you were almost on American 11!?
Back then it was the first flight out of Boston to connect with a flight to Hawaii.
I lived here on Maui but a close friend died unexpectedly and his family wanted me to be one of the pallbearers.
I used to run security for the now defunct Maui Writers Conference held every Labor Day weekend. It used to be the largest writers conference in the world. I just got home that Monday night when my buddy’s family called about my buddy’s death. I flew to Boston the next morning.
My return flight was American 11 on September tenth.My wife tried to talk me into changing the flight to the following day so I could get some rest. I refused, I had to get back to work. We had a big fight about it.
On 9/11 my house phone started ringing off the hook at three thirty in the morning. It was my buddy down the street who said
“Turn on the tv, we’re at war.”
My wife and I got up and turned on the tv. Like everyone else, we were horrified. When they eventually said one of the planes was American 11 my wife said to me “I’ll never tell you what to do again”
Of course that only lasted a couple of days, but it was a nice couple of days.
We had started training to deal with plane hijackings in the 70’s, they had happened a lot. There was nothing we didn’t know about airliners. We spent hundreds of hours (literally) with certain makeshift weapons that we all flew with. Still do. Even when I flew armed, I still had the makeshift weapons.
Probably would have died anyway, but I’d bet my life we wouldn’t have hit the building, we would’ve gone into the ocean.
And I’m still seriously pissed at all of Saudi Arabia and nobody’s going to talk me out of that.
