9/11

 

Photo by Anthony Fomin on Unsplash

I am not a morning person. When the phone rang shortly before 7 am Pacific time, I was confused. Before I could even ask who it was, the person on the other end said, “Turn on your TV.”

“What channel?”

“Any channel.” My heart skipped a beat.

My friend, Donna, worked for one of the big financial firms back East. She was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on her way to her office in San Francisco when she heard the news on the radio.

A plane had flown into one of the twin towers.

That’s crazy, how could that even happen? The towers loomed above everything--you’d have to try to hit them.

It wasn’t an accident.

Donna crossed the bridge, turned around, and drove back to Sausalito. Then she called me.

Everything got fuzzy after that. I turned on the TV, but I can’t recall if I watched the second plane hit in real time or just saw the playback so many times it feels like I saw it as it happened.

I remember specific moments in time, but the details aren’t clear. Did I drive to work that day or stay home, glued to the TV? Are my recollections of watching, re-watching, and watching again--that same horrifying clip of the second plane hitting the second tower--from that first day or the days that followed?

I do know that for months after, every time I heard a plane overhead, I would look up and imagine it blowing up. For months, maybe even years. I’m not sure when that stopped.

At some point that week I was back at work. A TV had been rolled into the break room so when we weren’t at our desks we could watch the news, a moment-by-moment unfolding of one unbelievable scene after the other. People running from an enormous cloud of smoke, dust, and debris, faces contorted in fear and disbelief as they tried to outrun the disaster behind them. Bodies dropping from windows as news anchors exclaimed with genuine horror--the kind of gut-wrenching emotion we had never seen from the talking heads before.

As each one fell, I asked myself, “Would I have jumped? Could I have jumped?

It had to be so smoky up there, how could they breathe? Were they feeling the heat of the flames, aimlessly running to escape them without even realizing they were about to go through a window?

I struggled to understand them, as if somehow that would make it less surreal, less frightening, less painful to watch, less excruciating to contemplate.

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I was attending college at the time, taking the last few courses needed to get my B.S. I was supposed to attend class that night, but the professor called to say it would be cancelled. The class was Social Research Methods, and our final project was to conduct a study we would each design ourselves.

Everybody had turned in the title of their study and their main hypothesis the week before. The next step was determining how to test for it. I don’t remember what I had originally chosen, but after 9/11, whatever it was seemed too trivial to contemplate. I was still struggling to make sense of what happened, so I changed my research topic.

The subject of my study would be PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder). It seemed like everybody was suffering from it. I had to pick a very narrow aspect of it for the purpose of the study, so I focused on treatment. What I learned while in the process was that my original hypothesis (that women would be more likely to seek treatment for PTSD than men) was not substantiated. Statistically, there was no significant difference between men and women in that regard.

What did show up as a slightly more likely (though still not statistically relevant) reason for some to be more willing than others to get treatment for PTSD was extroversion--presumably because extroverts like to talk about everything more than introverts do.

No groundbreaking discoveries there. But I did learn something: conducting a study and getting relevant data from it are two entirely different things. You can take all the right steps, but that’s not enough.

You need to ask the right questions.

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After 9/11, I had a lot of questions. I started paying more attention to the news. I wanted to know why someone would do something so unimaginable to us.

Why us? How could anybody want to do that to us?

I devoured the news, reading and watching everything I could to understand the insanity I had witnessed. But mainstream media wasn’t interested in understanding the people who committed these atrocities. They wanted revenge. When a rare voice tried to point out that our habit of fighting wars on foreign soil was not well received by the rest of the world, they were shut down with a ferociousness that frightened me.

I didn’t understand how trying to piece together some kind of narrative that would make sense was such a terrible thing to do. I decided I needed to get my news firsthand.

I applied for an internship with a local radio station—public radio—so, yes, liberal radio. In Berkeley. (Okay, very liberal radio.) The draw was less their politics than their willingness to ask questions and listen to the answers.

Granted, the newsroom Rolodex was filled with the names of like-minded thinkers, so most of the time when we called for interviews, we knew what they’d say. Still, it felt like we were doing something important. We were trying to ask the right questions.

Did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction? Was he really trying to buy uranium from Niger?

Stephen Zunes was a regular guest on the Sunday evening news. He is a currently a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco and is an expert in Middle Eastern Studies. In the years leading up to our invasion of Iraq, he made frequent visits to the Middle East. He met with a variety of government officials, academics, journalists, and opposition leaders, and provided insights we could get from no one else. We loved him because he knew on Sunday we’d call, and he’d always pick up.

He told me that Saddam Hussein had about a dozen body doubles because he couldn’t trust his own people. He spent much of his time in hiding.

He also told me Saddam was obsessed with Jennifer Lopez. He had pictures of her everywhere and he was writing a romance novel with J.Lo as his inspiration. The man who couldn’t trust his own people, spent his spare time on romance novels and was infatuated with J.Lo, did not sound like a nuclear threat to me, or to Stephen Zunes.

Every other week, when it was my turn to cover the lead up to the war in Iraq, we’d go over what we knew and what we questioned. We’d try to get various viewpoints, but the people who had already decided it was time for war weren’t interested in talking to us. They didn’t like our questions.

After a couple of years, I gave up. Despite doing everything we could to stop the country from going to war in Iraq, repeatedly broadcasting news to help people see that Saddam Hussein was not a threat to us—that terrorists tended to be mobile, and leveling another country wouldn’t help us fight the terrorist threat—reason did not prevail. Vengeance did.

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Today we are commemorating 9/11 just as we are finally ending the war in Afghanistan. For 20 years we have occupied another country to save ourselves from a future terrorist threat. But now the greatest threat to the United States is from within the United States.

Have you ever wondered why so many of the insurrectionists on January 6^th were ex-military? We trained them to be terrorists.

We taught them terrorist tactics so they could fight terrorists in another country, in a war with no end in sight—where suicide bombers and mines were a constant threat—where civilian men, women and children were blown to bits on a regular basis.

Our soldiers had to watch the carnage, clean up the mess, and live with the guilt.

What were we doing there? Why did we stay so long? Did their sacrifices even make a difference?

We asked soldiers to monitor civilians as they went about their daily lives for weeks, sometimes months, then told them to operate a drone to wipe out the very people they’d gotten to know—sometimes intimately, over long periods of time—as they watched them go about their business, walking to work or haggling for food in a local marketplace.

Thanks to the United States, an entire generation in the Middle East has grown up in rubble. And the people we ordered to make that happen, returned to a country where their needs were largely ignored. Their sacrifices were taken for granted, their pain diminished, their value questioned.

I just remembered something else I learned from my study on PTSD. Time doesn’t heal PTSD. If untreated, it festers. The nightmares get worse, the pain becomes chronic, the torment never ends.

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We need to honor the people we’ve damaged.  We need to acknowledge that they are not so different from the rest of us. We need to face the fact that we made them vulnerable by asking them to do the unthinkable and then telling them the war they fought for 20 years was never going to succeed and it was all for nothing.

We need to welcome the refugees our actions created. We need to take care of the Afghan people who helped our contractors, not just those who helped our military. We need to understand what motivated us and do everything in our power to prevent this from happening again. We can’t keep creating terrorists in the name of stopping terrorism.

We need to start asking the right questions. If we don’t, we are doomed to repeat ourselves.

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I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

(From the poem September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden - 1907-1973)

Photo by Alexander Jawfox on Unsplash