I was working on a flyer for the Ohio Aviation Association's fall conference, my cubicle drenched in light from that morning's blue-crystal sky everyone remembers when Germaine, our secretary — now deceased, God bless her soul — walked up to me from her desk. She never had and I don't believe ever did again.
"Did you just hear?"
"About what?"
"About the plane. On the radio. A plane hit the World Trade Center." Germaine always kept the local National Public Radio station playing softly. In those days before I turned to the internet for my news, I didn't have any reason for Internet Explorer to be running. I tried loading my home page — the Fox News website — and failed. What could the server load have been like?
"What kind of plane?" I asked. I was incredulous about the prospect altogether. What kind of plane? — Germaine didn't know. She went back to her desk, turning the volume dial on her radio a bit.
I will remember that moment — that time, gone forever — before I could wrap my mind around what we would all learn had happened. As Germaine relayed what she heard I made a steady descent into the impossible, each layer of disbelief peeled back to leave a grisly, naked horror, knives for teeth, grinning at me. I began with the scene that could fit in my mind. A small plane, of course. No? A — a prop plane, an airlink. Small. Not a jet. A jet? No. Yes. It couldn't have had passengers — men, women, dear God, no, not children — in it. It must have been a cargo plane. Or empty. I just couldn't believe it. All those people.
Fox News finally popped onto my screen and I saw the wounded North Tower for the first time.
I don't remember how quickly news came after nine o'clock that the second jet had hit. Germaine must have announced it, shattering any illusion of accident. If I concentrate, that moment of realization of America under attack comes back. But it's fleeting, so much have I changed since then. As Matt Drudge demanded, "who did this?" Unable to work, I fidgeted about the office in a dull shock.
Then the shock turned, on a dime, to fear. A third jet had hit the Pentagon; someone had reported a car bomb at the State Department. The attacks were well-coordinated, succeeding in terrorism's aim to make every man believe himself a painted target. In the rush to ground aircraft, several planes were reported nonresponsive, one of them heading towards Cleveland. For a moment, I believed it. Who and what was next? After the flash of terror, frustration came like a wave and I paced, praying, trying to comprehend the change of times that was upon us all.
It seems incredible now, but when the news came of first the South and then the North Tower collapsing, it was without details or images, and I again clung to the fathomable: surely the towers wouldn't simply fall. Today I strain to reassemble the concept of skyscrapers tumbling into city streets as absurd, apocalyptic science fiction — not a ghastly rent in downtown Manhattan that as a memory now settles, quietly and dangerously, into triviality. When I arrived at my parents' house for lunch — after a surreal drive through a beautiful, fall day in Ohio — I turned on the television and watched each tower disappear into thick, billowing clouds. Over and over the footage played, each run as unbelievable as the first.
The rest of the day I remember as an unending stream of news — radio, internet, television. The president had spoken; brief, defiant and prescient. Every nation — but Saddam Hussein's Iraq — had extended official condolences. Suspicion quickly centered al Qaeda and their host state of Afghanistan. That night the new world mingled with old. When CNN's Kabul feed depicted fires in the sullen city, word went out that the United States may have already begun to act — just as it had for eight years, firing missiles from afar with indeterminate results in stories that would soon slide off the newspaper pages. In those final hours of the day of September 11, 2001 some might have concluded that after a showy display of ballistics life would return to normal; Afghans would remain under Islamist oppression and Americans would ease back to the slow suffocation of complacent self-indulgence.
Today, Kabul is a capital on the verge of the first free and open election in its history. Baghdad is no longer the seat of the Near East's most mechanically cruel dictatorship but instead the region's greatest hope, the capital for a people defying the lethal vermin swarming from the rotten corpse that once was 20th-Century Arab Socialism.
Today, Americans are invited again to believe in the unfinished struggle against tyranny; and the power of freedom to defeat the enemy and bring peace.
From today's American Minute:
Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended, spoke President Bush on September 11, 2001, after the most devastating terrorist attack upon America. Islamic radicals hijacked three passenger jets, flying two into New York's World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. Another crashed in Pennsylvania.That evening President Bush addressed the nation: "Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. Pictures of planes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger... America was targeted...because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. ... I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve... And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are with me."
A dedication, a remembrance, an accounting for the weary heart; for we have much to do.