23 years ago today, Major Asit George of Lexington’s Salvation Army found out exactly what it means when someone says, ‘The silence was deafening.’
“For those who use the West Side Highway, or Broadway and knowing how busy those were and, on that evening, even the daytime, the phenomenal silence you could cut through is what touched me, is what I remember,” Major George said. “It was unthinkable. People (law enforcement officers) with machine guns everywhere,” he added.
On Wednesday, America remembered the civilians and first responders we lost in the September 11, 2001, attacks, when terrorists turned planes into missiles, slamming them into both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Major George and his team based in suburban New York were asked to assist at Ground Zero.
“The immediacy, the sadness, the shock, is what we were dealing with,” he said. “We were asked to help out with counseling, handing out food, speaking with volunteers and encouraging them,” he explained of the work his team was doing during the week spent there.