September 11, 2001 · My Firsthand Account
The bluest sky
you ever saw
An ordinary morning that changed everything. Twenty-five years later, we remember.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was flying. Not as an airline captain that day, but in an F-15 — one of six pilots airborne over the Northeast.
It began as the most ordinary kind of day. A clear, blue September morning. A routine training mission. My best friends were on alert, and we joked with each other the way pilots do. None of us knew what the day would become.
When the attacks came, everything changed in minutes. Our jets were loaded with live weapons, and we were sent back into the air with orders no one had ever been given. I was vectored west, toward an aircraft that had been hijacked — the airplane later identified as United Flight 93.
I never reached it. Before I could, the men and women aboard rose up and fought back, and brought it down themselves, in a field in Pennsylvania.
The rest of that day I spent in the skies over a wounded country, part of the air defense that closed the sky. For a moment I flew through the smoke drifting from Ground Zero, and I felt the weight of the lives we had lost. When we were finally cleared to land, a controller told us we could have any altitude we wanted — we were the only ones still flying. No contrails. No chatter. An empty sky over a nation that had changed forever.
I came home that night to a houseful of messages, and to my young son, who looked up at me and asked what he should do if they came to his school.
I carried September 11 for a long time — the duty of it, and the cost of it. For years I tried to carry it on my own strength, and I could not. I tried to hold everything and everyone together, and I could not see what it was doing to me, or to the people I loved.
What finally healed me came quietly — through my family, through hours in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, and through a faith that met me when I had run out of my own strength. It did not come on my schedule. It came in God’s time. And the lesson, when it came, was not about holding on. It was about letting go.
Some of the men I served with came home and never fully recovered from what those years asked of them. When we say we will never forget, I believe we owe that promise not only to the ones we lost that morning, but to the ones we kept losing quietly, for years afterward.
This Friday · The 25th Anniversary
Join me on The Drew Mariani Show
Friday, September 11 · 3:30 PM Central / 4:30 PM Eastern · Relevant Radio
My first time sharing that morning through the lens of faith.
For the ones we lost, and the ones still carrying it.