I was 6 years old and living in Brooklyn, N.Y., when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. I can’t remember the radio broadcasts or newspaper accounts of the destruction at Pearl Harbor but over the years I’ve seen pictures of the burning and sinking ships. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a speech to Congress about the attack, stated “Yesterday, Dec. 7,1941 – a date which will live in infamy.”

Sixty years later, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, my wife and I had just finished breakfast when a friend called and told me to turn on the television. When we did, the screen showed the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center. Thinking that an accident had happened, my wife and I stared in disbelief as a plane struck the South Tower. At that split second I knew terrorists had attacked the United States and I feared for my five children who worked in the city. At that moment I offered a silent prayer for their safety. The next few hours were taken up with trying to see if they were safe. Finally, my second oldest daughter called from Greenwich, Conn., to tell us that she was working from home that day and all her siblings had called, from the city, to say they were all right. My fears subsided but I continued to watch my city burn.

Within a few days, I learned that my cousin’s son, a fireman in New York City, was at the World Trade Center when it started to crumple. Working on a side street with zero visibility and debris falling all about him he met another fireman with an air tank and using the one mouth piece they scrambled to safety. As with so many firemen that are on the job a long time and have horror stories, his life was also spared in the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center. His fellow firefighters pulled him from the rubble in the bombed out underground garage.

After Flight 77 crashed into one side of the Pentagon, the government asked for civilian help in clearing out the tangled steel and debris from the crash site. My brother, who owns a demolition company in Rockville, MD. and was a Pentagon Emergency Response Contractor, went to work 24/7 to help with the clean up. He still remembers the gruesome job that he, his two sons and their many co-workers experienced at the Pentagon.

In thinking back to September 11th, I believe the attack brought our country together in both helping New York City recover and to find and punish the attackers. A lot of information has been gathered about who committed the attack, who didn’t warn us in time and why we weren’t better prepared. The debates still continue.

The passage of time has made many of us very complacent and not realistic of the threat that terrorism poses. Five years have passed and there is still questionable security at our airports, millions of containers never inspected at our seaports and very porous borders. The blame can be placed on both our Executive branch of government as well as both Houses of Congress. I sincerely believe that our country is still very vulnerable to a terrorist attack. When it will come is known only by the terrorists.

Each day when I dress I pin a small American flag with the date, September 11, 2001, on my shirt. It’s my way of remembering that day, five years ago, when our war started. That particular day was definitely my “date which will live in infamy.”