Remember 9/12, Too

L et’s remember 9/12 as well. There were three things that swept over you through the day: Fear, Grief, and Fury.

Fear. Surely this wasn’t a one-off. Islamic terror cells would be activated and rise up board-stiff like Nosferatu coming out of a coffin and do very bad things. Dumping sacks of anthrax into the ventilation system at the shopping malls. Driving trucks into schools. Suicide nail-bombs in Times Square. This was such an elevation of the usual miserable jihadi activity that it felt like war would soon be everywhere, right? No place was safe. You sent your child off to school on the bus and tried not to imagine some guy at the garage wiring C-4 to all the axles. Why not? What would stop them? Morals? Shame?

It wouldn’t happen, but you didn’t know that. The audacity and scale of 9/11 made it seem as if the country had been struck by forces whose sophistication and abilities were leagues beyond what we’d seen before. Some fools driving a boat to hit the Cole: low tech. Beardy bastards blowing up a truck in the World Trade Center parking garage: bush league. Turning our own planes against us and bringing down two towers was like spending ten years fighting guys who shot blowdarts from horseback, then discovering they suddenly had invisible death-rays shot from levitating tanks. Of course we were afraid.

Grief. The raw grave of Ground Zero was on the TV constantly, and it seemed like the death of everything you thought was solid and safe. You might dip into the internet now and then, but mostly you watched TV, girding for more bad news. They replayed the previous day’s catastrophe, and every time the towers came down, it seemed worse than the last time. Stories came out from those who survived. Stories were told of those who didn’t. Pictures of the towers still standing seemed like images from a strong and confident world, serenely self-possessed, now walled off for good.

Fury. Not everyone was mad. Right away, the usual scolds flooded message boards — the social media of the day — to caution against overreaction, to remind us that we had sinned against the world, and this was a time for self-reflection. Ever wondered why they hate us? The flame-America-first cohort was already looking at flying flags and getting the cringey ick, as we might say today. That was to be expected. Even to this day, if you tell a leftist to say “9/11 was bad” without adding “but,” it’s like giving somebody shave-and-a-haircut without the “two bits.” They squirm in the discomfort of incompleteness.

On the other side, though, quiet grim resolve. End this. On 9/12, you wondered what was coming, and maybe you thought: all of it. All of it is coming. B-52s over Tehran in 24 hours, surely. Saddam’s house goes up. MOABs generously distributed over Afghanistan. Basically, anyone who cheered on 9/11 gets the business. All scores settled. No more dropping expensive ordnance on tents or sending in a Tomahawk to blow up an aspirin factory. No more sending a message. Oh, sure, maybe Iran wasn’t specifically involved, but if one head of the Hydra bites you, whack ’em all off to make sure it doesn’t happen again. After Pearl Harbor, what did we do? Send in the Doolittle Raid, then call it a day?

The fear would fade. Grief and fury remain. For those of us who remember 9/11 and the days that followed, it all comes back undimmed when again you watch the towers fall.