NACOGDOCHES COUNTY, Texas — **EDITOR'S NOTE: The video above is from Sept. 11, 2021.
So much has happened in 21 years, but that day, September 11th, 2001, Terry Lane, a now retired FBI agent, can recall like it was yesterday.
"I was on my way to work. I heard it on the radio heard, you know, the reports of the first crash. And because there'd been a plane crash into the Empire State Building years and years ago, I thought, well, maybe. But when the second one hit, I knew immediately I said, this is an attack," said Terry Lane, retired FBI agent.
Lane was a special agent in the Lufkin office when terrorists struck the World Trade Center Twin Towers. He was also part of the evidence response team. The calls quickly starting coming in from his bosses.
"Hey, get ready. We don't know what, you know, we're going to be asked to do, but be prepared," Lane said.
Lane headed for New York City with a team of agents based out of the Dallas field office. At this point it was a recovery mission, no longer search and rescue.
"I was there in 1996. And it was a different place. I was working with the TWA 800 crash," Lane recalled. "But this time, it was very surreal, because it wasn't noisy. It was very quiet. And I've told many folks this as we're walking the blocks to the actual site, we went past businesses and restaurants and one image in particular sticks out. We walked past this, obviously very nice restaurant they had the linens on the table, the crystal is on the table, all the plates, all the silverware on the table, but it's dead silent. I mean, it's literally like walking through a ghost town. There's white powder, dust everywhere, just coating, it looked like snow, you're walking in snow."
Lane spent the next month in Staten Island at a landfill that had been closed down, facing a different danger.
"We were sent day two and the rest of our tour to Fresh Kills landfill, but because of the necessity, they opened it up and, you know, expressed concerns to us about, hey, this may be a dangerous place," Lane said. "We had to kit up, wore respirators, wore goggles gloves, trying to protect ourselves. And sadly, it didn't offer full protection, because we've had a number of folks, not only in the FBI, but in the first responder community that are suffering illness, different kinds of cancer or different kinds of respiratory disease. So far, I've been real lucky. I've not experienced any of that."
The work they were called to do, almost unimaginable for us, but a calling for these men and women who serve their country, not just at home in East Texas, but wherever they're needed.
"We would go through all the material. Our primary responsibility was looking for human remains, trying to recover, you know, the victims so we could provide something back to their families. And then, there were some other classified issues that we were addressing as well," Lane explained.
More than 2,700 people were killed in the New York attack.
"That's the reason you're there, you're hoping you're doing something for the greater good, you're hoping you're going to be able to provide something back to the families. You know, so they can get some closure. And, you know, the FBI and a lot of other agencies, you know, medical examiner's offices, we're doing yeoman's work, because they were taking what was found, and then they would do the DNA and the matches, and be able to say, okay, we found your loved one. You know, it's it's, they're not just missing, you know, we found them we know what happened to them," Lane said.
So many families shattered and a nation in mourning for all the lives lost and the sense of security that was stolen that day.
"As an FBI agent, is that something that you can process emotionally? Or is that just something you have to distance yourself from?" asked Dana Hughey.
Lane explained, "God gave me a gift. I picked up a lot of human remains in my career. And again, I was a banker. I wasn't trained to pick up, you know, bodies. But God gave me a gift, that I'm able to take that and compartmentalize it and do what needs to be done. And with rare exception, I don't carry that with me. You know, part of that is I had seven really great partners. There were seven other FBI agents from the Dallas division who I knew and had worked with in the past, we were all members of the evidence response team being able to, you know, talk to each other about what we were encountering."
For Lane, his work in New York was just the beginning. Our nation's war on terror took him to Iraq in 2004 and to Afghanistan several times after that helping to track down anyone who wanted to hurt Americans.
"So Ground Zero was just the beginning. Hoping we were doing the right thing and protecting my wife, my daughters, my neighbors, their children.
Speaking of his family, Lane said his support system, his wife, who took care of his children while he was away. That's what allowed him to proudly serve his country on so many missions, always with the goal of making America a safer place for all of us.
