10 years later...

It started out as a beautiful morning.

For our generation, it's our Pearl Harbor. It's one of those basic questions that we'll ask someone in a conversation.

"Where were you when you heard about 9/11?"

It's as common a question for us to ask one-another as "Where did you go to college?" Or at least as common as "Where were you when you heard about the Challenger?"

For some reason, I remember that hour before the attacks as clearly as I remember the three hours after. I took a backroad into Spencer, where I was working at the time, and had my hand out the window. It was an absolutely beautiful day. A touch of crisp, but still far from chilly. I remember thinking: "Now, this is a perfect day."

It was a Tuesday, and I was running a little late. Pretty standard, actually. The first thing I did every morning for the Spencer Evening World was stop by the Owen County Sheriff's Department and sift through crime reports from the previous night. I rapped on the door and was let in. Peggy Cradick was in the office filing some paperwork, and the dispatcher was having a pretty quiet morning in the dispatch center.

I looked through the overnight reports, and wrote up a few car wrecks. Nobody had been killed, and no serious crimes were committed. I heard Peggy from the other room talk aloud.

"Oh my God," she said.

My head turned. I will never suggest I'm a great reporter, but I do have a knack for sensing when something is up. Something in someone's voice or mannerisms. My best friend once said I am intuitive. I don't know what that means, exactly, except I usually pick up on hints and allegations a few milliseconds before others do. Something like that.

I got up to check out what caused Peggy to gasp. She had on CNN in the other room, and the first jet had struck a few moments earlier. CNN coverage had just started, talking about the incident. There was heavy smoke and a significant hole, but it was so early into the news, that there was still debate on what type of aircraft struck. A small jet, perhaps, I remember hearing.

I watched for just a few seconds and decided I'd have to mention it to my boss. We didn't cover national news unless it was really, really big. But who knows -- maybe we had someone who worked in that building originally from Spencer, Ind. It was possible.

Returning to the dispatch center, I went to write down the last of the arrest reports.

"Check out CNN," I mentioned to the dispatcher. "Something big is going on."

"Fuck that," he said. "I'm watching CHiPs."

He was. It was a few minutes before 8 a.m. Central time, and I gathered up my notepads, driving five minutes over to The Spencer Evening-World. I walked in and mentioned the burning tower to a co-worker, Shelly, before walking back to my cubicle. Tom Douglas, my editor, walked to his desk and I stood up.

"Hey Tom, I doubt it means anything to us, but some plane hit one of the twin towers over in New York City."

Tom looked at me and acknowledged it, but also gave me a "so what?" look. We covered, exclusively, Owen County, Indiana. And that was no where near New York City.

Shelly walked back, and in retrospect, I now know she was stunned.

"Scott," she said. "Jimmy called. He said a plane hit the tower."

"Yeah, I know," I said looking at her. "We were talking about that ..."

"No," Shelly cut me off. "Another one."

And suddenly, New York City meant a lot to everyone.

Tom didn't really even need to say much. We just started trying to figure out how we were going to get this news to our readers. Our job isn't very important in the overall scheme of things, but in Spencer, a lot of people actually relied on us for information.

The Spencer Evening-World didn't have wire service. Everything was either written by four writers, including our editor-in-chief, or it came in via press release or community member. And while not having wire was some sort of source of odd pride -- it made us focus on writing a lot of local-local-local -- it really hampered us in the world of world news. Especially on 9/11.

The Internet was almost impossible to use. And we didn't have a television in the office. Tom told me to grab $100 out of petty cash, walk over to Radio Shack and buy a good radio. I did just that, watching some of the images on the televisions inside the store. I brought the radio back and tuned into AM radio, writing down quotes from John McCain and any other official the networks interviewed. I wrote a lot of attribution to ABC News. I'm sure I didn't spell a lot of things right, but I remember trying to figure out Osama bin Laden and Taliban.

I was too busy typing for a noon deadline to think much about the implications. We all were.

Somehow, though, I did manage to take time to be a world-class ass to a co-worker who had annoyed me. And, while I apologized for saying something completely ridiculous a few minutes later, I still wonder why when our world was changing I could still be the same petty ass that I sometimes am.

I tried to handle the main story while my boss wrote a local reaction piece. My boss OK'd taking an image off the Internet from a website that finally started working and showing the explosion of the second jetliner into the second tower. We were at work.

My phone rang. It was my mother, checking in. I didn't mind at all. It made sense, but I was trying to concentrate on typing. We spoke about the situation.

"Are you going to go back in?"

"Um. I don't know, Mom. I mean, I haven't really thought about it."

I'd gotten out of the Navy a few years earlier and was still eligible to re-enlist. I dialed my future-wife's office. She worked on an upper floor in a Fort Wayne law office. Sure it wasn't a target, but it was still a bit unsettling. We spoke for a few moments and that was it. Not too much needed to be said. We'd been a couple before ... would be one again ... but on Sept. 11, we were just friends.

As I was finishing up the main story, my boss looked at me.

"So ... are you thinking about ... what's your plan? Are you going to be called back by the military? Are you going to join again?"

I still didn't know. The war was three hours old, and all I knew was things were going to be very different for a very long time.

You wonder about all the people dying that day, and you wonder back to how beautiful the morning began, and you think: This is not a guarantee.