Was in St. Andrews, on a golf trip with three pals, playing just down the road at Kingsbarns. At one point during the afternoon round, a small maintenance truck pulled up alongside of the fairway we were playing. The driver motioned to one of our caddies. He walked over and leaned into the cab. Don't know why but the whole scene looked strange and very serious. The caddie stayed for a few minutes then walked back across the fairway where all four of us had gathered. As he walked toward us, we could all sense he had some bad news to deliver. My mind raced. All I could come up with was that something awful had happened to one of our wives or kids. I didn't want him to open his mouth, but he did.
"I've got some bad news for you, lads," he began. I don't remember his exact words, but he manged to explain the whole story, ending with the news that both towers had collapsed. "We're so sorry lads," he continued. Then he proceeded to remind us about the jet liner that went down in Lockerbie Scotland some years earlier, the result of a terrorist bombing. I remember him saying, "The Scottish people are with you."
We finished the round with barely a word spoken and returned by car to St. Andrews around dinner time and shuffled into a small pub in search of food. The TV in the corner replayed the jet liner collisions non-stop. We spoke little. And the few locals in the pub minded their own business. They could tell we were Americans, and we could tell they didn't quite know what to say.
I can remember seeing Prime Minister Tony Blair on TV telling the world that the people of the UK would completely support their American allies in the effort to bring the killers to justice. His press conference sound bites were repeated over and over. Strangely, his words provided a bit of comfort. But soon enough it dawned on us that we were thousands of miles from home, on foreign soil -- and all we could think of was how to get home. Calls home that night did little to settle our nerves. Our wives and kids missed us. They were terrified. We were terrified. And nobody could do anything to change any of this. It was Tuesday night. Calls to the airlines gave us no information. Airplanes weren't flying. And although we were scheduled to fly home on Saturday, no one would speculate when or if planes would resume flying...
The rest of the week was a numbed-out blur. Each day we checked for flights, even boats. But there was absolutely no way to return home and no one would speculate if we would be in Scotland for a few days, weeks or longer. We decided to continue with the golf trip. We played our rounds and at each stop, the people we encountered would make a point to approach us and offer their condolences. In some strange way, we must have stuck out as strangers, foreigners, Americans. But the people cared. And they tried to console us.
I remember one instance in particular that happened while we played at Montrose. An elderly man pulling a trolley appeared on a tee behind us. As he was a single, we waved him through and scattered to the edges of either side of the fairway. He hit his tee ball down the middle, but instead of walking to it, he zig zagged his way there, stopping to spend a moment with each of us. "I know you're Americans," he spoke slowly as he stared onto my eyes. "They told me in the clubhouse. We're so sorry," he half whispered. He stopped and did the same with each of my mates. The scene stays with me to this day.
We finally did get a plane out of Scotland -- on one of the first international flight out of Glasgow on Saturday. The airport was clogged with machine gun armed military personnel and the checkin process took hours but we made it onto the plane and into the air. It was a nervous flight, but we were headed home -- back to Chicago and finally, to our families in Indiana. I learned that in a disaster the most important thing is to be with your family. It was a chilling week without them.