About two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, I flew into New York's La Guardia Airport for a meeting. Even if I had been unaware of the tragedy, I would have known that something was wrong. Even the woman who sold me a magazine at the newsstand looked haunted.
You could hear it in people's voices. You could see fear in their eyes. A few days later I flew on the Shuttle to Washington -- and it was the same thing there. It was one of the first flights to land at Reagan National Airport. As we walked to baggage claim, there was eerie darkness, a huge presence of armed soldiers and almost no regular folks in the airport. It felt like the landing of freed hostages.
A day later, I visited friends in D.C. They told me about their emergency plans, about how husband and wife always planned how they'd find their daughter at school and whether it was wise that both of them worked.
When I returned to California, life was normal again. People laughed, joked and casually mentioned what their kids were doing or maybe a new hobby. The attacks of Sept. 11 were a world away.
Now, with the killing of bin Laden, the reaction is similarly split. Sentinel reporter Jason Hoppin got it right in today's paper when he said: "... reactions here were more muted than the flag-waving and rapturous glee seen around the country."
I guess that's to be expected. Watching something on television from 3,000 miles away is different from experiencing the horror directly.
One of those who was on the scene was Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reprinted his words today from the Sept. 12, 2001 edition of The Journal: "I think that in the next few days I am going to wish that I had not seen any of this." (He won a Pulitzer Prize for eye-witness article, right here).