Before & After
Nobody comes out of any given eight-year stretch quite the same person they went in, thanks to normal aging and experience. In time of war, with a sharply defined starting point, the change is likely to be more profound. The banality of a sunny workday morning with all its unremarkable elements rendered sinister and traumatic, followed by years of uncertainty, political upheaval, combat and loss for some, means that for many Americans, there was the world before, and the world after. There is nothing cliche about what is now an old cliche, “Everything changed after Sept. 11.” Because everything changed.
Via the Boston Herald, here’s something on The National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum, a work in progress that includes gathering video, stills and stories. In keeping with the recent theme of what images are acceptable and should be seen, I thought this was interesting:
“I and many family members don’t want revisionist history, and we don’t want this sanitized,” Wolf said. “It is very important that people remember what happened that day: This was civilization, people merely at work, caught up in religious fanaticism.”
Charles Wolf was in his Greenwich Village apartment and reports seeing an American Airlines jet fly overhead and into the office tower where his wife was working. So here are some images:
Two who were close to friends of mine lost that day: Peter West, an executive with Cantor Fitzgerald, 104th floor, North Tower. His son Matt is a photographer at the Boston Herald. Rick Rescrla, security chief for Morgan Stanley, credited with successfully evacuating thousands thanks to his preparedness and cool head, died in the South Tower. He served with 2/7 Cav at the Ia Drang in Vietnam in 1965 with several friends of mine, who say keeping people’s spirits up and never giving up is what Rick was all about. You may recognize him from the photo below, taken when the bayonet charge was ordered at LZ X-Ray. He’s a Brit who became an American, and then came to embody some of the best and hardest parts of what it means to be an American.
We all share those images. The horror of the day imprinted something on everyone. A lot of my personal memories of the day are about the sky. A clear blue one. September is the best month in New England, perfect weather. I still love it, but I can never look at a perfectly clear blue September sky without thinking about it.
For me it starts with the memory of sunset the night before. Sept. 11 is our anniversary, but we went out on the 10th to celebrate because I had Sundays and Mondays off in those days. I remember watching the sun set across Dorchester Bay from a restaurant’s outdoor deck. It was a beautiful clear evening with just a couple thin wisps of pink cloud, maybe some contrails. There would have been planes cutting across the sky from Logan International Airport on the other side of Boston Harbor. It was the same piece of sky two of those planes would cut through a few hours later.
Everything changed in the morning. I remember getting the news, my wife interrupting me while I was mowing the patch of grass along the street that I had missed the day before. When she said a plane had hit a building in New York, I shrugged it off and went back to mowing, thinking she meant a small plane. My son, then 5, watching cartoons and flipping through channels before late-morning kindergarten, was the one who told her, alarmed by what he saw on every channel. Then she came back out and said there was another one. At that point I started heading into work. I remember driving in under the September sky, hearing the report about the Pentagon on the car radio, and watching diverted planes empty out of the sky into Logan. It was a lonely and menacing kind of thing to see, and still looks that way every time I see it, which is most days, heading up the Expressway into Boston.
On Sept. 12, we saw an F-18 flying over our house, out of Otis Air Force Base, the reservist base on Cape Cod about 30 miles south of here that had scrambled jets on the 11th. Our son saw it. He knew planes weren’t supposed to be flying. We told him it was ours. They would get the bad guys. The little boy jumped toward the sky with his fist up and cheered. War has defined much about our lives since then.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:25 am Comments (3) on Friday, September 11, 2009
3 Responses to “Before & After”
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September 11th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Thank you, Jules.
This is excellent.
September 11th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
I had almost the same reaction. I was working in the office when my wife saw it on TV and told me about it, and I shrugged it off for the same reason you did. When she screamed and said another plane had just crashed into the other building, I realized what was happening.
It’s something you never forget, though they are trying very hard to make sure our kids do. I’m sure the ultimate plan is to have 9/11 eventually known for being “Service Day” and nothing else.
September 12th, 2009 at 8:14 am
Yes, I got that September Eleventh feeling last week, when we had such beautiful dry clear weather. It was kind of nice to have the rain yesterday. Went well with vanderleun’s poem.
That morning, we heard about the first plane on the radio and figured it was a terrible tragedy with a small plane, then turned on the TV and were watching when the second plane hit. My husband decided to go to work anyway, but turned around when he heard about the Pentagon on the radio. We sat and cried in shock, thinking nothing would ever be the same again.
What shocks me now is how little has changed. We are still largely complacent. The U.N. still exists in its toxic form. I did not expect either of those things. (Nor would I have ever dreamed that we would join the so-called Security Council, much less chair a session of it.)
I tried to be patient with people who didn’t understand Bush, who called him a warmonger. I knew people were frightened, I tried to allow for that. I figured they would come around. Now I don’t know what to think. I really don’t.
My mom asked, early on, “why does this man want war?” I said “because freedom is at stake!” I thought that would sound familiar to her. My father and everyone he knew signed up for the service when the U.S. entered World War II for exactly that reason, and he never talked about it except when it was necessary to make that particular point about what was at stake. My mom was a few years younger, about the age during World War II that I was during the Vietnam War, and equally clueless, it seems. She didn’t get it. She hadn’t learned it. (And, yes, neither had I, until rather recently.)
My father’s silent wisdom together with my mother’s silent ignorance present a grim summary of our culture.
Sometimes I feel good about the way many of us are trying to gulf that gap, by sharing our ideas and doing our best to listen to one another.
Sometimes.