Napoleon said: “To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty”. Although everyone remembers where they were on 9/11, when I had just turned 20, it still feels self-indulgent for a British person who was uninjured and not bereaved on that day to even talk about it.
The recollections and images of that day, ubiquitous for the first decade after, are seen and talked about less frequently now, and for me in recent years have regained some of their ability to shock. I’ve found myself distracted in recent weeks, and surprised but the jolt they have given me by appearing in my Twitter feed, in the TV schedules and on every streaming platform you care to open. What this does to the thousands of people bereaved that day or closer to events I can’t imagine.
In the immediate aftermath, it seemed necessary to deny that a heinous act of terrorism could or would affect how we saw the world. The 20th anniversary has made me at least wonder how, for my peers, it really did. This is quite a detailed account for which I apologise but hopefully provides some context for the lessons I think it taught me about the world I live in.
Sizing up a console table
When I was 20 I worked as an intern for a Congressman on Capitol Hill, while on an exchange scheme between Leeds University and the Catholic University of America. From late August 2001, I worked full time carrying out crucial tasks like collating press cuttings (with actual scissors and glue), taking notes from meetings real staffers had no time to attend, opening the mail and answering the phones.
Like most political nerds barely out of their teens, I would claim (often) that I was capable of much more sophisticated work to make use of my expert political analysis, in reality it was enough of an adjustment for me to go from student life in Leeds to a life where I needed to wear a clean and ironed shirt every day and hop on the Metro from campus to Union Station on time for a 9am start.
Seeing Capitol Hill in all its pomp was the true purpose of the exercise, and the class of 2001 were disappointed that the students on the scheme the year before us had got to watch all the drama of the disputed Presidential election to play out.
September 11th was in my third week in the US. Everyone talks about the weather on that Tuesday morning, and it sounds fanciful, as though hindsight makes us transport ourselves back to a carefree summer garden party in 1914. But it really was an unusually spectacular day. The humidity and grey haze of August in DC evaporated and the skies were blue and clear. I stopped and sat in the sun for about ten minutes to bask in clear air and blue skies, on my walk from Union Station to the congressional office building on the opposite side of the Capitol, something I had never done before and never did again.
I saw the Congressman’s press secretary in the lift on the way in, looking flustered and keen to get to the office. She was someone I already found a little intimidating but I remember mainly being perplexed when she said to me, with no preamble “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center in New York”.
Like millions around the world, I had no real concept of what that meant, even of what kind of event it was. I certainly did not think of terrorism — growing up in the UK in the 80s and 90s meant I thought I knew what that looked like. It bore no relation to those words. But a plane crash was certainly big and shocking news. We went into the office and switched on a small television which sat on my desk, just in time to see the second plane hit the South tower.
It’s hard to explain to people even slightly younger than me, who know this as a historical event, that for me at least there was no concept of this was a thing that could happen. I remember feeling something that I suppose is best characterised as horror, mainly around how many people might be dead or dying in that burning hole in the building. The questions of intent, and what led to the monstrous fireball, coupled with the thought that events may not be over, took much longer to dawn on me.
Like the rest of the world, my office was now watching events unfold on television. Staff would gather round the small television as they came in, jackets and bags in hand. Calls stopped coming through. The mood was quiet but there was a lot of speculation, about how many people might have been in the buildings and how long it might take for them to be evacuated.
I can’t remember the order in which some of the conversations happened, but it felt like we were watching events in New York helplessly, disbelief slowly giving way to horror. The shock of what was happened had (in my case at least) had time to translate into fear for our own safety a little before we heard via CNN about what was described as a fire at the Pentagon, and a car bomb at the state department. Faces in the office turned ashen at the news about the Pentagon, where many Congressional staff had friends or neighbours working.
A colleague was in touch with the Capitol Police about whether we should evacuate and was relaying to us that we were safer staying put. The rumoured car bomb at the State Department was assumed to be the reason for this, though I also heard later that Congressional leaders wanted to wait until they had said prayers in the house.
The report of the car bomb at the State Department, which seems to have been the result of confusion, was also the reason why at that moment an ocean away my Mum, having heard scraps of news from colleagues at lunchtime but then needing to resume her work as a probation officer, collapsed during a meeting with a client.
After the “fire” at the Pentagon was reported to be another plane crash (and after the events had solidified as occupying the space between a massive terrorist act and the beginning of a war) my main recollection is of the unmistakeable sound of a plane in the air, travelling low and fast and getting louder.
Due to the angle of our windows we couldn’t see it, and the sound probably lasted only a few seconds, but I remember everyone being rooted to the spot and completely silent. I remember thinking of history lessons about air raids in WW2 and wondering whether climbing under the console table next to me would offer any protection at all if this plane was coming for us.
I had been struck by the futility of this thought even within those seconds, and still had not moved when the sound passed, rattling the windows as it went. A colleague identified it as an F-16, presumably one of those scrambled to defend the capital from any other hijacked planes. In the years that followed, it has only got harder not to think about how many people may have had a similar moment of anxiety that day, with a very different ending.
When our office was evacuated (I think very shortly after the first tower fell in New York), I remember everyone walking quickly but not running in panic. We were told to head for the nearest Metro station, Capitol South, which I hadn’t been to before so took a wrong turning and was separated from my colleagues. I caught the briefest of glimpse of black smoke rising from the direction of the Potomac and the Pentagon opposite.
My journey back to the CUA campus meant changing trains at Metro Center, close to the White House, and I remember the trains being held several times, I presume from uncertainty as to whether they should be evacuating. Again, it felt like we were under ground for hours. The mood was tense and quiet. With no access to mobile phones (they were prohibitively expensive for an overseas student), radios or signal underground the mood and uncertainty of the day had seeped in, and I remember wondering what would be left above ground when we emerged.
In the European Casino
Even the shaded calm of a University campus felt like a different world from the one I left less than three hours earlier. Some students with cars were already loading them up and leaving town — parents from nearby states would also arrive through the day to take their children home. I remember being acutely conscious of topography, but unsure whether “safety” was to be had indoors, outdoors, on a hill or underground.
I spent a long time looking for a working phone to tell my parents I was safe, which was hard to find. It would only be hours later that it would occur to me to queue for ‘the computer room’ from where students could use email, although my parents at that time would not have been able to access email at work. More than a decade later, when my parents moved house I found a print out of my eventual email, clearly attempting to reassure them that everything was fine but not, to my older eyes, very convincingly at all.
I had a landline in my dorm room but it wasn’t working. Eventually I found someone in my building whose line seemed to be the only one connected, and who had a small queue of distressed students phoning home. Fortunately I had a pre-payment card for calling the UK, and called my Dad’s office. He was in a meeting but I knew his colleague who answered the phone, and it was lovely to hear a familiar voice. She reassured me that she would tell him straight away, and I heard later that she passed him a note, and also anticipated his request to call and reassure my mother that I had been heard from back on campus (no doubt to the immense relief of my mother’s client who was having a more intense meeting with his probation officer than he anticipated).
I lived in a large dorm with a lot of students who had gone or were going home, but two of the male students on my course had accommodation in a small trailer park on campus, known as the “European Casino” due to the reputation of the international students for playing poker and drinking. The trailer had a small living area where we all gathered as we arrived back on campus, and like much of the world spent the afternoon watching television in growing disbelief.
The second tower had collapsed while I was underground or on the way back to campus, but I remember seeing it happen again and again. A painful amount of time was spent discussing potential death tolls. Even the real final number is too big to fathom but we discussed huge numbers that felt more or less meaningless as a way of conveying the sadness and violence of what had happened. The scale of events in New York in particular meant we paid little attention to the reports of the plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The students I spent the remainder of the day with, from the UK, Spain, Belgium, and Australia as well as the US, seemed better informed than me about the nature and likely consequences of what happened, but mainly that day was about the scale of it all — sadness, death and destruction. We attempted to donate our blood, in the vain hope of helping injured victims of the attack on the Pentagon (and also because it was the only thing you could do that felt like helping), but due to fears of mad cow disease British students were turned away.
I don’t recall a moment when we felt sure that the attacks were over, except that it must have seeped into us at some point between the closure of the airspace and the return of President Bush to Washington. Having said that, if you had asked me on that day whether I assumed attacks on this huge scale were going to become a regular occurrence, then I would doubtless have said yes.
As Washington grew dark we ventured out to a 7/11 with a more reliable pay phone outside, and lined up to call home and speak at more length to our families, whose relief had given way to a stream of updates about where the family had all been when they heard, who had been sent home from work to wait for a call. I was pleased to hear that my indomitable Grandmother had been so engrossed in cleaning out her freezer that she had been unaware of events for around six hours, expressing indignation when told that I was fine because why on earth wouldn’t I be?
The rest of that week was a jarring blur of normality and strangeness. After Congress gathered on the Capitol on the evening of the 11th we prepared to go back to the office on the 12th. I remember discussing with my fellow students that we were probably now in the safest city in the world, with military and police presence wherever we looked, on the ground and in the sky. It was only when we returned to our offices that anyone said out loud that we had not been simply under a general threat on that day — the Capitol itself had to be assumed to be the target of the fourth plane which crashed in Pennsylvania.
In the months that followed, that Tuesday morning dominated everything — from passing the Pentagon and seeing the gaping wound in its side, to the suddenly changed legislative agenda of the year. Most of my colleagues knew people who had been killed and there were frequent absences for memorial services. I went ahead with a long-planned trip to New York for a friend’s 21st went ahead ten days later, with much of the city inaccessible and what tourist sites remained interspersed with hundreds of missing posters and fire houses which resembled roadside shrines. I returned to Washington and a few weeks later was evacuated again due to anthrax contamination in our office.
The next twenty years — what I learned
1. Conspiracy theories are no longer a joke
One of the things my group of students did over the coming days was to be interviewed, for local news back home and for the BBC World Service. I’ve never heard my own interview back (thankfully, as I think I was excessively stiff upper lip about it all) but have since learned that others have pored over this and all the interviews in the immediate aftermath. I suspect I will have only given my first name for this interview but was still tracked down seven years later via an obscure blog on other subjects I had written as part of a journalism course.
I began to receive messages via the comment section of the blog from very generic names asking me if I was the student who was interviewed in the aftermath of the attacks, followed by very specific questions asking me about my precise location on the day, the angle of the windows and the sounds I heard at specific times. My lack of response prompted the author or authors to post additional messages speculating why I was not responding to them, suggesting I had something to hide. A little investigation of the usernames of these messages led me into a network of conspiracists and deniers, which was starting to build online in a way that hadn’t previously been aware of.
I remembered one afternoon in the autumn of 2001, the Congressional office being visited by a small old man in an old fashioned raincoat who leaned across the counter where I was manning the front desk, whispered “read this” and shuffled out again. In the envelope he handed me was a photocopy of a handwritten letter alleging that there were no Jews killed on 9/11, and that the attacks were committed by Israel. I am afraid to say that I read this out to the office and we all laughed.
I can’t imagine laughing in a situation like this now, where conspiracy theories have, if not escaped from the realm of the pub bore, at least managed to unite their authors and followers online. Anti-semitism in particular seemed completely bizarre (and the assertion in the letter instantly proven false), but I probably would not have seen it as a political act or a dangerous trend.
It makes me hugely sad to see how many people have fallen into these modes of thinking. On a previous anniversary, I was appalled to see someone who I was good friends with in 2001, sharing theories on Facebook that what happened was all a hoax. While I understand the need to deny something so visually overpowering with a scale that is hard to comprehend, I also miss the days when face to face discussions could mark such beliefs as hurtful and disreputable.
2. Broadcast news did a good job and we didn’t all have to have a “take”
The atrocities of 9/11 were clearly designed to have a massive visual impact as well as mass death and suffering. But looking back, I am on balance relieved that it was mediated at the time through broadcast news. Around the world we watched and discussed what we saw with the people around us and on phone calls to friends and family back home.
It was enough to simply be sad. People understandably didn’t want to feel “terrorised” or let the perpetrators win, but could talk to each other about what happened without the expectation that we all become commentators online.
Of course mistakes were inevitable for broadcasters and newspapers in the hours and days after the attacks, but if you watch back segments like this four hour broadcast from the BBC on the evening of the 11th you find expert explanations without rush to judgement, a tone of sadness but not hysteria, and a balance between explaining the enormity of what has happened and preparing for what comes next.
While social media can have huge power in shaping how we feel about tragedies, and offer support to those affected in a good way, I worry that if an event this huge and unexpected were to happen now then people would feel the need to have a simple, straightforward interpretation of events.
Online echo chambers mean people feel their reaction to the unexpected must include a clear, instant villain and obvious heroes. The heroes must be people they already support, and the event must fit into their existing and previously stated understanding of the world. There isn’t time or space to come to a considered view, and polite challenge from people with different knowledge and perspectives is seldom hard wired into online conversations.
Even as an opinionated politics student in 2001, I knew I needed to know much more before slotting this event into my existing views on the world. That doesn’t mean it could be allowed to change how I wanted the world to be, which would mean letting the terrorists win, but it definitely meant being open to challenging my interpretation of how the world currently worked.
Other students around me knew different things, about history, world affairs, and even responding to tragedy with emotional intelligence. I got to listen to their perspectives and the knowledge that informed them and others before giving my view. Broadcast news and newspapers (including UK newspapers via their early websites) exposed me to views I might have disagreed with and knowledge I might not have thought worth acquiring. I wish I could more easily say that the same would be true today.
3. The perpetrators did it
There has been, and will always be, discussion and justified criticism of the rush to judgement that led to the war on terror and the methods used to conduct in over twenty years. It’s only now becoming a moment in history that can be looked back on with hindsight rather than the fear of the moment, but many of the criticisms made when it was politics rather than history will be proved right, and some may be proved wrong.
But the rush to war wasn’t the only rush to judgement. There was also a train of thought that led many of the people whose views I would have shared on September 10th 2001 to continue to pursue their own prejudices in categorising what happened in a way that placed their existing beliefs ahead of a humane reaction.
The fact that there were commentators who swayed quickly and comfortably into blaming the US, and by implication people who had gone to work in offices on a Tuesday morning and never come home, created for me a distrust in the ideological certainties of the left. For the author of the piece in the immediate aftermath expressing righteous hatred for the US to then hold a senior role in the party I was a member of (then and now) has always given me deep unease.
It no doubt causes unease for those who think the left is always right to hear that (as one of them) I felt comforted on that day to be protected by the US military swinging into action in the skies above Washington.
It’s largely accepted that the prejudices of the right have led to islamophobia, racist attacks in the West and conflicts around the world, but as a paid up member of the left who felt their certainties being challenged on that day and since, it’s important to say that the right are not the only ones with prejudices. Neither set of prejudices is without its consequences around the world.
Many on the left take a much more humane and considered view of the events of that day, but there is not enough challenge for those who blame everyone other than the perpetrators, who chose to kill thousands of people who went to work on a Tuesday morning.
Since that day I hope those of us on the cusp of adulthood on that day have all learned more about the effects of global politics, religious radicalisation, warped psychology and power imbalances throughout the world. But none of these, alone or together, can explain the cultish followers of violence and death.
Hate on a scale that can’t be rationalised or quantified shouldn’t be twisted to fit the other agendas we all have in these fields. We always need to know more, but we are descending into comfortable over-simplification if we think we can ever truly explain it.
So for me, the events of a Tuesday morning half my lifelime ago are mainly sad, and still shocking. They can’t be allowed to alter the ambitions my generation and those that follow have for the world. But they have taught me that my views have to be open to challenge, and we could all be much braver in challenging the prejudices held by others.
