9/11 and 1968: Memories

Seven years on. This is a family blog, so I'll leave politics out of it, though obviously as a Middle East specialist 9/11 cut close to the bone. But I don't think I've ever recorded in words the experiences of that morning.

It was, here as in New York, a gloriously perfect autumn morning. Blue skies, perfect weather, everything idyllic. Tam was in her last week of maternity leave (we'd adopted Sarah in July; she was returning to work the following week I believe) and, to prepare Sarah for day care, we'd started her on half days at Miss Adela's day care on Monday. 9/11 was a Tuesday of course, Sarah's second day. As we dropped her off at a little before 9, we saw Miss Adela (a Peruvian day care provider who goes to our church) watching the first tower afire. A plane had hit it; I thought immediately of the World War II bomber that had hit the Empire State building in a fog, but how with modern navigation could such an accident happen?

I was planning to go in to work a little later; we went home, turned the TV on, and learned the second plane had hit. At this point we knew that New York was under attack. I was well aware that the idea of using airplanes as weapons was not new: as far back as 1972 the Israelis shot down a straying Libyan airliner they suspected of such a motive; Ramzi Yousef, of course, had planned a multi-aircraft attack in Asia. Not everyone knew this but I certainly did. Cautiously enough I said to Tam that this might not be a good day to go to the Capitol or Pentagon for business, but since Tam was on maternity leave that wasn't a big issue.

I left for work. Driving in on Route 50, listening to all-news radio for the news from New York, I reached a point on 50 where the road points virtually due east straight towards Fort Myer and you can see the Washington Monument centered ahead of you. Suddenly big billowing clouds of black smoke were rising in front of me. It looked like either a fuel or ammunition fire, something stoking itself, not just a house or building fire but something with flammables, and I immediately thought that what was happening in New York had now moved to Washington. I thought of the Pentagon, or perhaps the USA Today towers (as they then were) in Rosslyn, or something on the National Mall. I'll admit I thought of the Pentagon first because we seemed to be on a straight line with it. Nothing on the radio yet, then suddenly an announcer broke into the reports from New York to say there were reports that a helicopter had crashed into the Pentagon. (The plane did come in roughly on the side with the helicopter pad, and perhaps that led to the confusion.) I pulled off Route 50 and turned the car around: instinctively I wanted to be with my family, not at work, and I tried to call Tam on my cell, but couldn't get a signal (no one could that day). I drove back home, called work and told them I'd not be in till I knew what was going on, and discussed with Tam what we should do. We both agreed to go to Miss Adela's and pick up Sarah. It was a day for families to be together.

While at Miss Adela's we heard sirens everywhere, and at one point a muffled boom -- this I think was a secondary fuel tank explosion mentioned in a few of the accounts of the Pentagon crash, but I recognized it as an explosion and decided still more must be happening (by this time the White House and Capitol had been evacuated, there were reports of a car bomb at the State Department, and chaos was taking over). We brought Sarah home.

She was just a toddler, not yet speaking more than a few words, and though she didn't understand what was going on she picked up our tension and reflected it. We took her to the local playground and played on the swings, and I think Tam went back later with neighbors.

I still have that image of the black cloud rising over the Pentagon, straight ahead of my car on Route 50. And it then -- and since -- evokes the one other time I have seen Washington burning.

Usually in college Easter break was too short for a trip to Missouri, but in 1968 (spring of my Junior year at Georgetown) I decided to leave earlier than the official break (didn't have any exams just before the break) and scheduled a flight home on April 5. The night of April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. The next morning as I went to the airport the city was under siege, riots having gone on all night. The white cabbie, I remember, was full of racist invective all the way to the airport, the sort of thing you don't hear anymore, at least from cab drivers expecting to be paid. (It was along the line of "the n------- are really going wild" and such like that). I stood at National Airport waiting for my flight and seeing three or four large black columns of smoke rising over the city across the river: the seventh street corridor, the 14th street corridor, the H street NE corridor.... and of course the Capitol Dome and the Washington Monument clearly interspersed among the columns of acrid smoke.

Those two sets of black smoke columns, 33 and a half years apart, will always be burned together in my mind: our nation's capital in flames. I know they were different events and not really comparable, but black smoke over my country's symbols.

Later in 2001 we took Sarah in her stroller to Arlington National Cemetery for a B-52 flyby. We stood on the ridgeline in Arlington Cemetery, looking down on the great black gash in the Pentagon building -- a gash that was gone completely by the first anniversary, unlike the great hole that still stands in New York -- and as I looked at the gash I saw the thousands of small white headstones, row on row, of Arlington Cemetery, of all our war dead, and knew as we all did that there were now going to be more because of that gash in the Pentagon ... and the B-52 came by, and we went home, and you know the rest. Today they dedicated the permanent Pentagon memorial. New York says its memorial is still years from completion. The Pentagon memorial may be finished but Arlington Cemetery is still growing...

Back in 1915, after the battle of Ypres (pronounced by British soldiers not as ee-pr but as Wipers, an endearing sign of Englishmen's eternal refusal to learn French) the Canadian soldier John McCrae looked at similar rows of graves and famously wrote:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row...

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Such words, from the War to End Wars (it didn't, actually) can still inspire (and are, or at least were, iconic in Canadian patriotic rhetoric when it existed), but we should also remember the other observation by another poet (Wilfrid Owen) of the same war:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

And a modern evocation of the same theme from 1976 in Australian Eric Bogle's Green Fields of France (also known as Willie McBride or No Man's Land and sung a lot in Irish pubs)

And I can't help but wonder, young Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?


Since we're doing the "British poets of World War I" (and a Canadian and a modern Australian to boot) seminar I should mention that one of my Dad's favorite poems was one that I think has been more or less neglected lately, Rupert Brooke's

IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


That has little to do with the war as such, but my Dad liked to quote it as a poem many soldiers empathized with (it is in fact titled just "The Soldier"). And it's my blog and I can write what I want. Brooke did die in that war, not in combat but of a mosquito bite -- on his way to Gallipoli. His corner of a foreign field that is forever England is on the Greek island of Skyros.

There is absolutely no political agenda in my quoting these: war is hell, as Cump Sherman said (and he did a lot to make it so), but it is also the lot of man, and World War I was a particularly stupid and pointless and bloody one, though three of my uncles (my mother was the youngest in the family of 12, so the siblings ranged over 25 years) fought in that war and a great-uncle lost the sight of one eye as a Marine in Belleau Wood. My ancestors have fought in most American wars, and on September 11 we were not asking for it, and for all my qualms about Iraq I've never doubted we had to take out the Taliban in Afghanistan. We must honor those who fight for us, but never glorify the horrors of war. Sun Tzu was right that the best war is the one in which you win without ever engaging the enemy (by maneuver alone), but I don't think even Sun Tzu ever saw such a war, and for all our idealism, as Plato said, only the dead have seen the end of war. And with that, I'll try to come back on a more cheerful note.

Remember 9/11, but don't confuse justice with vendetta. We survived 9/11, like we survived Pearl Harbor and the Alamo. But we remember. And there's still a big hole in New York. And I guess the rest of us, too.

More another time.