9/11 | Before & Forever After
Everyone remembers where they were that day, but does everyone question whether the war begun on 11 Sept 2001 has truly come to an end?
Here it comes. Not a plane, this time, but another sort of improvised missile: a memory turned story. So, look at me: seventeen-years-old, sitting in the afternoon Business & Computer class (or whatever it was named), waiting for the bell to ring so I can walk down the street, through this tight suburban neighborhood just across the river from Phillie, and Mr. Brown, the Business & Computer teacher (or whatever he was teacher of), is telling us lethargic, bored, shushedly-gossiping sophomores about what he did in Vietnam.
“What did I do in Vietnam? Well, my job title was as a rifleman. I was in a platoon. But what did I do? What was really my job? I'll tell you what my job was. My job was to kill people.”
Did he just say kill people?
O-kay, kinda got some of our attention now…
“That was my job,” continues Mr. Brown. “I didn't like that part of it, but it was my job. It was what I was trained to do. And I did it, for what? Anyone? Why did I do it? I did it because it was what my country asked me to do.”
Everyone got an A in Mr. Brown’s class. I honestly have no memory whatsoever of submitting any classwork.
Memories loosen, shed skin, become like vapors, like veils, like old lace with strings dangling off the edges. Many vanish entirely; forgetting is a good thing, a necessary function of the brain. Time, distance traveled, allows us to move on. However, the memories we keep thinking about, pinging, double-clicking with our internal mouse-pointers—memories associated with something seismic, traumatic or special, we carry them, wheel after wheel around the sun.
These are the memories we pass down, which shape our beliefs about ourselves, about who we are, who we once were, and who we’re meant to be.
School starts again in the fall and I'm a junior and sitting in Computer Typing class. It's around nine o'clock in the morning. We're a week or two into the new semester and our fingers are already learning their way around the obstacle course that is the Qwerty keyboard. I don't remember my teacher's name; call her Mrs. Benson. Another teacher (I don’t remember her name either) hurries into the class and to Mrs. Benson, she says, under her breath but loud enough for we, the students, to hear, “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
By the end of Typing class, the cat’s out of the bag. Out in the hall, another teacher beelines it past me, down the stairs, and out the double doors to her car. Her son works at the World Trade Center. She didn’t yet know that he happened to be late to work that morning.
The same story is on everyone’s lips—whispers, hushed exclamations. At some point, the principal issues an announcement over the intercom, but I don't remember any of it. I remember beelining it myself up the stairs and down the hall to Mr. Brown’s classroom.
I find Mr. Brown in his classroom, alone, except for one other Business & Computer teacher. Both teachers are gray-haired men who wear button-down shirts and ties and suit slacks every day to school. Mr. Brown sits in front of his own computer. He’s got a tiny square of an image that probably took fifteen minutes to download on his screen: the second plane careening into the South Tower. The moment everyone knew: this is no accident.
I watch the blurry image, the smoke and burst of flame, repeat, reload, once, twice, thrice.
“What happens next?” I ask Mr. Brown.
“Next?” he says, as though coming out of a stupor, realizing I'm there. “Next, we go to war.”
Flash forward twenty-three revolutions around our yellow dwarf, and, in America, the current election season seems to be revisiting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan like none other since 2008. The military service records of the vice-presidential candidates in particular are drumming up all sorts of analysis and opinions and memories. Veteran communities, online and otherwise, are pulling their hair out over rife misconceptions and decisions-made twenty-some spins ago. The current Republican candidate isn't the first politician to snap and post a selfie power-grieving over the tombstones of those fallen in war. He won’t be the last. Our legacies of violence, the politics of memory, the stories told and retold and those yet to be told, the war of words and images—these, too, are a part of the conflagration which began on 11 September 2001.
Anniversaries are a chance to remember, to reflect, to take hard looks in the mirror, and wonder—was I really like that? Did I really go along with that kind of thinking? Was I, too, so worried about not if but when another attack would happen?
We can seem strange to ourselves, as the distances lengthen, when we take a second from our busy routines to glance back.
With hindsight, decades, we're able to see that while we’ve gained some wins, some confidence-building exercises, there have been, as well, many losses. The toppling of the Taliban regime was a win. The takedown of Saddam. The air strike on al-Zarqāwī. The Geronimo operation that finally got bin Laden. The raid on al-Baghdadi’s compound. The assassination of General Soleimani. But, in case you were wondering whether the ever-contracting-yet-expanding War on Terror did indeed end with the pullout of US forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, the drone strike on al-Zawahiri in Kabul, nearly a year later in 2022, or AFRICOM targeting ISIS in Somalia in 2024, ought to put such naive notions to rest.
The War on Terror never was a good name, however fitting it might seem nowadays considering the actual amorphousness of the conflict. The mission almost immediately morphed into a global whack-a-mole with no end in sight. No goal other than get the bad guy. No idea of what “peace” looked like other than a continuing assembly line of corpses with Terrorist stamped on their death certificates. Terrorist, extremist, detainee—even with a Deck of Cards and the FBI's Most Wanted List, we yet struggled to identify just who or what our enemy was (is) beyond high-profile leaders, the faces, the images, the hydra-heads, we could simultaneously flash on the evening news, slap EVIL upon, before comfortably bombing out of existence.
But memories, particularly memories of violence, don’t work that way. They don’t cease to exist once you scroll past them or once the weekly media churn moves on to the next story.
Over the years, countless military-age Muslim males across the world have been scooped up, detained, fired upon, their homes raided, lives upended, lives ended. America being America, we couldn’t kill them without also trying to save them. We brought bombs, yes, but we brought schools and elections and women’s rights, too. We brought freedom—Freedom!—for crying out loud. It’s their fault if it didn’t work out, isn’t that so?
Yes and no.
After 9/11, we learned a new language, a new political lexicon, words with double meanings, images with questions about what was left unspoken, unphotographed, outside the frame. This is what a war of occupation liberation looks like. This is what a global assassination machine targeted strikes look like. This is what blowback a senseless act of violence looks like. This is what torture enhanced interrogation looks like. This is what too many flag-draped coffins and stumps and scars and broken minds sacrifice for a Greater America looks like.
Remember?
And, nowadays, to see the Taliban in control of more territory than prior to 2001, to see that Iraq's best hope of survival may be as an Iranian vassal state, or that the Sahel now accounts for nearly 50% of worldwide terrorist Islamic insurgent violence, or that the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, passed by Congress in the days following 9/11, remains active, useable, used.
I doubt Mr. Brown or anyone could have foreseen what this war would become, how it's shapeshifted over time; switched tactics with technology and public opinion; spawned countless seedling conflicts and unspoken atrocities of its own. Hundreds of millions of miles traveled around the sun and yet this war—my generation’s war—bleeds on, into subsequent generations not even alive on the day in question, yet the memory grinds on.
11 September 2001 was the end of something as well as the beginning of something. A legacy of violence born again in the wake of the tumbling of the Twin Towers, of one-fifth of the Pentagon. A worldwide conflict which, maddeningly, has yet to find its enduring peace.
Closing prayer:
To visit the Flight 93 memorial is to drive way out of your way smack into the middle of Flyover County, Pennsylvania. To visit the Flight 93 memorial is to stand and look out at a field where tiny flowers and wreaths mark the site. To visit this place of deep wounding is to stand and look at basically nothing—there’s nothing left but trees, and the grass grown back, and sky irrevocably turning overhead, and memory. What did the families even have left to bury? To visit the Flight 93 memorial is to stand and look out while looking into yourself. Would you, faced with such a circumstance, act as selflessly as those aboard Flight 93? What “right” answer to violence is there but sacrifice and yet more sacrifice and to remember that sacrifice?
To remember is, in a way, to keep circling around the same questions though no sufficient answer may lie within sight, no true end to this ceaseless spinning.
Beautiful writing on a disturbing topic. Your piece asks all the right questions.
Brings back some very sad memories and worries about today’s world.