airline impacts, which only deepened my state of shock in how our society would be forever-changed.

All the while that day, my husband Charles — a Chevrolet dealer — was trying to manage our family’s own extension of the crisis.  His parents were actually inside the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., on the morning of 9/11, on an automotive industry legislative trip.  They saw for themselves the vast column of smoke rising from the direction of the Pentagon as they were evacuated in a veritable panic-like atmosphere to the streets outside the Capitol (the directive from Capitol security staff to everyone exiting the building was “Do Not Walk . . . RUN!”). 

With the shut-down of air travel that day and the fact that every rental car within a vast radius of the Beltway was immediately spoken for, Charles made haste over the phone – not knowing minute-to-minute what else might befall our nation’s capital with his parents stranded there – to purchase a vehicle off the lot from a D.C.-area dealer friend so that his folks could drive themselves home.

As we later learned, the presumed target of United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania was the U.S. Capitol Building, where my parents-in-law had been that morning.  The enormity of that knowledge has never escaped me, along with overwhelming gratitude to the men and women on that flight who sacrificed themselves to avert an even greater disaster. 

While my family experienced a personal near-miss that day, the thousands of individuals who experienced one or more direct losses remains staggering. 

I won’t forget conversations in the days that followed with my dear friend and long-time mentor, David Bicofsky, who served then as the school-community relations director for the Teaneck, NJ, public school system, located about 10 miles outside of Manhattan – and his relating the school system’s efforts to arrange grief counseling for students and staff whose parents, spouses or other family members were lost at Ground Zero.  Dave’s description of those days as “surreal” echoed mine, only about 20-fold given his proximity, particularly as he walked from his office to the parking lot one night that week with what seemed like legions of U.S. fighter jets streaking across the Jersey sky at low altitudes, patrolling Manhanttan’s airspace. 

The experiences of those days, weeks, months and the years that have followed will never leave this country’s citizens.  As a nation, we find ourselves in a place politically right now that’s tough, full of a level of internal vitriol that seemed unthinkable during our time of greatest immediate crisis 10 years ago.  I hope the next few days will serve to reconnect our leaders to some unified sense of purpose and reality.  We need it.