I’ve found myself glued to the TV and the radio today; particularly when I was getting in to work and the ceremonies commemorating 9/11 and “this is what happened at this time five years ago.” It brings tears to my eyes, and I’m not even sure why. It’s not simple mourning over so many lost lives, nor fear or sadness about our national “loss of innocence”. I think what affects me so deeply is remembering how it felt that day. I had forgotten (and I didn’t think I had) how profoundly confused everyone was about what, exactly had happened. For days I was certain that the other shoe was about to drop. I took up turning on the TV for a few minutes each morning and listening to the news on a hastily-purchased portable radio on the bus into work–that’s where I heard President Bush’s State of the Union and his memorable “axis of evil” phrase.
Do you remember how it took us months to know how many people were killed in the attacks? Do you remember that we didn’t hear for years what, exactly had happened that brought down the towers? I’m glad that ABC is airing their controversial miniseries showing some of our failures in the run-up to 9/11–it’s something that we’ve had to become aware of in the military, and I read many books detailing the history of the Islamist war against America in the course of research for my thesis earlier this year.
Where were you when it happened?
I was living in Tacoma, Washington on 9/11. It was my habit to get up around 5:30 a.m., get ready, make my way to the bus stop at the Tacoma Dome, and take the bus to downtown Seattle, where I worked, arriving around 7:30 to my office in the second-tallest building in Seattle, on the 49th floor.
I started a little early–I’d taken my car into the shop for some maintenance on the day before, and it meant that I’d worked shorter hours on September 10th. (Which we now remember the last day of “the way things used to be”.) I left the house around 6:15, got down to the bus stop–it was still dark, in my recollection–and had a fairly normal ride in. I do remember the woman in the seat beside me talking into a cell phone. What I distinctly remember her saying is “And they fell? They both fell down?” with a voice filled with shock and disbelief. (I wish she would have told the rest of us on the bus what had happened.)
At the time, I thought that she meant a “jumper” from a bridge. You see, not long earlier, one fairly big news item in Seattle had been a woman who was standing on one of the bridges, threatening to jump. Well, she did this during rush hour, which is pretty awful anyway, and so people were very angry. “Jump, *****, jump!” screamed one exhasperated motorist out his window–people were justifiably horrified. Anyway, it was a big deal and that’s what I thought the woman on the bus must have been talking about.
But when I got to my building in Seattle, I noticed that something was off. There was a subdued huddle of office workers in the lobby, and the elevator bank was almost deserted, which was absolutely unheard-of at that time of day. When I got to my office, my supervisor came out of his office and told me what was happening (I think that the second tower was just about to fall at that point). I looked it up online, until the news server overloaded, and then logged off my computer (they were evacuating the building as a precautionary measure).
And I rode home on an overcrowded bus . . . much like the day 7 months earlier when we’d had the earthquake in Seattle and we all got sent home early. I got home, watched the TV coverage with unbelief, wondered what was going to happen next, and then went over to my cousin’s house and spent the rest of the day with her, watching the TV and feeling . . . numb.
One thing I do remember distinctly was all the speculation that our economy was going to fail because of this. I actually went to a store and bought a pair of shoes (that pinched horribly and I got rid of a couple years later) specifically to “bolster the American economy” and “do my patriotic duty–buy something.” Later on that action struck me as a very strange reaction. I suppose it was a lapse of judgment brought on by shock.
I went back to work the next day. I had gone through shock to anger–seething, gut-wrenching, overwhelming rage. How could someone do this to us? How could people perpetrate such a horrible act against people who were clueless, vulnerable, and who bore the perpetrators no real antipathy? I wanted to be able to do something, and yet here I was stuck on the other side of the country, all planes were grounded, and I was stuck at my office, where nothing real was happening (it was a law firm and understandably, most people weren’t concerned with matters legal for a few days). I was sitting on my hands and real life was happening 3000 miles away, and all I wanted was to go out there to Ground Zero and do something.
It didn’t help that this was Seattle and Bush-bashing headquarters and Washington State tends toward a certain Pacific Northwestern isolationism . . . so within even that first two days I was hearing a certain amount of whining about how if our government did something about this (that being taking on Afghanistan), it would be “another Vietnam” and they all started mouthing these “violence begets violence” platitudes that infuriated me further. It was like being on a playground, watching a kid get beaten up, and all these onlookers standing around saying that they didn’t want to intervene because then they’d be condoning violence.
So I talked to the Air Force recruiter on the 13th, and my life has taken a distinct turn as a result of that fateful day 5 years ago. I know for certain I would not be where I am now had 9/11 not happened. But then, that’s probably the case for lots of people.
Posted by Kjirstin 
Posted by Kjirstin 
