There have been many stories told about the September 11 terrorist attacks and know you have your own. You know where you were when you first heard. You remember who you called after seeing the TV image of the plane striking the second tower. Our stories of 9/11 are the things that unite us still, like the sense of unity we felt in those first days and months after the attacks.

Author Bio:

Except Virginia Buckingham never felt that way. She was the head of Boston's Logan Airport on September 11, 2001. On my watch, American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center. The first news story suggesting she might be fired in response to the hijackings appeared on September 13. A media frenzy followed. Six weeks after 9/11, Massachusetts’ then-governor forced her to resign. She was later sued personally for wrongful death by a 9/11 family, one of only two individuals named in the decade-long post-9/11 litigation. For many years, she feared that the blame was deserved.

She’s asked myself whether this story is worth telling many times. No one she knew personally died that day. She wasn’t part of the New York recovery effort, the federal response. She recounts the events of that day and the rebuilding of a broken confidence in aviation from my perspective at Logan. More so, though, she recounts the rebuilding of a broken life.

She doesn’t revisit the investigation, nor tread the well-worn path of what might have been different had political leaders, the CIA or FBI or FAA or airlines or airport operators or any number of individuals or agencies—herself included—put together the pieces of the 9/11 plot before that day. The following pages are an investigation of her heart, her mind, her soul. It is not about ‘who knew what’ but about the acceptance of simply “not knowing what she did not know.”