As a reporter for New Jersey Network News on the state’s public television network, the 21^st century’s version of the Day of Infamy began like any other routine Tuesday in September: a half dozen or so reporters and assignment staff joined with the station’s news director in the conference room just off the newsroom to hash out the pros and cons of whatever stories we might cover that day; while other news staffers joined by speaker phone from bureaus at Stockon University in South Jersey and Newark in the north.

The morning routine would soon become forever linked to the unthinkable, as someone said the World Trade Center just over the Hudson River had been hit with a jetliner. This would have been minutes, if not moments, after the 8:46 a.m. first strike of the Trade Center’s North Tower. I don’t recall who I stood there with in disbelief as we moved from the conference room to the newsroom staring in disbelief at the TVs lined up on a wall in the newsroom that were trained on every station, which in turn were all running video of the first plane that hit the North Tower with no explanation as to what we were seeing unfold before our eyes. But we stood there transfixed before I volunteered with cameraman Bob Hartman to jump in a van and head north to the scene.

Headed north en route from Trenton to New York on Route 1, typically about an hour north, we first saw the awful smoke rising from as far away as Rahway, about 20 miles south of our destination. We were called off from heading directly into New York by our veteran news director, Bill Jobes, who ordered all our crews to stay out of the city for our own safety.

Instead, we diverted to Newark International Airport to report on conditions there – neither of us knowing at that time that Newark was the airport from which one of the hijacked planes had departed just after 8 a.m. It was Flight 93, the plane where Plainsboro, NJ, resident Todd Beamer would utter the famous words “Let’s roll’’ as he and fellow heroic passengers rushed to take out the hijackers, ultimately gaining access to the cabin and crashing the plane thought to be headed to the White House or Congress into a field in Shanksville, Pa. (Later, I learned that I personally knew one of the passengers – disabilities advocate Colleen Fraser who was a constant presence at the New Jersey State House that I covered as a reporter).

Heavily armed Port Authority Police officers stood in a phalanx outside their vehicles blocking interior airport roadways – 37 of their fellows were later confirmed dead in the Trade Center attacks – and we were turned away after taking some video of them with their automatic weapons.

As I recall, we fed some of our video of smoking towers and airport police back to Trenton, where the newsroom was reportedly in full swing gathering video and news reports on the attacks on New York, the Pentagon, and the downed Flight 93.

For the next several days, I joined our photographers to cover the property and human devastation across the river in lower Manhattan to the vicinity of Ground Zero. Destroyed, ash-covered fire and police vehicles sat abandoned on side streets approaching Ground Zero like relics of war. Many grieving family members of some of the nearly 3,000 victims approached with photos of missing loved ones, pleading for the photos and information to be broadcast.

As my partner, video-journalist Ron Wagner, and I made our way back north along a West Street closed to all but first responders and media, crowds of onlookers gathered along the sidewalk erupted in impromptu clapping. They were applauding the news media, for being part of this tragic diorama of death and destruction all around by helping document what would be the worst attack on the United States in any of our lifetimes.

As I write this, memories from the attacks and their aftermath descend again – like touching down in a New Jersey National Guard helicopter for a reporting visit to the makeshift DNA identification site on top of the old Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island and being shown the baby’s car seat that brought tears I couldn’t hide.

As I write this, painful and still unresolved emotions from the attacks and their aftermath course through me like a low-watt electric charge. Still, I’m reminded of one of my old editors at the Trenton Times, the late Arnie Ropeik, who back in the 1980s wrote a column on what it was like being a working journalist at the time of JFK’s assassination. As horrible a time as that tragic event was, Arnie wrote that while others were stuck wringing their hands in worry and their minds spinning in endless loops of despair, he was fortunate to be kept busy because of his job, writing and reporting on the assassination’s fallout, which he saw as a special kind of public service.

And while I realize and understand that my own struggles with that infamous day and the days that followed are nothing compared to those experienced by the victims and their families, Arnie’s words helped sustain me through the emotions of my reporting then, as well as in the disquieting aftermath since.

Jim Hooker of director of internal communications for the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission.

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