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Notes -
The view from a quarter century later...
It's 8 o'clock on a Tuesday and I am just starting my shift. Ordinarily the TVs on display for sale would be playing a demo-loop fed from a DvD-player behind the counter but this morning they're tuned to CBS. A small crowd has gathered to watch as Tower 1 burns. I'm supposed to be answering questions, and trying to upsell people on the company's membership discount program and extended warranty plans but my heart's not in it. I watch the second plane hit live. I remember the collective gasp, and the horrified silence that followed. Then like Colonel Kurtz's diamond bullet it strikes me. This is no mistake. This is a deliberate act. An act of courage, an act of perfect crystalline Will.
100s of people dead in an instant because somebody made a choice. By the end of the day that count would be in the thousands. I would later find out that a friend of mine had lost an entire branch of their family tree in that fireball. An Aunt, an Uncle, two young cousins, and a dog all reduced to ash in the impact of United Flight 175 with Tower 2's southern face.
As the morning progresses there are rumors of other hijackings. Over a dozen planes are unaccounted for or not responding to ATC. There is rampant speculation about what target will be hit next. The President is in the air, and National Guard jets are being scrambled. The rest of my shift passes in a blur, but certain images remain seared into my brain.
Under my initial reaction of rage and helplessness something simultaneously imperceptible and momentous has shifted. It's cliche to say that 9/11 was the death of innocence for a generation but there is a truth to it. Things that had been mere abstract concepts to me when I woke up that morning, "Free Will", "Horror", "Heroism", "Good", "Evil", "Civilization", and "Civilization's Enemies", were suddenly real, immediate, and vital to me in a way that they hadn't been 24 hours previously. I can look back on my life today and say with confidence that, philosophically, the Charlie that woke up on the morning of September 12th 2001, was a fundamentally different person from the one who had gone to bed on September 10th.
In the interests of full disclosure I am tempted to turn this post into a rant about how politics and war are downstream of culture, and to wax philosophical about 9/11 as an act of theater, but I also feel like doing so would cheapen the moment, and be disrespectful to those who died 25 years ago today.
So instead I will ask, where were you on the day they wounded New York?
I was in grade school, in rural Alabama. We were put in the library and then a TV was wheeled in and turned on, showing the two towers burning. I was good friends with a pair of twin boys. I don't remember which was in the room with me, but he was crying. Both brothers wound up doing tours in Afghanistan 10+ years later. I could talk about how insane the Courtesy of the Red White and Blue era was, from 9/11 to invading Iraq, but when I think of 9/11 I think of the veterans.
Mercifully, most of the guys I know who spent time in the sandbox made it out more or less alright. But then there was Zach. Zach was a coworker of mine at a pizza place circa 2010. I didn't know him super well, only knew that he'd had a five alarm meltdown over a minor fender bender on the job and that was the last I saw of him. Another driver I was closer with explained: They'd grown up together, done Boy Scouts together, and so on. Apparently he'd done two tours in Iraq. The first was a cakewalk. The second was Fallujah, and he'd survived in body but not in spirit, lost his best friend in rather graphic fashion (The driver who told me this, an Air Force brat who'd been kept out of the service by a bad back, used to drive me nuts in how he'd get guys fired up to tell their war stories but not really listen to them.).
The last I heard Zach was on drugs and in and out of jail. I have no idea what happened to him. I hope that he's found peace, in this life or the next.
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