The United States, after coming under attack on 9/11, reacted with a sense of unity, two former New York Police Department detectives told Newsmax on Saturday.
“As a nation, we all came together,” Dr. Darrin Porcher, appearing on “Wake Up America Weekend” with fellow former detective Dr. Oscar Odom, said. “It wasn’t just Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani and the police commissioner at the time. It was George Bush who was the president. We all came together in unison. No matter what the political party was, we were Americans standing in the wake of terror. And we looked the lion in the face and said, we are not scared.”
Porcher recalled being in the NYPD Police Academy, where he was an instructor, when the planes struck the World Trade Center.
“When the first plane hit, we thought it was an accident,” he said. “But when the second plane hit, we immediately suited up and went into a mobilization zone. We stopped the series of MTA buses, loaded police recruits onto them, and headed down to the site where the horrific terrorist attack occurred.”
Porcher added that the scene was not something police officers were prepared to face.
“We understood the dynamic of crime control and even rescues, but nothing of the magnitude of what we saw during 9/11,” he said. “There were people who were jumping out of the building to prevent from being burned, and it was just one of these things that’s very difficult for me to describe.”
The memory of the attacks should be honored and not reduced to “another social media scroll,” Porcher said.
“Freedom comes at a price,” he said. “We have to do any and everything to protect democracy. This was an assault on democracy as it relates to the vicious terrorists that attempted to attack our way of life.”
Young people must also understand the scale of what happened, Porcher said.
“We need to stand tall, and we need to understand that we need to do any and everything to ensure that the democracy of the United States is kept intact,” he said. “We as one, as the United States of America, must continue the fight to ensure that we are safe.”
Odom, meanwhile, said Americans must remember the spirit of unity that followed the attacks and find ways to carry it into everyday life, warning that “it should not take tragedy to bring us together.”
“We have to look and reflect and look at 9/11 also as a benchmark on how we came together through a tragedy and how we need to come together and unite during good times,” he said.
“We need to get everything back together and let it not be only tragedies that bring us together,” Odom added. “We must come together and unite during good times, to be that great America that we are.”
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