9/12

September 11, 2021

We all have our “where were you” stories. We repeat them at this time every year. I planned to go to the Pentagon for an afternoon meeting on 9/11. When I saw the news about 9:30 AM I settled in front of the TV. Sandy called, the kids called, a niece called. Like millions, I watched the news nonstop for the next three days.

A week later, people with Pentagon building passes were permitted access. I went inside. The South Parking wing was sealed off with plastic sheeting, but the acrid smell of burnt sheet rock and metal singed the skin.

That same week the financial markets reopened in New York. I took an Amtrak to visit a friend at his Wall Street office. From northern New Jersey, miles from Manhattan, I could see from the train windows the thin dark column of smoke rising from the Twin Towers site. Downtown streets still were closed to traffic, but pedestrians could get through. Police officers were everywhere.

It had rained the night of 9/11, the millions of tons of concrete dust and pulverized glass and metal had congealed and coated the streets, sidewalks, buildings, and windows. From a distance of a few blocks I saw the ghastly tangle of girders pointing crookedly at the sky, construction equipment pushing and lifting chunks of concrete, the hard-hatted rescue personnel at work. As at the Pentagon, the smell of burnt building material was overwhelming.

Because the subway wasn’t operating I had to walk a couple of dozen blocks back to Penn Station. I passed Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village (where I was born many years earlier), which was initially used as a triage center for victims. Hundreds of photos of missing persons had been taped to the sides of the building by people seeking news about missing relatives. They crowded forward to study the photos, some still were posting them. Some were in tears. I caught a late train back to Washington.

On September 14, President Bush had visited the Twin Towers site. Surrounded by cheering rescue workers, he yelled into a bullhorn, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.”

That was America’s September 2001, and the first day of a twenty-years-long search for vengeance. Within weeks CIA and Special Forces operatives deployed to Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two weeks ago America departed. 

One evening last week the sunset in this corner of South Carolina cast a wide arc of pale orange, rimmed by black clouds.  Darkness is rushing in, soon bringing autumn chill. We walked around the block. We didn’t say much. I looked up, the dark sky summoned for me once again the 9/11 memories, now two decades past.

Tomorrow we start Year 21. Time after all is relentless. What will it mean? To the families of the victims very little, because for them time stands still. Their loved ones are lost now as they were lost on 9/12/01. Bodies were found in the debris of the Towers and the Pentagon in following days, but the reality of massive loss of life was recognized by the evening of 9/11. Two hundred sixty-five victims were aboard the four planes.

All of us, from those who were young, teenagers, even pre-teens at the time and everyone older, know what happened that day. Many don’t understand why. The 9-11 Commission Report, released in 2004, offered extensive analysis of the chronic social dislocations of the Middle East: poverty, violence, and religious extremism, which, it ventures to say, gave birth to hatred of the West, principally the United States, and the incubation of Muslim terror movements.

We understand now that in twenty years in Afghanistan the United States changed nothing. In the final week, in the chaos of Kabul, 13 servicemen and women and nearly 200 Afghanis were murdered by a suicide bomber. This is the world we live in today. 

But once again, time is relentless. Garrett Graff, who wrote The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, points out that a generation of Americans now is growing up who don’t remember what America was like before 9/11. But then we saw the same distancing from history after the Cold War, after Vietnam, after the Sixties, after Korea. And so on. The generations that lived through those lacerating traumas carry them forward for the balance of their lives. Their children and grandchildren may listen respectfully. But whether they do or not, they move forward.

The children are looking at the world they will live in, the world that will be theirs to create, after the oldtimers are gone. And we oldsters know that’s how all of history unfolds. We recoil at the horror, the tragedy. Then we confront it. We build the proper memorials and honor the victims—we honor them always, privately in our prayers, and publicly in their time. For the victims of the Towers, the Pentagon, the four aircraft, that is September 11.

The three major memorial sites have been completed. The memorial in the field in Stonycreek Township in western Pennsylvania honors the victims, some call them the warriors, of United Flight 93, which had been turned from its course to San Francisco to hit either the White House or the Capitol. The aircraft was crashed there by the hijacker-pilot as a group of passengers fought back and, according to the Commission, may have killed at least one of the four hijackers. After the crash Vice President Cheney is reported to have said one memorable thing: “I think an act of heroism took place on that plane.”

We can be sure of that. That heroism is to be honored once again on September 11, 2022. We can be sure also that 9/11/01 will lose its raw edge, which is as it should be. The children of the last two decades will move forward and, we hope, learn the right lessons: meet tragedy with dignity, not vengeance, prudence, not warmongering. The nightmare of 9/11, which became the nightmare of Afghanistan, still haunts us. Time to learn.