Outside, there was a palpable sense of anxious calm and cooperation among thousands of stranded passengers. Americans who barely knew one another shared cabs. Locals offered overnight accommodations to those marooned in an unfamiliar city. Cell phones -- less ubiquitous then than they are today -- were shared easily. Like millions of our fellow countrymen, we had to dial dozens of times to let family members and other loved ones know we were safe.
Tom and I got separated in the crowd. He walked two miles to the Freedom Alliance offices. I grabbed a cab and -- after offering a significant tip -- persuaded the driver to try to take me to the Fox News bureau on Capitol Hill, even though Washington was being evacuated. With the help of the Virginia State Police and a Metropolitan Police Department officer, I got there and confirmed what most of the world already knew: American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, both hijacked from Boston's Logan Airport, had been turned into flaming kamikazes, slamming into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. American Flight 77, outbound from Dulles to Los Angeles, had struck the west side of the Pentagon, and United Flight 93 -- from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco -- had crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pa.
We soon learned this horrific carnage was perpetrated by 19 radical Islamists dispatched by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. We know that despite extraordinary courage and compassion displayed by first responders, 3,023 innocent men, women and children were killed or died of injuries. Most Americans never will forget what happened that terrible day.
But not all. This week, the flight I took from California was full of young people headed for college in Washington, D.C. I asked several how much they remembered of the events of 9/11. They all recalled seeing the second plane hit the World Trade Center on television. Some recollected Todd Beamer's leading the rebellion on Flight 93. Only one of them knew we went to war in Afghanistan less than a month later. All the rest thought we went to war in Iraq first.
Apparently, a good number of our elected and appointed leaders think we have forgotten what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and the radical Islamists who started this war. That's why they feel free to endorse the erection of a mosque just a few hundred feet from ground zero in Manhattan. And that's why they ignored this week's indictment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that "international sanctions" have failed to prevent the radical Islamist regime in Iran from building nuclear weapons.
Those who think we have forgotten 9/11 are wrong. And on Nov. 2, just 52 days after this year's anniversary of that awful event, they will see just how well many of us remember.