Jody, as I've posted on this board before, I had a rather ironic morning on 9/11 for just the night before I finished an old Tom Clancy novel that detailed a disgruntled Japanese airline pilot flying a fully fueled 747 into the Capitol Bldg in Washington, killing the President and most of Congress. The amount of damage that Clancy described fit exactly the destructive power of such an act. The book had been written years earlier so here was an author who recognized the risk.

When I saw the plane hit the tower I immediately thought "Well of course they did that." It was an obvious terrorist tactic and as angry and saddened as I was at the violation and murder of those people, there was this little part of my mind going to the thought that somehow our intelligence community failed big time. If an action-adventure author could see the possibility, why in the heck couldn't our powerful government as well?

In the weeks and months that followed I also was shocked at the overreaction of our citizens. Our air travel system should have been up and running much sooner. We knew the threat and so did the passengers. They would never again allow a plane to be hijacked without fighting back. That threat was ended. Temporary air marshals could've been deployed. That's the kind of action that would've been a message back to Bin Laden that he didn't faze us. I was angered that we acted like there were terrorists under ever rock. It was an absurd notion and one the president should have led better on.

However, I concurred completely with the move into Afghanistan although in hindsight we did an incomplete job.

As I read what I posted above I can see I'm concentrating only on the outrage part which was a definite component but there was also a tremendous sadness in the nature of man and his ability to do such horrendous things to others. In the end though I probably came through pretty well because I'd already had prior opportunities to see the evil of man and had already dealt with the feelings.

Art