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We are forever changed

BY STEVE WICK | Newsday Staff Writer

As night arrived gracefully on July 17, 1996, the sky over Long Island held on to the last light of a summer day.

The evening air was warm, with barely a southwest breeze off the ocean, and the sky was clear. Families and friends savored a classic midsummer evening, strolling on South Shore beaches, surfing ocean waves and crisscrossing the Great South Bay in pleasure boats. Even as the sun sank low in the sky, they refused to let go of the day.

Then, at 8:31, out there, over the ocean, a bright light and a distant boom.

"Look!" shouted a man enjoying the evening with his wife and two boys on the family boat in the Connetquot River in Oakdale. "Fireworks!"

Peering out to sea, scores of people all along the South Shore saw a fireball over the ocean. Many reported seeing a streak of light -- "resembling a flare" -- moving upward in the sky in the split second before the fireball, which seemed to split into two fireballs as it fell toward the water.

"We just saw an explosion up ahead of us here . . . about 16,000 feet or something like that, it just went down into the water," reported the captain of Eastwind Airlines Flight 507, on a southwest heading near the South Fork, to an air traffic control center in Boston.

What so many had heard or witnessed was the explosion of TWA Flight 800, en route from New York to Paris, south of Moriches, killing 230 passengers and crew. A map assembled later by the National Transportation Safety Board shows that people across the length of the South Shore were witnesses, with the largest numbers clustered along the shorelines of Islip and Brookhaven towns.

Passengers on boats far to the north, in Long Island Sound, reported seeing flashes of bright light, as did people living on the Connecticut shoreline.

Flying below and to the west of Flight 800, a helicopter crew on a training run out of the New York Air National Guard base in Westhampton Beach saw an image of hell -- first the explosion, then debris and bodies falling through a column of spiraling smoke.

On a summer night on Long Island, when you could be forgiven for thinking there was no better place to be on such an evening, fear and horror and tremendous grief arrived. When law enforcement officials at news conferences spoke of terrorism, that perhaps a bomb had brought Flight 800 down, what was frightening and unpredictable about the world was suddenly here. You put people you love on a flight to Paris and wish them well, call when you get in, please, so I know you're OK and then they are gone.

There was precedent for this fear.

Fifteen months before, April 19, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed in a terrorist bombing, killing 168 people. Two years before that, on Feb. 26, 1993, a car bomb detonated in the garage of the World Trade Center killed six and injured more than 1,000.

And just 10 days after Flight 800, on July 27, a pipe bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, as the city was joyously celebrating the summer Olympic Games, killing two and injuring more than 100.

As the explosion had been seen or heard by so many, so the rescue and recovery brought hundreds of people on fishing and pleasure boats to an area eight miles off the Moriches shoreline, where a swath of ocean, soaked in jet fuel, burned. From afar, the flames floating atop a mirror-flat sea looked like a city ablaze.

A debris field floated across a wide area -- large sections of fuselage, seat cushions, insulation, along with luggage with name tags intact, children's toys -- an empty baby bottle -- plastic makeup kits, purses, clothes, shoes, books and magazines.

And the bodies, some floating on the water, others tangled up in the debris, and still others strapped into seats.

Hoping to find someone alive, boat owners retrieved the bodies, laying them out carefully on their decks. When they could carry no more, they turned toward shore, transporting them to a makeshift morgue in Moriches, where a Catholic priest, Monsignor James McDonald, prayed over the dead, commending them to the mercy of God.

Ten years later, the night is still fresh in McDonald's memory.

"In my own mind, there was an overwhelming sense of tragedy and heartbreak ... [You had] the sense that you were in the center of an event that would change you for the rest of your life, in the sense that I had never experienced such a colossal tragedy."

When talk of mechanical failure replaced bomb speculation, the destruction of Flight 800 and all the lives lost became a tragic accident.

For the people on the recovery boats, for the Coast Guardsmen who pulled bodies from the sea and retrieved debris, the day no one wanted to end evolved into the night that wouldn't end. Some Guardsmen, overcome with the horror and grief, wept at the Moriches dock where they tied up.

Five years later, on a clear, late-summer morning, Sept. 11, 2001, came another colossal tragedy, this one an act of mass murder committed by terrorists. There are memorials to those who died that day in many Long Island communities, some as far east as Riverhead.

On the beach at Smith Point County Park is a monument with the names of the 230 passengers and crew from Flight 800. Today and tomorrow, family members of those who lost their lives will stand on this and other nearby beaches, their feet in the water -- to just be there, and with each other, and to remember all that they lost that summer night.