Reliving 9-11 in Real Time
Today is the 6th anniversary of 9-11, of course, and I’ve spent the morning watching MSNBC’s rebroadcast of the “Today Show” as it aired on that day. There’s something exceptionally chilling and sad about reliving the events in real time, especially watching the North Tower burn and knowing that the South Tower will be hit at 9:03. Listening to Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw, et. al. deal with images that confront them one hears the sentiments of a nation - our collective loss of innocence. Osama Bin Laden’s name comes up for the first time at 10:05, just an hour after the second plane hit the South Tower. Jim Miklazewski isn’t sure what caused the Pentagon to shake during his first report after the jet hit. Tom Brokaw characterizes the attack as an “act of war” just after the North Tower falls. President Bush says, “Terrorism will not be tolerated,” in brief remarks on his way out of Booker Elementary School in Florida. More bogus information than I remembered: Explosion at the State Department, bomb at a high school near the WTC, and another jet headed for the Pentagon. The United Flight 93 crash isn’t reported for nearly an hour after it crashes into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Like everybody, I’ll never forget where I was that terrible morning. I was at the Naval Academy, where I was stationed, lecturing (along with my friend “Boomer” Stufflebeem, who was a rear admiral attached to the Pentagon at the time) a group of midshipmen on how they needed to be ready for rapid change as naval officers. After the lecture I returned to my office in Luce Hall. Carrie called me and told me a plane had hit the North Tower. The reporters were saying it was a small aircraft. I jumped on my computer and went up CNN.com and saw the photo of the impact on the tower. I counted the floors and the windows and commented that the wingspan of whatever had hit the building was too wide to be a small plane. Suddenly she said, “Another plane just hit the other tower!” Officers who were in the adjacent rooms started flooding into my office. The discussion was lively and full of conjecture, as you can imagine. A few minutes later we located a TV a couple of floors up, getting there just in time to see the South Tower fall.
I lived on the Academy grounds so I went home to watch the news with Carrie for a time. After lunch I headed back to the office to teach my afternoon class only to find that the Academy had been shut down. The faculty had been sent home and the mids had been holed up in Bancroft Hall. It was quiet and made even more eerie by the beauty of the day.
So six years goes by . . . not necessarily in the blink of an eye, certainly not for those who’ve been deployed multiple times for extended periods during that time. But it goes by, in any case. And in those years the unity we had on 9-11 has eroded for myriad reasons, mostly because war is hell and victory is seldom definitive.
But watching 9-11 in real time six years later helped to explain how we got where we are today. It didn’t justify it; it just helped to explain it.