To people who saw the towers fall, the date of 9/11/01 is a dividing line in our sense of ourselves and the world.
We can’t let the truth of that day be forgotten.
I ’ve never written about my memories of 9/11 because what I experienced does not compare to the tragedy so many other people suffered through that day. I was living far away from New York City and Washington, D.C.; I didn’t narrowly escape death. I didn’t know anyone who was killed. What I experienced was probably what most other Americans felt.
But 25 years on, with more than 100 million in America born after the terror attacks, our collective memory has faded. If people on social media can be ignorant enough to suggest that maybe Osama bin Laden was onto something, and politicians can court the support of an ignoramus who once said “America deserved 9/11,” it’s incumbent on more of us to describe our experiences, to explain how that day shaped our understanding of the world.
I was a grad student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A friend called me, told me to turn on the television — something was going on in New York. I went to my living room and turned on the set I was borrowing, a tiny thing that got two channels. One was CBS, where Bryant Gumbel, confused but poised, was interviewing eyewitnesses. When you see the footage today, it’s remarkable how little anyone knew. The plane was small, one person calling in to CBS said, probably a prop plane. No, said another, it was a commercial jet. Later, as smoke billowed from both towers, Gumbel mistook helicopters for more hijacked planes. Realizing his mistake, he explained he was “gun shy.” On the local Washington, D.C., stations, anchors announced that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department. (They quickly corrected that.) Nobody was sure what we were seeing; whatever it was, we couldn’t believe it.
I suspect the emotions I felt that morning were pretty common: confusion, disbelief, fear. Seeing the planes hit the towers was one thing. The towers disintegrating into dark gray clouds provoked a sadness unlike any I had known. That sadness is the feeling I remember most from the next few days. Anger would come later, when the plot and people behind it came into focus.
That afternoon I walked the mile from my apartment to campus. I passed a couple of friends walking the other way. We didn’t say anything to each other. What was there to say? We exchanged expressions of disbelief and commiseration as we kept walking. In class, my professor began with a moment of silence for those people who were killed “for simply going to work.” I had always admired that professor for his clarity, and while other professors would later call the victims “little Eichmanns,” his direct description of why those innocent men and women were murdered still obtains.
Later in the day, I told a friend something like, “Nothing will ever be the same.” That was obvious enough. I didn’t know what would change, or how.
In the days and weeks that followed, Americans were united and resilient, but also afraid and fragile. The most basic things could make me tear up: the image on television of an American flag set against a black screen would do the trick. This was my sadness giving way to pride in my country and its people.
Soon after the attacks, letters laced with anthrax killed five Americans, and there was fear that this was part of another wave from foreign terrorists. (It wasn’t.) Even in Madison, half the continent away from Ground Zero and the Pentagon, these mailings shook people, and there were several reports of suspicious substances arriving in the mail. According to the UW–Madison student paper, “the fear was enough to evacuate buildings, close off an entire downtown block and call out the Madison Hazardous Incident Team.” During a creative writing seminar, my professor tried unsuccessfully to get us writing and talking about the attacks. Perhaps we saw the class as a refuge from that topic; maybe we just didn’t know where to start.
To people who saw the towers fall, the very date of 9/11/01 is a dividing line in our sense of ourselves and the world, a boundary separating a life before witnessing unimaginable terror and the sadder but wiser life that followed. Looking at class rosters or résumés and seeing that students or job applicants didn’t live through that day is to know that the person will probably never experience the shock we did, never have his or her understanding of the world so dramatically overturned in the same public, communal way. It’s something like generational snobbishness, but it should also remind us of how quickly our time passes and why we need to share our stories. We can’t let the truth of that day be forgotten.
A few days after the attacks, I was playing soccer with other grad students on a field near the airport. We all stopped and looked skyward when something otherwise unremarkable happened: an airplane flew overhead. One of the first we’d seen in days, it marked a return to normal. But nothing would be the same. We now knew just how fragile the civilized world is. We saw that barbarism is always eager to destroy it.