It is 9/11/11. I am sitting at home watching the 10^th anniversary memorials to one of the darkest days not just in my lifetime, but in American history. Ironically, I am getting ready to get on an airplane to attend TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO West starting Tuesday in Austin, Texas. I am not afraid to fly. In fact, living in the New York City area, what I fear is driving my car across a major bridge to get to the airport. I also do not do well watching low-flying planes in air space I think is off what should be their normal routes.

In watching television today I have been struck by how many people have said, “It feels like only yesterday.” To me, the immediacy of my emotions (as I posted on my Facebook (News - Alert) wall) make it feel very much like today.

I am writing this for various reasons:

• As a form of therapy
• Because I have a platform that is widely read and the hubris to hope that my insights on this subject are valuable
• Because this was a day that changed my life and made me proud of our industry

With the request that you indulge me in recounting certain aspects of a very personal and highly emotional few hours, I hope you bear with me. You might also wish to click on the link that follows for the powerful Jim Steinman ballad, “It’s All Coming Back to Me,” as sung by Celine Dione.

Watching the horror

We can all remember where we were when we heard or bore witness to events that shaped our lives and times. I can recount precisely where I was and how I felt when: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated (junior high gym class); Martin Luther King was killed (doing homework); and John Lennon was shot (the same bar, since closed, in Washington, D.C.). 9/11/2001, however, was different from all of these and not just because I was far from loved ones and on business.

I was staying in the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Washington, D.C. We were two blocks from the White House.  My car was at MetroPark in New Jersey near New York City. I had taken Amtrak down the night before, still a bit over-stimulated from the three day celebration of my son’s Bar Mitzvah. Interestingly, I was there to moderate a press conference on a major network security announcement my client Wave Systems was making with E.D.S. In fact, it was while sitting with executives and support people for Wave in the hotel coffee shop waiting for E.D.S. CEO (and former Cable & Wireless and Ameritech CEO) Richard Brown to arrive that we saw the first live pictures of the North Tower of the World Trade Center on fire.  In short order, we watched the second plane hit, and listened to a man in the lobby screaming that he had just crossed Potomac River via the 14^th Street Bridge where he watched an airplane crash into the Pentagon.

At that point, hotel security ushered us into an elevator. We were sent us down four floors to where our press event was to be. We were told that all of the elevators in the hotel had been turned off, no one would be allowed to return to their rooms until the situation was deemed safe, and that there were reports that possibly other planes were on their way toward targets in Washington, D.C. 

The first thing I did when sequestered was pick up a hotel house phone to home. No luck. All the lines out were busy. I pulled out my cell phone. For reasons I still don’t understand, I had signal. The call went through. My wife and I talked briefly. She was on her way to get our kids from school. I just wanted to let her know that I was OK. We subsequently -- and miraculously -- talked several times that day without a problem — keeping each other sane, reassuring our children and following events as they unfolded.

I will be brief about what happened next. It turned out the Mall was not on fire. The U.S. State Department had not been bombed. All planes that had been in the air were safely accounted for once news came of the heroic actions of the passengers of United Flight #93 which crashed in Shanksville, PA. Thus, in the early afternoon, we were allowed back into the lobby (where on the street I saw soldiers with M-16s forcibly detain a man of seeming Middle-Eastern background). My clients commandeered what may have been the only two available rental cars in D.C. This was a good thing, since there was no way to get to an airport where car rental companies had fleets, and they were saying they were not renting anyway. We drove back to New Jersey in silence. The car passed streets in the Capital that were deserted except for the soldiers on almost every corner. Busy I-95 between Washington and New York had virtually no cars. The speed limit turned into a guideline to be ignored. I retrieved my car just south and west of New York City.  I drove my familiar route up the New Jersey Turnpike just as the sun was setting.

As everyone has said, that day was one of the clearest in anyone’s memory. It remains, in many aspects, way too clear. I will never forget looking at the New York skyline while driving home. Where the Twin (News - Alert) Towers should have been was nothing but billowing smoke. I started to weep. To this day, whenever I drive into New York my mind’s eye sees those towers. I get a knot in my stomach. There will always be something that was a part of me that is now missing.

I can’t tell you how many times I had been in the World Trade Center over the years. It was a favorite place for telecom industry events, both in the Marriott Hotel at the base of the towers (where I had sat in exactly the place 6 people died in the first attempt to topple the towers in 1993 listening to an AT&T presentation to financial analysts the day before the bombing), and in the restaurant Windows on the World. It was also a favorite of my kids who loved going up to the observation deck.  

Most of that drive back from the train station to my home was spent on the phone. My kids got to hear the voice of their daddy. I got filled in on what was known.  My wife told me a story I’d like to share. She and my children were sitting outside on our deck shortly after noon. The towers had crumbled but the nature of what we were experiencing was unknown. There was a sonic boom. A fighter plane passed over our house only a few thousand feet above the ground. My wife turned to my children and said, “see the American flag on the tail…that is the good guys…we are going to be OK.”

 At first, from a personal standpoint, it seemed like good news, and we would be OK. However, within days I found out my best friend’s brother had been on the 92^nd floor of the North Tower. He did not get out. A fraternity brother’s wife was on the plane from Boston that crashed into the South Tower. There were six people from my town who died, including the fathers of friends of my children. I had met most of them. It was a small town. In every community in our area, we all knew someone who had died or had a loved one who had. It is why watching the memorials today, on an important anniversary and on a weekend when the physical memorials were unveiled to the public at Ground Zero and in Shanksville, was so terribly painful.

I will not get into my feelings about the causes of 9/11, or what has happened to the U.S. as a country and the world in general since. That is for commentary on another platform. What I will say is that on 9/12 my wife, bowing to the wishes of my 13 year-old son, bought him his first cell phone. Since, that day, not a single member of my family has been without a working and charged cell phone. In fact, ours have never been turned off.

It is almost impossible to put a price on peace of mind. However, having that cell phone that day and having it work gave me an appreciation for the term invaluable. Thank God for my cell phone.

I will add one piece of political/industry commentary as a closer. I agree with the members of the 9/11 Commission, who in the last few weeks have publically decried the fact that we still do not have a seamless and flawless way for first responders to communicate with each other at the site of a disaster, or for a unified command and control capability at such catastrophic events.  It seems almost unimaginable that the lesson of 9/11 (only amplified by the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina) regarding the absolute and urgent need for real-time coordination of emergency response resources remains if not unlearned, at least unfilled. We can and should be better than that.  

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel, France Telecom (News - Alert), and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.