The first September 11th I was not on call

Twenty-five years ago this morning, 343 firefighters, 60 police officers, and 8 EMTs and paramedics walked into two buildings everyone else was running out of.

Most of them knew.

They went anyway.

I want to tell you where I was.

A few months before that morning, I had turned in my gear. Fourteen years as a medic. Army first, then eleven years running ambulance calls across the Inland Empire.

I had just started a new job. New desk. New routine. First time in my adult life I was not on call.

I remember standing there watching the second tower come down and feeling something I did not have a name for yet.

Every medic in that footage was doing the thing I had done for fourteen years. Tones go off. Rig door closes.

The world narrows to one address and you do not think about yourself because someone is waiting on the other end.

Except this time I was not on the rig.

I was watching.

I want to be clear. I never did anything close to what those men and women did that day.

But I know the instinct that put them in those stairwells. It is trained into every first responder in this country, and on September 11, 2001, it was tested at a scale nobody had ever seen.

And it held.

So today I am not writing about the IRS. Not about California. Not about anything I usually write to you about.

I am writing to say thank you to the ones who did not come home, and to the ones who did and have carried it every day since.

The FDNY. The NYPD. The Port Authority officers. The medics. The Pentagon responders. The passengers on Flight 93 who became first responders at 30,000 feet.

And to every firefighter, cop, paramedic, and EMT reading this right now, in Redlands or anywhere else: the job you signed up for is the job they were doing that morning. Same tones.

Same door closing. Same instinct.

I was not there. But I know what it cost to be there.

Never forget.

Carlos Samaniego

TaxDebtConsultant.com
Former Army Medic, Former EMT

P.S. If you know a first responder, call them today. Not a text. Call. Tell them you remember. The ones who carry this day carry it quietly, and quiet is heavier than it looks.