What were you doing when.....

[L Verge]

I was a junior in college in the hills of western Maryland and had just returned to my dorm room for a few hours in-between classes. I was listening to music on the radio when the news announcement first came that he had been shot. As the news spread, everyone gathered in the common room - where the only TV in the entire dorm was allowed. When they announced his death, everyone began to cry, including "the jocks." The next move that we made was to hike across campus to the chapel where we prayed and sat in silence.

Since many of the students at my college came from the D.C. and Baltimore regions, we had lived under the threat of atomic warfare for years, especially just a year before with the Cuban missile crisis. Andrews AFB was only about five miles from my home, and we had been taught throughout my childhood that it would be a major target when the Russians hit.

Believing this, over half the college population packed their bags (me included) and headed home. Few of us had our own cars in those days, so we had to depend on buses and trains mainly to get home. Both means of transportation, however, would land us in downtown D.C. I came into the marvelously grand Union Station late at night and was greeted immediately by my parents and thousands of others whose children were coming home from colleges and schools up and down the East Coast for safety.

I don't think I left the TV for more than a few hours to sleep over the next period of days. I repeatedly watched the same news reels over and over and thought my chest would cave in when John-John saluted his father's casket. And, those mournful drum beats. I have attended several military funerals at Arlington over the years, and every one of them reminds me of those muffled drums and the solemn processions.

Maybe because I was much older on 9/11 and had experienced personal losses over the years, but that event did not affect me in quite the same way as the Kennedy assassination. I was at work and on the phone when that occurred, and another museum director said simply, "Some plane has evidently flown into the World Trade Center." I turned on the TV in my office in time to see the second plane hit. All of a sudden maintenance trucks came flying into our parking lot. My guys knew I had a TV. Many of them were Vietnam and Gulf War vets. There was no crying this time - just fury - in my office. I sometimes feel ashamed because the loss of 3000 or more lives that day in September did not have the same effect on me as the loss of one life on that day in November.