2001-09-14 - 1:13 a.m.

Okay, I've already reduced two people to tears just talking about this. If I do to it to you, too… I'm sorry… I don't know what else to say but that.

Never before today have I scared myself so much with my own thoughts. Not that I'm afraid of things that might happen to me, but I'm afraid of what has already happened to me.

I sat in front of the television today pulling on my shoes and socks today, preparing to go to work. On the television, a video of an earlier press conference played, with Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz speaking from the Pentagon. Eventually, the topic on everyone's mind came up, asking about the military reaction to Tuesday. He said that, because of the nature of the enemy, most likely anything military reaction would involve a hard-fought, long campaign, rather than any sort of quick strike. Because we wouldn't exactly have strict strategic targets as much as a general organization of people pretty much in hiding. But he said that, if it came to it, we would be there ready to do whatever it took to destroy this group and anyone who supported them.

As I walked along, I thought about those words. I looked around me and saw more American flags of all sizes on houses than I ever remember seeing other than *maybe* on some national holiday. Numbers that ran across the bottom of the screen when I'd been watching came back into my head. 4,763. Four-thousand, seven-hundred and sixty-three people officially missing, according to the latest stats at the time from the websites, hotlines, employee lists and passenger lists. Ten thousand. Ten thousand body bags had been ordered to the towers.

I started thinking about the dead and missing like out of balance bank transactions at work. Right then, there were nearly five thousand pronounced missing, and something like 47 identified bodies. A variation like that in a transaction, you keep looking for the missing amount. Then, as that amount shrinks as you find errors, it gets closer and closer until almost every amount missing from the transaction, or person missing from the accident is found. Eventually, if we get less than a dollar and we just can't find the mistake, we charge it off, let it go, stop searching. I started to think about what happens when there is just nothing left to search, and anyone left unfound or unidentified is just charged off. "We're sorry, ma'am, but your husband… is gone. We were unable to find his body amongst the rubble, but it's been three weeks, and we have no sign of him. I'm sorry." And with that, the man will be charged off. Absorbed into memory as one of the people who will never be found, dead or alive.

And that's when the anger set in. Shock, denial, anger, etc., all of those stages of grieving, they've all hit me time and time again. The only one I've never reached is acceptance. But the anger hit me hard today when I started to think about all of the people who are gone forever, and who will be lost to the inescapable imperfections of even the most careful rescue teams. People who were not just killed, but forever missing.

I started to think about the idea of war. Because this must be stopped. This must not be allowed to happen again. There are some people who want to, to use a phrase I still remember vividly from the Gulf War, even though I was still in elementary school, turn whatever country these people came from into a glass parking lot. Carpet bomb the whole damned thing and leave nothing to chance. I don't want that. I don't want to hurt more of the innocent.

But, if what many people, from everyday citizens at least to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, say they want—to find who did it and bury them under piles of rubble that were their own buildings—comes to pass, I will feel much better. Not so much because I want revenge, though deep down, that is definitely there, too, but because I want it to end. I know terrorism will never cease, but I want these people to have no chance to ever rain this type of terror on anyone again. I do not want another innocent life taken by them. I want them stopped for good.

And that's when I made the decision. I'm going to watch the news. I'm going to listen to my government's stand on it. I'm going to hear what they're plans are, and through that, I'm going to make my decision. If they find out, without a doubt, who these people are, and they go to attack them and wipe them out along with anyone who tries to stop us, then I will support it without question. And, if I truly believe that's what's going to happen…

I'm going to go.

I will be right up there, wherever I have to go to do it, signing up. I feel bad for what I know it would do to all of the people who care about me. But then I remember what was done to the tens or probably hundreds of thousands of people who cared about people who may have been in those buildings or in those jets. What it is continuing to do to those who don't know. And I realize it's something I have to do.

The more I thought about it, though, the angrier I got at myself for things I have no control over. I have serious back problems and slight joint problems. I have a slight hearing comprehension problem. I probably wouldn't make it through the physical. But I don't care. I'm going to try. I hate that I probably can't go, do something, if I make the decision that it's the right thing to do. But I'm not going to let that stop me from doing my damnedest to make my difference, if only because I hope that risking or possibly even losing myself might help keep thousands of other groups of families, friends, loved ones, from going through the same thing the nation did this week.

To my friends, those who know me only through my diary and those who have known me for years, fear not. I will find a way to keep in contact, so you always know I'm alive. I'm praying it doesn't come to this, but I have to prepare for the worst now.

Because the only thing that scares me more than the idea that the crime of the century may have already happened, just a year into it…

…is the idea that the crime of the century may not have happened yet.