OT - 25 years ago today | Syracusefan.com

OT - 25 years ago today

Amazing that 25 years have passed already...

At the risk of diverting your thread, I just started reading the Mitch Rapp series of books by Vince Flynn. Rapp is an off the books CIA counter terrorism operative who is trained to go after and assassinate terrorists. The character Rapp is supposedly a former SU lacrosse All American who is motivated by the loss of his girl friend who was on the Pan Am flight. Flynn died earlier this year. It would seem that he must have had a connection to SU, but I haven't been able to figure it out.
 
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One of my father's students was in that study group and on the plane. Surreal and sad day.
 
i went to the hoop game that night. very sad.

that, and the pending war, are why i never did a semester in europe.

had always planned on doing it, but cant really say its a regret because i remember even being a lil scared to fly out of the country for spring break.

a bottle of tequila in the airport cured that, but still.
 
I remember the hoop game that night as well. Very somber in the dome. Cant believe its been 25 years.
I was a freshman and finished my last final that morning. Was looking forward to going to the game and then home for Christmas. Felt very weird at the game, sort of surreal like at the UCONN game when the first Iraq war broke out.
 
Amazing that 25 years have passed already...

At the risk of diverting your thread, I just started reading the Mitch Rapp series of books by Vince Flynn. Rapp is an off the books CIA counter terrorism operative who is trained to go after and assassinate terrorists. The character Rapp is supposedly a former SU lacrosse All American who is motivated by the loss of his girl friend who was on the Pan Am flight. Flynn died earlier this year. It would seem that he must have had a connection to SU, but I haven't been able to figure it out.
I have read most of his books. I loved them and wish they would make some movies out of them. He has no direct connection to Syracuse University. He said in an interview that he graduated from college the year before the Pan Am. incident. In the process of defining the character for Mitch Rapp and what would make someone become a trained assassin , he came up with the concept of making Mitch a Syracuse grad. who loss his fiance in the Pan. Am. bombing.

Actually Olympus has fallen which is an attack on the White House is the theme of one of his books with the difference being that in the movie the terrorists are North Koreans while in his book they are Islamic fundamentalists.
 
I have a bizarre (in retrospect, embarrassing) initial memory of Pan Am 103. I was in the communications department at GE, one of the three major jet engine manufacturers. At the time, there had been several major plane crashes, and the engine manufacturer was always initially blamed for them (causing a huge amount of work for us). Therefore, my first task after any crash -- while the media was already calling -- was to determine whose engines were on the plane,. As soon as we determined it was a 747-121, we knew they were not GE engines. Shortly thereafter, the enormity of the tragedy became apparent (terrorism). And it was another day before I learned of all the SU students on the plane.

As I said at the outset, this is an embarrassing story, but it is reflective of how we sometimes live in our own little worlds... and see things through our own little prisms.
 
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I was a freshman and finished my last final that morning. Was looking forward to going to the game and then home for Christmas. Felt very weird at the game, sort of surreal like at the UCONN game when the first Iraq war broke out.
I was at both games as well. It was almost like looking at the game from some far removed location. SU students in one situation and our son in the other.
 

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