Garbanzo Toons

Because we should all know why we are at war.

A lot of blogs will probably post these links, but go here for a reminder of why we are battling the Islamofascist menace and why we need to keep fighting them. It's short. It's important.

Radio communication broke down. Commanders lost contact with their squads. Noise and dust obscured the senses. One paramedic likened it to being in an infantry unit overrun by enemy troops. Yet, in the confusion at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, firefighters and emergency medical technicians improvised, and kept working.

Without direction from superiors and no plan to guide their actions, they followed their instincts and extinguished blazes, triaged casualties and comforted the injured, at a time when they could have surrendered to panic.

More details of their rescue efforts that day have emerged in an archive of interviews and audiotapes released by the city this week as a result of a court order.

Among the hundreds of pages of transcripts are scores of instances where trained rescuers realized they were on their own.

Then go here to the Oral Histories From Sept. 11 Compiled by the New York Fire Department. There are a lot of them. I read two and had to stop. If you don't find these stories haunting, you are more cynical than I've ever been.

A rich vein of city records from Sept. 11, including more than 12,000 pages of oral histories rendered in the voices of 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians, were made public on Aug. 12. The New York Times has published all of them.

The oral histories of dispatch transmissions are transcribed verbatim. They have have not been edited to omit coarse language.

In order for Western Civilization to survive this latest barbarian onslaught, we must keep reminding ourselves that no matter how "moderate" they pretend to be, there is a large portion of the Islamic world that is at war with us. They will keep attacking us whether or not we want to respond. Forget root causes. Apeasement won't work. We have to fight back and we have to win. These oral histories serve as a permanent reminder of what they are willing to do to us, and anyone else who does not believe as they do.

Labels: 9/11 firefighters transcripts

posted by Harry @ 9:41 PM