29 years ago today Pan Am 103 was brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland.
A few things make it personal for me.
One is that it happened a day before my 14th birthday.
Another was I met up with this really pretty girl that day…ended up marrying her!
Lastly is that there were 35 Syracuse University students on that plane coming home for the holidays. SU is local to me.
NYH1.
I remember reading the list of victims in the NYT, and being startled to recognize the name of one of them. He was an attorney with the DOJ’s Office of Special Investigations–the outfit looking into Nazi war criminals who had managed to fraudulently emigrate into the US after the war. I was slightly involved in one of his cases and so got to know him a bit. At the time of the crash he was headed back to Germany to work on additional new cases.
It was sort of a Twilight Zone moment.
Every year at this time they hold a big vigil/memorial up on the SU campus. They have a nice monument with the victims names on it. The news stations cover it pretty good. We’ll never forget.
NYH1.
Pan Am 103 demonstrates everything that’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy. We effed around with Gaddafi for 30 years before we decided pile on at the last minute when it wouldn’t look like it was just American imperialism. Should’ve just gone for the jugular after 103 when we didn’t give a crap about world opinion.
That was a bad one alright. Very sad.
Yep, 29 years ago at the age of 14 I developed hatred for a certain group of people that hasn’t dwindled one bit.
NYH1.