The Day That Silenced Our Skies

it wasn’t quite four weeks after September 11, 2001, when my wife and I chose to visit Ground Zero. Still in uniform after returning from a trip, I approached a beat cop standing on one corner. He was guarding a perimeter of the devastation. I nodded and gestured toward the rubble, firmly holding my wife’s hand.

The cop asked, “Did you fly the kind of airplane that hit the towers?”