Remembering 9/11: Doing Our Job

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)by Daniel Duncan
After escaping downtown DC following the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, my wife and I headed straight to Fairfax Hospital to donate blood, but so many others had the same idea that the hospital had run out of parking spaces and was asking folks to return the next day. The line to give blood was 8 hours long. People wanted to help and this was one way they could.
      When we got home, we heard from others how they got home. One union member was on a bus from Prince William County and witnessed the jet hit the Pentagon during the morning rush hour backup. Passengers told the driver to turn the bus around and head back down Shirley Highway. Another union friend’s daughter was in a motorized wheelchair downtown. The battery held and she rode it out of town beside pedestrians crossing the 14th Street Bridge into Arlington.
      We heard of the bravery of our local first responders, of those in New York, of the passengers flying over Pennsylvania and of the countless others who raced to the Twin Towers in construction equipment to help rescue those trapped while others aboard ferries and tugs sailed to take those fleeing to safe shores across the rivers.
       The very next day, September 12, we were determined to come back to DC to work. We were stuck with thousands of others on 395 and saw the huge American flag on the Pentagon. We also could see the damage. But like everyone else, we refused to let those acts of terrorism keep us from doing our jobs.
- Duncan, President of the Northern Virginia Labor Council, works in the Maritime Trades Department of the AFL-CIO.