Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [90]
Sometime within the first six hours, I also called the CIA guy who’s based in the region. As governor, I was commander in chief of the Minnesota National Guard. I needed to know if the CIA had any “intel” as to whether Minnesota was a target. Could we be hit? What should we be doing? He told me, “We know nothing more than you do right now.” Months later, when I ran into him, he said, “You were the only governor that bothered to call me that day.”
We were the first state to hold an official memorial, after 9/11, that next Sunday morning. I give credit to Senator Coleman, who thought of it first. He called me and said, “Let’s have a memorial at the Xcel Energy Building in St. Paul.” I said, “No, let’s do it outside, on the front lawn of the Capitol, because a building won’t hold enough people.” I ordered my staff to begin organizing what we called “Minnesota Remembers: A Memorial from the Heartland.”
It was heart-rending. The crowd exceeded all expectations, even with a drizzling rain falling. Over forty thousand people showed up, every kind of person you could imagine. We had Native Americans there, medicine men pounding drums, right alongside honor guards who represented the policemen and firefighters and military. It showed that, at heart, we were all one. It still chokes me up to think about it.
The ceremony went on for more than two hours and I was the last one to speak. I remember I had on a leather National Guard bomber jacket. I looked out upon hundreds of flags fluttering in the breeze, and dozens of people embracing each other. I told them, “I stand here today humbled but comforted by your presence. That’s what family is for, to share with each other the hurt, the sorrow, and the sadness.
“We will overcome this tragic moment,” I continued. “We must and we will move forward. We will move forward in fairness. We will live together with tolerance. We will extend our hands to the people of the world in solidarity and unity. We will pit honor against dishonor. We will promote good against evil. And finally, we will together restore our sense of freedom by conquering this enemy! We will do all of this and we will not fail!”
We also passed out three-by-five condolence cards, and asked people at the memorial service to write whatever they wished on them. Terry and I would then personally deliver these to the citizens of New York. We brought the cards with us when Governor Pataki took us down to Ground Zero.
This was almost three weeks after it happened. The smoke was still billowing from the wreckage. Governor Pataki told me, “You’ll see steel I-beams three or four blocks away, mostly from when the planes actually hit.” He went on, saying that everything from the Hudson to the East River was covered with several inches of dust for the first few days. Everything. The ground, all the plants and trees, all the buildings. It was as if you were walking on the moon.
When we got our first look at the devastation, Terry was overcome. I walked over and put my arm around her. They found the bodies of several firefighters in the debris that day. Every time that happened, all the clean-up work would come to a halt and everybody there would stand in silence while the firefighters carried out the body on a stretcher under an American flag.
TERRY: The first thing I noticed was that the streets of New York were deserted. There were sometimes two or three people at a time; it wasn’t like before. The closer we got to Ground Zero, it was weird, there was almost like a thing in the air—you started feeling very afraid and very sad, at the same time. When I saw the devastation, I could not comprehend: Why would anyone want to inflict this kind of damage on someone else? What kind of hatred could the hijackers possibly have, to give their own lives to kill other people like that? And innocent people . . .
Later in the year, Terry went back to Ground Zero on her own. She worked there for ten days, for the Salvation