“Where was God on the morning of 9/11?” a CNN reporter asked Gen. Charlie Baldwin in his office not long after the terrorist attacks.
“It wasn’t something I had to make up. It was obvious to me that he was present in the midst of the terror. He revealed himself through the angels of mercy who were present,” Baldwin recalled.
For starters, his own life had been spared. Going to the Pentagon was not a normal part of Baldwin’s daily routine. Based at nearby Bolling Air Force base, Baldwin came to the Pentagon that morning to attend his first senior staff meeting as the new deputy chief of chaplains for the Air Force.
“That meeting started at 9 o’clock,” Baldwin said. “We were about 20 minutes into the daily slide briefing, when someone interrupted. We watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center Tower on TV,” he recalled. Shocked, they immediately adjourned.
“I had a 10 o’clock meeting on [the] other side of the Pentagon,” Baldwin said, “but stopped to get a latte in a cafeteria,” which is where he was when a guard told him to evacuate.
“So we exited the building,” Baldwin remembered. “That’s when we saw the huge fireball on the other side of the Pentagon.”
Baldwin then realized that his 10 o’clock meeting was located at the site of the black billowing smoke. Had he not stopped to get a latte, he would have been in the wedge that was hit.
He also saw that God had provided an extra number of chaplains to be at the Pentagon that day. “Normally there are probably five or six chaplains in the Pentagon on an average day,” Baldwin explained. “But that particular day, September 11, 2001, it was really an amazing thing. There were about 35 chaplains in the building.”