318 years before, on September 11, 1683, the conquering armies of Islam were repulsed from the gates of Vienna. In our day, no one thinks about such things when they get up in the morning. It was important to the Europeans then, and for a hundred years or so afterward it was a date they remembered.
September 11, 2001 started out as a pretty day. There was sunshine with just enough hint of impending autumn in the air to make it almost perfect. I was running a little late, but my wife, Gloria, and I were having a cup of coffee before I left for work. Lots of days, thatâs the only time we see each other before we go to bed at night. If I could get out the door at 9:00, and the traffic was good, I would be at work at 9:30. We were watching Steve, E.D., and Brian on Fox and Friends. Weâre both news junkies, so Fox is usually whatâs on the box. Somewhere between one cup of coffee and another the image on the TV screen switched to the 110-story World Trade Center in New York. A plane, American Airlines flight 11, out of Bostonâs Logan Airport with 92 people on board, had just crashed into it. Fox and Friends was aghast. So were we. We saw a gaping hole in the side of the building, a lot of smoke and flame and falling debris.
Casualties? Who had any idea? Certainly a planeload of people was dead. Certainly most, if not all, of the people â on how many floors? â were dead or seriously injured. Someone reported 70,000 people worked in the twin towers. The toll must be horrific. How were rescuers going to get up there? It was an incredible, sickening tragedy. âHow the hell does a pilot make a mistake like that?â I asked. It had to be an intentional act â but who would be crazy enough to do that?
We didnât know then that the air-traffic controller handling the plane in Nashua, N.H., had heard a conversation in the cockpit and realized a hijacking was under way. John Ogonowski, 50, the captain, had thumbed the mike button to alert controllers.
A few minutes later â 15 minutes, to be precise â the second tower was hit, the same way, by United Flight 175, also out of Boston. We actually saw the second plane fly into the building, live. We saw a second planeload, 65 living, breathing human beings, die. There was no uncertainty about what had happened this time. By some stretch of the imagination the first could possibly have been an accident, however unlikely. There was no way the second could be. New York was under attack.
âItâs Pearl Harbor,â I told Gloria. âWeâre at war now.â
The thought of going to work went onto the back burner for awhile as we watched, stunned and fascinated, along with everyone else in the country who had access to a television.
Somehow I got out the door. I listened to the car radio, WTOP, the Washington all-news channel, all the way down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. The attack on the Pentagon â American Flight 77, out of Washingtonâs Dulles Airport, with 64 people aboard â an hour after the first tower was hit, didnât come as a surprise after the World Trade Center. All we would do was curse the people who had done it. And wait for the next attacks, wherever they were going to happen. The crash destroyed four of the five rings that encircle the world's largest office building. A Pentagon spokesman called the casualties "extensive," although they were clearly not as extensive as New York's. These casualties were also more personal to me, as a retired military man.
Reports kept coming, but they were were confused and confusing. There was a story that a car bomb had gone off outside the State Department. There was a report of smoke coming from a location near the White House. There was a rumor that a plane had crashed in western Pennsylvania, another had supposedly crashed in Kentucky, and a rumor of another headed toward the White House from Dulles Airport. We didnât know which were true; we assumed they all were until they were disproved or retracted.
People were already leaving work to bring their kids home from school. Would whoever did this attack schools, too? I didnât think so, but I could understand the feelings, the uncertainty. I wasnât altogether sure that someone wasnât going to strafe the traffic on the parkway â i.e., me. It would have been easy enough. The south tower collapsed and it was still only 9:50 a.m. The area was evacuated. There was no immediate report on casualties. We were to learn not much later that many police and firefighters didnât make it out.
President Bush spoke to the nation from Sarasota, Florida, where he had been visiting an elementary school. He tried to sound reassuring, but it was obvious he wasnât sure what was going on. No one was. There simply werenât enough facts available yet. Even before I reached work he was airborne, in Air Force One, headed for Louisiana and from there to Nebraska. Vice President Cheney was in Washington. The Capital and the west wing of the White House were being evacuated. The FAA shut down takeoffs and flights in the air were told to land in Canada.
At my office someone had brought in a television and nothing got done. We watched a snowy picture from Washingtonâs Channel 4. There were more rumors, delivered in authoritative tones, cunningly disguised as reports. Then there was the confirmation on the story about the airliner down in a field in Pennsylvania. It was United Airlines Flight 93, carrying 45 people, out of Newark, N.J. There was speculation that it had been headed toward either Washington â the White House? The Capitol? â or perhaps Camp David. It crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Had it been shot down? Had the passengers crashed it? It seemed unlikely the hijackers had. An empty field didnât make much of a target.
Goddard Space Flight Center, a couple blocks from where I work, was locked down. I wondered what the terrorists would blow up there â the souvenir shop? Cubicles filled with engineers? The finance office? It didnât make sense, but I still found myself trying to calculate what the blast range would be for a nuclear device set off in downtown Washington. I wasnât happy with the results.
Dan Rather came on the box and his head talked. There was nothing memorable, only the uncertainty. He didnât know much more than we knew. Maybe not even as much. At 10:30 the north tower collapsed. There had been an hour available for evacuations; how many people could evacuate from what had been 110 stories in an hour? How many stairwells were there? How many people could walk abreast? There would be losses from smoke inhalation. Many people would have been horribly burned but still ambulatory. There were blind and otherwise disabled people who worked in the building. How to get a wheelchair down, say, 80 flights of stairs? Much later we would learn that as many as 18,000 people evacuated the two towers.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani publicly urged New Yorkers to stay calm and stay put -- unless they were below Canal Street in lower Manhattan. "If you're south of Canal Street, get out," he warned. "Just walk north." He didnât add not to stop, but New Yorkers guessed that part.
Things started to clear up a little as the day wore on. Government buildings around the US were evacuated and facilities â Goddard among them, which meant my office, too â closed down. The UN closed down. US financial markets closed down. Mayor Giuliani called for the evacuation of lower Manhattan. Vice President Cheney and first lady Laura Bush were whisked away to undisclosed locations in the morning, while the Secret Service hustled and worried. Some Congressional leaders, such as Speaker Dennis Hastert, were taken to Andrews Air Force Base. Others, like House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, as well as some Senate leaders where taken to police headquarters just blocks from the Capitol. All leaders were eventually moved by helicopter and limo to hideouts in West Virginia and Virginia, like Mt. Weather, an underground communications center near Round Hill, Va., some 75 miles from Washington.
President Bush, speaking again, this time from Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, told us that US armed forces were on maximum alert. He vowed to "hunt down and punish" those responsible. We all hoped that was true; Bill Clinton had used almost the same words in the wake of the bombings of our embassies in Africa. The nation was still waiting for results.
The Drudge Report had some information. Foxâs web site had some, as did CNN, MSNBC, and others. Gradually some of the rumor was sorted out from the scanty fact. There was a traffic jam on the way home. Bush touched down at Offutt AFB in Nebraska, and was soon back in the air, on his way to Washington. A network of Navy warships was deployed along both coasts for air defense. Landmark buildings and sites were shut down, from the Space Needle in Seattle to the Sears Tower in Chicago to Walt Disney World in Orlando. The borders with Canada and Mexico were sealed. New York's mayoral primary was postponed. So was Major League Baseball's schedule, followed quickly by professional football. Nobody cared at the moment, except maybe the players and not all of them.
The military command center in Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, responsible for U.S. air defenses, received word just 10 minutes before the first aircraft struck the World Trade Center that an American plane had been hijacked. The notification came too late for fighter jets to take action.
The TV was on as I walked in the door, with Gloria glued to it. We watched the scenes of the attacks over and over as each new bit of news was added to what Fox â and MSNBC and CNN â had to say. We saw the tapes of the towers collapsing. We heard about the people who jumped, rather than be burned alive; the Spanish-language stations ran footage of some of them. One pair, a man and a woman, held hands. It was sickening, horrible. It was beyond mere words. At 5:30 structurally weakened Seven World Trade Center collapsed.
The news channels showed us the images of smashed fire trucks, covered in gray dust and ash. There were first estimates of how many had died, still just guesses. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas was informed that the casualty figures would likely range between 15,000 and 25,000. There were fears that other nearby buildings were structurally damaged and that they would collapse as well. There were still fears of further attacks, on the Empire State Building, on the Sears Tower. Amtrak train and Greyhound bus operations were halted in the Northeast. The bridges leading into and out of New York were locked down.
By evening the fires were still burning amid the rubble of the World Trade Center. Pools of highly flammable jet fuel continued to hinder rescue teams who were still searching through the rubble, despite their losses.
Our country had been attacked and the realization was stunning. For the first time since 1814 the USAâs soil had been subject to naked, vicious aggression by a foreign power. The attacks had been aimed at symbols of American power, as though to destroy them would be to destroy what they represented. The thought that had gone into selecting them was from one point of view effective â strikes against âsymbols of oppression and greed.â From a practical point of view, the point of view that would have been taken by a professional military planner, they were ineffectual because they were totemistic. The US military is no more the Pentagon than US economic power was confined to the World Trade Center. So Clue Number One was in that sense reassuring: the enemy, whoever he was, was not a competent general. He was a tactician but not a strategist. Symbolic attacks donât win wars; destruction of the enemyâs command structure does. When thatâs gone, the enemy forces can be rolled up practically at leisure.
Congress â both Republicans and Democrats - declared its support for Bush in finding and punishing those responsible. "We are outraged at this cowardly attack on the people of the United States," Congress said in a bipartisan statement. "Our heartfelt prayers are with the victims and their families, and we stand strongly united behind the President as our commander-in-chief." Members concluded their session by singing "God Bless America" on the steps of the Capitol.
In the course of that day, President Bush spoke to the nation three times. The first was the quick talk I had heard on the radio, from Florida before leaving for Louisiana. The second, nearly as brief, was from Offutt. That evening he spoke again, at a little more length, and we listened:These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong.
A great people has been moved to defend a great nation. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.
America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.
Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America--with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could. "We will make no distinction," Bush warned, "between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."
Despite the fears of further attacks, there was a national growl of defiance, a national thirst for vengeance. If the terrorists had expected to throw the nation into confusion they had succeeded. If they had expected us to collapse in fear they had failed. They had aroused a national fury unseen since Pearl Harbor. Sen. Hutchison spoke for us all when she said that we should determine with a moral certainty who did it; issue an ultimatum to whatever country was involved to give the person up; and if not, "We should go in, attack them, and wipe them off the face of the earth." The nation accepted the concept of being at war â we werenât quite sure with whom, not yet â with no hesitation.
Libertarian writer and weblogger Virginia Postrel passed on the story of a man who worked as a prosecutor in Galveston. He cut through the minimum security wing of the jail on an errand. All the prisoners were gathered around the televisions, wearing their orange jumpsuits, following the story with their jailers and with the same reactions. Even Bad hates Evil.
There were three attacks. The plane that went down in Pennsylvania was supposed to have been the fourth. Minutes before United Airlines Flight 93 crashed outside Pittsburgh, passenger Jeremy Glick used his cell phone to call his wife in New Jersey. He told her that he and several other people on board were going to resist the hijackers. Knowing the chances were good that he would die, Glick told his wife, Lyzbeth, that he hoped she would have a good life, and to take care of their 3-month old baby girl. Alice Hoglan of California also got to say goodbye to her son, Mark Bingham. He also spoke of a plan to tackle the hijackers in a last-minute cell phone call. One of the other people on Flight 93, Tom Burnett, the vice president of a northern California medical devices company, also managed to call his wife from the plane before going to his death. And Todd Beamer also talked to his wife. The last words she heard him say were the words he used to fire up his kids: âLetâs roll!â
We had forgotten what it was like to have heroes. Beamer, Glick, Bingham, Burnett and those who went with them rushed the hijackers. They fought them hard, the flight recorder would later attest just how hard. And rather than giving control of the aircraft back to the Americans, the fanatics smashed the plane into the Pennsylvania countryside. The men and women who resisted them went down fighting to the last.
US Solicitor General Ted Olsen was lucky enough to talk to his wife, Barbara, on American Flight 77, via cell phone before her plane smashed into the Pentagon. Barbara Olsen was brilliant and witty, a ferocious political partisan who had written Hell to Pay, an exposÚ on then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. She was a fixture on political talk shows, had another book coming out on the sordid last days of the Clinton administration and she was on her way to Los Angeles. âWhat should I tell the pilot to do?â she asked her husband. Whatever she told the pilot, Barbara Olsen died trying. Charles Burlingame, the pilot of American Flight 77, was bludgeoned to death before the plane hit the Pentagon. He died trying, too.
We were to learn later, after flight recorders had been recovered, that the pilot of Flight 11, which had hit the World Trade Center, had also fought the hijackers. On all of the four planes, Americans had died trying.
By the next day we were busy with the long process of fitting the pieces together and putting together a response. |
On the subject of political passion Tom Shales, longtime TV critic of the Washington Post and possessor of occasional eloquence, wrote a piece this week that deserves comment. I don't mean his State of the Union review, which began, "George Bush may or may not be the worst president since Herbert Hoover . . ." I mean his attack last Monday on "Flight 93," the A&E television movie on that fated 9/11 flight. Mr. Shales said it was shameful that vulgar dramatizers would "exploit" the pain of those on the flight and those they left behind. Or as he put it, he had, innocent that he is, thought it "unthinkable" that "even the sleaziest producers" would "exploit any aspect of a nightmare that the nation had witnessed in horror."