9/11 Changed Everything

14 years ago, the living was easy. Erica and I had been together for ten sweet months and we were living in a beautiful beach house in Malibu. She was producing my top-rated CNBC show "Rivera Live," which was broadcast every other week from the West Coast and I was balancing the thrill of our still new relationship with the responsibility for my four children, especially my two young daughters back in New York.
The world changed with a frantic 6am phone call from my longtime friend and producer Greg Hart urging me to turn on the television.
Seeing the Twin Towers assailed generated feelings akin to panic and rage. Although my girls lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, several miles from the atrocity unfolding downtown, I was desperate to speak with them and be with them and for hours was unable to do either.
Thousands were dead, injured or disrupted, telephone communications were crippled, school children were being sent home and all New York airports were closed, making it impossible to get back to the stricken island at the center of the world. 
It would take me days, and by the time I got there, while relieved to be reunited with my children I was enraged at what the terrorists had done to my town.
Traumatized and outraged by what the criminals had done to New York, within weeks I quit the CNBC show and accepted a job as senior war correspondent for rival upstart Fox News. By mid-November, I was in Tora Bora Afghanistan chronicling America's efforts to track down and hold responsible the mass murderers who killed so many of our friends and disrupted so many lives. The idle days of Malibu was a distant memory never to be renewed.
For more than the next decade, I emphasized reporting on our brave Armed Forces and the righteous war against Al Qaeda. 
9/11 changed everything.