In the autumn of 2001, it felt like the whole world had spun off its axis.
In the autumn of 2001, it felt like the whole world had spun off its axis.
K id, the thing that none of the documentaries will show you was how that morning, after the first reports, nobody knew anything.
CNN had reported about a fire on the National Mall, which turned out to be people seeing smoke from the Pentagon and not understanding what they were seeing. There were rumors of a car bomb at the State Department building, a bomb at the U.S. Capitol building, and one at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. “The USA Today building in Rosslyn was supposedly enveloped in smoke,” per one report. You name the Washington landmark, chances were somebody had heard it had been hit.
It felt like the whole world had spun off its axis.
Way fewer people had cellphones back then, and the phone lines quickly got overwhelmed that day. Just about everyone on the East Coast was calling at the same time on landlines, trying to reach and check on their loved ones. Blogs took off that day and afterward, because a lot of the major news websites were down from overwhelming traffic.
Once you’ve heard the words said aloud, “The World Trade Center has been destroyed,” you really don’t feel like you have any idea of what’s impossible or unthinkable anymore, or what’s going to happen next. Suicide bombers? Chemical weapons? Some nuke hidden in the trunk of some car?
Trying to figure out what was going on with that supposed fire on the Mall that morning, I walked from the National Press Building down to the Tidal Basin, seeing what was clearly the smoke from the Pentagon. Then I tried to get back to the office — we used desktop computers back then, kid, so most of us couldn’t just set up with a laptop — and kept getting diverted as the cops were shutting down streets. The federal government, recognizing that just about any federal building could be the next target, decided to evacuate all federal buildings. Have you ever seen about 280,000 federal workers all trying to get home at the same time? No, you haven’t, because they only tried it once and it didn’t go well. Every street was snarled in every direction. The Metro was shut down — memories of Tokyo and Aum Shinrikyo, I figure — so for me, living a bit south of Dupont Circle, walking home was the only option.
Everybody on the street was in the same emotional state — shock, grief, disbelief. Guys took out boom boxes and turned up the sound on news radio so folks on the street could hear the updates.
The other thing that seems to have been largely forgotten is that we started getting the anthrax mailings right after. Just as we’re all reeling from something that seemed out of some dark climax of a Tom Clancy novel, suddenly we’re in a Robin Cook thriller, where just opening your mail can infect you with killer bacteria. Two postal workers got killed from inhaling it, just doing their jobs. The danger came in the most mundane and common form, white powder. If you spilled a packet of Sweet’N Low in a public place, everybody would get nervous a few minutes later.
Again, kid, it was like the world stopped making sense; impossible things were happening, and you never knew where the danger was going to come from next. Between all this, you’re hearing all kinds of rumors: “They arrested some Arab guy with a big backpack with wires coming out of it,” that sort of thing. You’re hearing stories like, “Some guys from Saudi Arabia went to a flight school and wanted to learn how to fly a plane but said they didn’t have to learn how to land.” Apparently, that was an exaggeration, but the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service notified a Venice, Fla., flight school that Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi had been approved for student visas . . . six months after the attacks.
It’s still amazing that there was no real connection between al-Qaeda and the anthrax mailings, which were carried out by some nutjob scientist who was convinced he was helping expose our weaknesses by mailing stuff that killed people. Ever since then, sending some white powder in the mail has turned into the go-to move for every maniac who wants to scare people. Between 9/11 and 2008, Postal Service and law enforcement officials responded to thousands of hoaxes involving white powder sent through the mail.
Almost nobody remembers American Airlines Flight 587, either. That one wasn’t terrorism, just a godawful coincidence. Here we are, two months after 9/11, almost to the day, and out of nowhere, a passenger airliner flying from John F. Kennedy International Airport to the Dominican Republic crashes shortly after takeoff into Queens — killing everybody on board and five on the ground. When people saw the news, everyone thought the same thing — somehow, some way, despite all the security and the precautions, they did it again. Turned out it was the first officer making some mistake with the pedals, and the vertical stabilizer and rudder splitting off. No al-Qaeda, no deliberate act of terror.
The next time al-Qaeda took a shot at us, it was clear they had used up all their best guys. Richard Reid, the “shoe-nibomber,” was this idiot who tried to blow up a homemade bomb in his shoes. We spent about two decades taking off our shoes in airport security lines thanks to that moron.
You kids born later, you’ve seen some troubles. The Great Recession. Covid. Way too many mass shootings. But thankfully, you’ve never experienced anything like autumn of 2001, where you turned on the television news and wondered what terrible thing had happened since you last tuned in. “Doomscrolling” hadn’t been invented yet, but we had the dread of the CNN “Breaking News” chyron and sound. If they were interrupting regular coverage, it meant something unexpected had happened, almost certainly bad news.
Still, looking back on that day 25 years ago, there was that silver lining of just about everybody putting their American flags out. That was the “united” part of that time. For all we knew, we were all the next target, together. Al-Qaeda didn’t give a damn about what color your skin was, or what nationality you were, or, when it came down to it, even what religion you were. We weren’t like them, so they wanted to kill us. It made all our differences look small.
I’m not so sure we’d react the same way today, if, God forbid, someone hit us like that again.