We arrived amid chaos. The hotel personnel were all watching Italian TV and when they saw us they cried “You are Americans! They are bombing you! They are attacking your country! Look! Look!” It was about 3:45 PM, just an hour after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. We checked in quickly and watched CNN for about three hours.

As we saw the towers fall and the Pentagon in flames, I suppose my feelings were the same as everyone watching at home: disbelief, helplessness, horror, anger. It was the JFK assassination all over again. I wanted to walk out into the hills and just scream. But I didn’t; I just sat there watching numbly. It was so incomprehensible. In those first hours, there was so much uncertainty. Another plane crashed. Would more be hijacked before all were grounded? Where was the president? Who was responsible.?

[During our four weeks in Europe, we had access to English-speaking television on only four nights. Fortunately, these were the four days immediately following the attacks and we could learn almost as much about the murders as could the folks back home. But we were not as immersed in the tragedy as they were. Because we got out of the hotel room and continued with our vacation, we were spared the non-stop replays of the planes hitting the towers and their collapse, and all the rumors, accusations and uncertainties that followed on U.S. television for four days. We ran into a group of American women at a train station a couple days later and one asked me if I didn’t feel guilty about enjoying myself at this time. I said I was sorry not to be sharing the national angst, but I welcomed the diversion that our vacation provided. In the weeks following our return, I realized that the enormity of the loss would have hit me much harder and more emotionally had I been home in those several days after the murders. The stories in newspapers and on TV of the individual loss by the victims' families would have been heart-wrenching and much harder to absorb.]