Sunday, September 07, 2003
The second anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001 is approaching. And obviously I’ve been doing some thinking on the subject. Spent a bit of time looking over the Voices project at A Small Victory. Go read it. It is important. And Michele’s worked hard on it – especially considering that it seems to be ripping her heart out.
When I look back I’m forced to curiously examine my own reactions. I seem to have experienced some kind of slow rolling emotional thunder. On That Day I reacted as most others must have, watching it unfold on the TV. I got a phone call from my mom that morning, telling me to turn on the news (which put me in an ominous mood – the last such alert from her was in January, 1986). It was a few minutes after the first plane went in, and I was (apparently unlike many) immediately thinking terrorism, though desperately hoping it wasn’t.
I watched and listened to the commentary. I flipped around the channels, finally deciding on CNN, which, bizarrely, seemed to have the most serious coverage (FOX was in hype-mode, which I found distasteful). I was turned away when the second plane hit, but heard in the background the alarmed and confused reactions. I sat there, next to my wife, Judi, in stunned indecisiveness. I really didn’t know what to think – somehow I just couldn’t believe that this was happening. It was the most mentally vapor-locked moment of my life.
I sat/stood/ paced in that frame of mind for the next hour or so. When I started to think again I suddenly got it into my head that I had to get to work. I work for the Department of the Navy, but there wasn’t really anything I needed to do at that moment that would have had any immediate relevance. But I just needed to go.
So I started to get ready, leaving the TV on. My kids were in the front room, watching. I had tried to explain to them what they were seeing. My daughter, 12 at the time, understood. My son, then 8, understood as well… unfortunately. They both looked scared and I assured them that there was no immediate danger to them.
As I busied myself preparing to leave my son came to our bedroom door and said something. I couldn’t hear from in the bathroom so I asked him again what he’d said. He told me one of the buildings had fallen.
I became enraged. Not about the building, but at him. I had assumed that he was engaging in some kind of childish overreaction or exaggeration. I told him to stop lying. We had been talking about a half hour before about the number of people in each of the buildings (we’d heard that each had about 25,000, and that a substantial number of them were probably still inside). It was inconceivable to me that one of the towers had fallen. I saw the damage when the planes hit and assumed that if they had withstood the impact and resultant structural damage that the fire was the main concern. It never even occurred to me that one might fall.
Obviously, my son was right. I sat and stared at the screen for a some minutes, watching the replays, eyeing the other tower. Reports were coming in that a helicopter had crashed into the Pentagon, in an apparently unrelated accident – an assumption I did not trust. Other planes were unaccounted for.
I told Judi to keep the kids home from school.
As I went back to getting ready for work my son came to the bedroom door again. I didn’t disbelieve him this time.
My mind had finally started to function again as I drove in to work, listening to the radio. A deep feeling of rage was percolating behind my eyes, tinged with unreasoning fear. I always knew that the building in which I work was extremely vulnerable (inviting, even) to some kind of truck bomb (I work at a large naval facility in the area). But I’d never felt the prickly tingling of personal physical exposure to the Forces of Darkness before. That may sound stupid, but my building is one of the tallest in the city (not Seattle) and would make an awfully sweet target for some Islamofascist. And we were all being told that there were still planes up there that had not reported in (I can stand in back of my building and watch planes coming to and leaving from SEATAC all day long – almost directly overhead). I actually thought about turning the car around, but realized that my coworkers and friends would be there and I was not going to be away from them, in that place, at that time.
During the next few days I made a point of emotionally distancing myself from the personal tragedy of all those poor people. I was not going to feel that. Not then. Never, if I could help it.
Fast-forward one year. The first anniversary was here and I was at work (a major point of vulnerability of my office building had been corrected, BTW), listening to John Carlson on KVI radio. He was interviewing a woman who works there who had been in New York That Day. She was in a hotel across from the WTC in a room with her husband. They had awoken to the screeching whomp of the first plane. As Carlson interviewed her she described that she and her husband had pulled back the curtains to find that one of the towers was on fire. Her husband grabbed their video camera.
She was having a tough time telling Carlson about what she saw. She had watched people gathering at the broken windows in the upper floors of the WTC. She told of watching people going to the windows, backing away and coming back again. Then she said that she watched as two people, a man and a woman, held hands and jumped.
My stomached lurched. I had stopped typing as I was listening to her, the horror and pain in her voice. She told of more people. She had been close enough to see their faces. Made eye contact with some of them. Saw them hit.
I ripped my headphones off and stepped outside. I couldn’t get the images created by her words out of my mind. I had doggedly refused to view any video or images of people leaping to their deaths. I had always believed that it is wrong to view such things. A person’s death should be a private thing. I know it’s impossible for it to be private, given the circumstances, but I don’t have to be a participant in what I can only perceive as a person’s most humiliating moment. I can imagine those people seeing the watchers, and I would be angered that they were gawking at me, like an accident at the side of the road that induces that peculiar goulash curiosity that so many people exhibit. My last words would be, “stop looking at me, you bastards!”
I’ve always known that I do not have the emotional toughness to see people dying in such grim ways without empathizing way too much. Maybe that’s cowardice, and maybe I dress it up as moral superiority. I don’t know. But that day, one year removed, I found myself unable to keep the personal tragedies out of my head. They overwhelmed me. As I knew they would.
I watched the CBS special. I’d planned not to, for the same reasons stated above, but thought to myself that I needed to witness it to remember. Not that I had forgotten, but to touch again that sense of outrage, and to commemorate those people who were, now, the reason behind so much of my work.
I remember I got very drunk that night, which was stupid because it stripped away my last, carefully built defenses. I started to talk to Judi about the radio show that I’d heard earlier. I repeated the things the woman had said, feeling an irresistible rising tide of sorrow and anger. I wanted those terrorist motherfu*kers dead. Now. I immersed myself in what the thinking must have been for those poor people who stood with fire at their backs and a yawning abyss before them. What kind of human slime would intentionally torture people like that? What kind of contemptible simians would celebrate this in the streets? I raged ceaselessly that night.
I’m glad Judi loves me… nobody else would have tolerated such a display.
I can honestly say that the first anniversary was personally more painful than was That Day. I don’t know why that was, other than I had not allowed myself to “feel” some parts of it until I was taken by surprise by the radio interview. I hadn’t expected that woman’s story to take that direction, and by the time I’d pulled the headphones off it was already too late.
I am not looking forward to Thursday.
When I look back I’m forced to curiously examine my own reactions. I seem to have experienced some kind of slow rolling emotional thunder. On That Day I reacted as most others must have, watching it unfold on the TV. I got a phone call from my mom that morning, telling me to turn on the news (which put me in an ominous mood – the last such alert from her was in January, 1986). It was a few minutes after the first plane went in, and I was (apparently unlike many) immediately thinking terrorism, though desperately hoping it wasn’t.
I watched and listened to the commentary. I flipped around the channels, finally deciding on CNN, which, bizarrely, seemed to have the most serious coverage (FOX was in hype-mode, which I found distasteful). I was turned away when the second plane hit, but heard in the background the alarmed and confused reactions. I sat there, next to my wife, Judi, in stunned indecisiveness. I really didn’t know what to think – somehow I just couldn’t believe that this was happening. It was the most mentally vapor-locked moment of my life.
I sat/stood/ paced in that frame of mind for the next hour or so. When I started to think again I suddenly got it into my head that I had to get to work. I work for the Department of the Navy, but there wasn’t really anything I needed to do at that moment that would have had any immediate relevance. But I just needed to go.
So I started to get ready, leaving the TV on. My kids were in the front room, watching. I had tried to explain to them what they were seeing. My daughter, 12 at the time, understood. My son, then 8, understood as well… unfortunately. They both looked scared and I assured them that there was no immediate danger to them.
As I busied myself preparing to leave my son came to our bedroom door and said something. I couldn’t hear from in the bathroom so I asked him again what he’d said. He told me one of the buildings had fallen.
I became enraged. Not about the building, but at him. I had assumed that he was engaging in some kind of childish overreaction or exaggeration. I told him to stop lying. We had been talking about a half hour before about the number of people in each of the buildings (we’d heard that each had about 25,000, and that a substantial number of them were probably still inside). It was inconceivable to me that one of the towers had fallen. I saw the damage when the planes hit and assumed that if they had withstood the impact and resultant structural damage that the fire was the main concern. It never even occurred to me that one might fall.
Obviously, my son was right. I sat and stared at the screen for a some minutes, watching the replays, eyeing the other tower. Reports were coming in that a helicopter had crashed into the Pentagon, in an apparently unrelated accident – an assumption I did not trust. Other planes were unaccounted for.
I told Judi to keep the kids home from school.
As I went back to getting ready for work my son came to the bedroom door again. I didn’t disbelieve him this time.
My mind had finally started to function again as I drove in to work, listening to the radio. A deep feeling of rage was percolating behind my eyes, tinged with unreasoning fear. I always knew that the building in which I work was extremely vulnerable (inviting, even) to some kind of truck bomb (I work at a large naval facility in the area). But I’d never felt the prickly tingling of personal physical exposure to the Forces of Darkness before. That may sound stupid, but my building is one of the tallest in the city (not Seattle) and would make an awfully sweet target for some Islamofascist. And we were all being told that there were still planes up there that had not reported in (I can stand in back of my building and watch planes coming to and leaving from SEATAC all day long – almost directly overhead). I actually thought about turning the car around, but realized that my coworkers and friends would be there and I was not going to be away from them, in that place, at that time.
During the next few days I made a point of emotionally distancing myself from the personal tragedy of all those poor people. I was not going to feel that. Not then. Never, if I could help it.
Fast-forward one year. The first anniversary was here and I was at work (a major point of vulnerability of my office building had been corrected, BTW), listening to John Carlson on KVI radio. He was interviewing a woman who works there who had been in New York That Day. She was in a hotel across from the WTC in a room with her husband. They had awoken to the screeching whomp of the first plane. As Carlson interviewed her she described that she and her husband had pulled back the curtains to find that one of the towers was on fire. Her husband grabbed their video camera.
She was having a tough time telling Carlson about what she saw. She had watched people gathering at the broken windows in the upper floors of the WTC. She told of watching people going to the windows, backing away and coming back again. Then she said that she watched as two people, a man and a woman, held hands and jumped.
My stomached lurched. I had stopped typing as I was listening to her, the horror and pain in her voice. She told of more people. She had been close enough to see their faces. Made eye contact with some of them. Saw them hit.
I ripped my headphones off and stepped outside. I couldn’t get the images created by her words out of my mind. I had doggedly refused to view any video or images of people leaping to their deaths. I had always believed that it is wrong to view such things. A person’s death should be a private thing. I know it’s impossible for it to be private, given the circumstances, but I don’t have to be a participant in what I can only perceive as a person’s most humiliating moment. I can imagine those people seeing the watchers, and I would be angered that they were gawking at me, like an accident at the side of the road that induces that peculiar goulash curiosity that so many people exhibit. My last words would be, “stop looking at me, you bastards!”
I’ve always known that I do not have the emotional toughness to see people dying in such grim ways without empathizing way too much. Maybe that’s cowardice, and maybe I dress it up as moral superiority. I don’t know. But that day, one year removed, I found myself unable to keep the personal tragedies out of my head. They overwhelmed me. As I knew they would.
I watched the CBS special. I’d planned not to, for the same reasons stated above, but thought to myself that I needed to witness it to remember. Not that I had forgotten, but to touch again that sense of outrage, and to commemorate those people who were, now, the reason behind so much of my work.
I remember I got very drunk that night, which was stupid because it stripped away my last, carefully built defenses. I started to talk to Judi about the radio show that I’d heard earlier. I repeated the things the woman had said, feeling an irresistible rising tide of sorrow and anger. I wanted those terrorist motherfu*kers dead. Now. I immersed myself in what the thinking must have been for those poor people who stood with fire at their backs and a yawning abyss before them. What kind of human slime would intentionally torture people like that? What kind of contemptible simians would celebrate this in the streets? I raged ceaselessly that night.
I’m glad Judi loves me… nobody else would have tolerated such a display.
I can honestly say that the first anniversary was personally more painful than was That Day. I don’t know why that was, other than I had not allowed myself to “feel” some parts of it until I was taken by surprise by the radio interview. I hadn’t expected that woman’s story to take that direction, and by the time I’d pulled the headphones off it was already too late.
I am not looking forward to Thursday.
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