One more thing to post about today. Just one, and I'll be gone. I was going to post about this on Sunday, but I was too tired and hung over. Anyway, I wanted to briefly note that after September 11, 2001, the red cross had to stop taking donations because they had received so much aid that they couldn't distribute it fast enough, something I will return to in a moment.

September 11, 2001 will always be a meaningful day for me because, as some of you may know, Tito Puente and I were at the Pentagon for the entire day and some of the evening. We lived right around the corner from the West entrance to the building in Arlington, VA at the time. I heard the plane hit from the law library at GW in Foggy Bottom. In the confusion (and it was mass confusion, we heard rumors for almost an hour about the Mall being under attack), I ran out and caught the last train home to Virginia, which was only about a 10 minute ride. I woke up Tito, and we ran upstairs to the top of our building, which we shared with the US Marshalls as their operational headquarters. There was a company of Marshalls up there, attack helicopters above us, and F-16s above the helicopters.

We could see from our rooftop that the Pentagon had been attacked and was obviously in bad shape, because it had only been about 30 minutes and most emergency help wasn't there yet. We decided that the best option was to go to the Pentagon to see if we could get in to help in the rescue effort. We ran to the security gate, hopped on the back of a troop transport full of Marines that was rolling through the gate with a Salvation Army supply truck and hitched a ride to the crash site. They handed us gas masks, boxes of bottled water and med kits, and told us to help the troops that were fighting the fire and starting the rescue effort in the offices adjacent to where the plane crashed. They also told us to make sure that we knew that the fourth missing plane, which later turned out to be Flight 93 which crashed in PA, hadn't been found yet. The afternoon and evening was spent doing what we could with the firefighters and troops, and then bagging and tagging parts of the plane with the FBI. When we decided to take a break at around 8:00 PM, we were leaving and they told us that civilians were no longer allowed near the site and if we left we wouldn't be allowed back in. We hadn't heard from lots of family and friends in New York, and similarly, many people hadn't heard from us (most of whom knew we lived next door to the Pentagon). So we left. As expected, we showed up early in the morning on September 12 to go back to our station at the crash site, and we weren't allowed in.

The fact that a foreign enemy was responsible for September 11 made Americans so willing to give to the cause that charitable groups literally couldn't spend the donations fast enough. For many people on the gulf coast, the damage that has been done by the hurricane is equally as devastating.

There were a lot of people at the Pentagon on September 11th that had to be restrained from running into the crash site to try to bring people out. A lot of people in New Orleans are taking similar risks to help those trapped, displaced, or stranded by the hurricane. If you can, please do what you can to help. It's easy to be an American most of the time, so let's remember how good we have it and do our best to help on the rare occasions when it's not.