[Crafty Angler]

I'd actually slept in a bit that morning until 8 or so and sat having coffee, proof reading the ProJo and watching the morning news after a busy weekend during what had been a very busy season for us. My wife was already downstairs in the studio office when the first news reports came in about the WTC.

When I saw the 2nd plane hit live and in real time, there was little doubt that it was indeed an attack and not just a terrible accident and it sent a cold chill through me - I distinctly remember saying OMFG.

In the eight years since there's been a minute-by-minute replay of the sequence of events on the anniversary. I watched perhaps 10 or 15 minutes of it Friday morning and had to turn it off. I find I can't watch it anymore. As someone who has dealt with imaging for over 25 years, it's too much for me and takes me back to something nightmarish I keep hoping I'll wake up from and can't. There's still an air of unreality to it.

I now find that those images and the heart-rending stories of the unimaginable horror, self-sacrificing heroism and tragedy that go with them are too much for me to revisit through the cold unblinking eye of taped live TV coverage. I suppose that videotape will become the Zapruder film for Gen-X and Gen-Y, documenting the shocking and grisly details of the attack that stunned and saddened us all. Watching it now, in retrospect, it also foreshadows what was yet to come as a result.

Ultimately, whether we knew those people who perished or not, they were a part of us as a nation and that sense of loss and grief is still with us today. The cathartic moment for me was the service at St Patrick's for the fallen police chaplain. My wife and I knew one of the officiants, a Jesuit monk with Newport connections and made us feel a part of the effort to address our grief and sadness as a nation.

Less than 2 weeks later we shot the wedding of a young woman at the NYYC whose boss, the CEO of a well-known software company, was in the first plane to strike the WTC. Her husband and his groomsmen had friends in both towers.

Two weeks after that we shot another big event and the groom was in the 2nd tower when the first was hit and immediately exited the building via the stairs some 80 floors up. It was a joyous occasion for the young couple but there was a pall of sorts over the affair, too, and as an observer I saw the thousand yard stare in that young man's eyes.

Today, without a doubt, post-911 America is a much different place. Eight years later OBL is still at large while we chased other red herrings in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing and wounding tens of thousands of young American men and women with collateral casualties in those countries well in excess of a hundred thousand by conservative estimates.

At this point I'm not so interested in where I was then as where I find myself today after the anniversary.

That place is older, colder and a good bit more cynical when I realize that our great national loss and the shock, anger and determination to bring those responsible to justice was manipulated into an excuse to further someone else's agenda at a staggering cost in human suffering on all sides.

911 will always be a terrible memory for me and for all of us, a day to remember and reflect on a great national tragedy. It is also a day to honor the men and women who gave their lives driven by the hope that others might live.

I pray we never forget.