September 12, 2006

My 9/11--A Personal Reflection

Against Christopher Hitchen’s wise advice to avoid recitations about one’s own private 9/11, here are nevertheless a few words describing my experiences that day, as I feel, now five years on, that the time is right to share them. This is purely a personal reflection, without judgments about the wisdom (or lack of) any policy choices made since then in the global war on terror that began that day. With this by way of brief preface and disclaimer, here is my 9/11 story.

I woke up to the news that the Towers had just been hit, and decided to stay downtown that A.M. (I lived a couple blocks south of Union Square at the time). Needing to head over to a friend’s apartment in the East Village, I caught my first glimpse of the two Towers on fire on my way further downtown. I still remember the block I was on when I first saw the Towers in flames: University Place and 11th. “Holy Shit”, I thought. “What’s going to happen to the people up on those floors!?!” It was already clear that, with two towers in flames already, this had been a concerted attack, not some fluke accident. My mind was reeling and processing this information, but not coherently yet.

In the East Village, down around 1st Avenue and 2nd Street, a guy in a livery cab with his radio on and windows rolled down turned to me as I waited at my friend’s apartment door ringing the buzzer: “They just hit the Pentagon, and a car bomb went off at the State Department” (this last a rumor that appeared to be circulating widely that AM). Oh no! I thought of the many times I had been to the State Department, visiting my father who had served there during a long three decade plus diplomatic career. How many there might have been lost, I wondered? And the Pentagon… the very seat of American military power! What stunning and horrific developments. The nation was under concerted attack.

I rushed back to my apartment a few minutes later. On the street, there was already grafitti ("Time to Fight Back"). And this was the East Village! Back at home, only one channel was working for some reason. I guess antennas had been knocked out for most of the channels. Was it CBS still functioning? I can’t recall. No commercials, just non-stop coverage of the towers on fire. And then, the unthinkable happened. The first Tower crumbled! And then the second! Fear. For the first time that day I felt real fear, deep fear. Now if felt like anything could happen. Like all bets were off. At this point, I was pacing somewhat madly around the apartment, incredulous, agitated and aghast. The last time I had felt anything close was seeing the fall of Srebrenica broadcast on CNN from my apartment in Zagreb in July of ‘95. But this was of course totally different. I was in my hometown, and what I thought then could be tens of thousands of people had just died in a massive dust-cloud a few dozen blocks south of my location. Lower Manhattan had just become a war zone.

A few minutes later, my roommate arrived (we shared a loft space). He was a bond trader at Goldman Sachs, and their offices were way downtown, very close to WTC, at 85 Broad. He was with about five colleagues. They had just raced uptown, I think on foot. Boy did everybody look shaken up, but also almost numb, very resigned. About a half hour or so later, I volunteered to get everyone lunch, and walked across Broadway in the low teens to find a place. Dust-covered people were streaming up Broadway escaping downtown. I turned to a friend: “This is like the kamizakes at Pearl Harbor. Except it’s an iconic civilian target in the heart of our greatest city.” But I still couldn’t really fathom what had just happened. I picked up some Mexican food, and all the deli guys were looking at the unfolding events on a small black and white T.V. I headed back to my place, and we ate lunch, staring at the news, still in profound shock. I think everyone just wanted to be around other people, and hard as it is to imagine, those who lived uptown weren’t quite ready to trek north just yet. Everyone waited another hour or two to feel that it was ‘safe’ to head back out.

Around 4 PM, I felt I needed to get outside again, and told my friends I was heading to a watering hole, unsure which one. I ended up further north, quite by chance, at the Gramercy Park Hotel and started ordering drinks (perhaps I gravitated towards the comfort of the beautiful park nearby). Grown men were walking in and breaking into tears. “I lost X” said one, to the bartender, before starting to cry and shake. It was awful. On CNN, some military action was taking place in far-away Afghanistan. Were we already retaliating? No, couldn’t be...probably something related to Massoud’s recent assassination, I figured. Friends gathered, now nearing a half dozen of us, and we decided to have dinner at an old steakhouse called Billy’s in the East 50s. We took the subway (yes, north of 14th street, it was working OK even that day, if memory serves), perhaps wanting to reassure ourselves that our quotidian habits hadn’t been violated. Six of us gathered around a large table, and we proceeded to order big steaks and lots of bottles of full red wines and more scotches. Discussion got heated and emotional, as we began to try to figure out: Who? From where? Why? It was an animated discussion, not least as there were some foreign policy hands among us. We figured it was Osama bin Laden who had ordered the attack, and that major U.S. forces would be in Afghanistan sooner rather than later. I can’t remember if Iraq was mentioned, but I do remember someone kicking around something akin to what came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, that terrorist sanctuary states should be held to account as much as the terrorist groups themselves, if a rather raw, inchoate version of it.

But the specifics of the discussion, now five years on, are rather cloudy. I only remember that we were loud, even a bit rowdy, almost as if the dinner was meant to serve as a rallying call to help bolster our spirits. The owner came over, a great old school New York City lady, the great-granddaughter of founder Mickey Condron (as it turns out, Billy’s was the oldest family owned restaurant in NYC, having opened in 1870): “We’ve been open every single day for over a hundred years,” she told us. “Waiters walked over the Brooklyn Bridge today to get to work”, she said. (I paraphrase, relying on memory, and hope I've got it right still). God I was happy to hear that, proud of her spirit, her staff's spirit, the city’s spirit. We’d make it through this, I thought ( Mike Bloomberg’s anti-smoking ban would later do Billy’s in, where 9/11 didn't!).

That night I went to bed with heavy heart, anguished and angry, but with a sense of innate optimism that the American way of life would persevere through this trial. On at least three occasions later, I would have nightmares about planes flying into buildings, causing mass casualties, but not that first night. I think I slept soundly, and don’t remember exactly what the next morning brought, save that the dust and stench were beginning to spread, enveloping the city—and that I was curious to see the New York Times headline on Sept.12th, which struck me as well chosen: “U.S. Attacked”. The weeks to follow were equally dramatic, in many ways, particularly downtown (through the post-attack weeks and months there was a marked difference between uptown and downtown, with the atmosphere much more impacted south of 14th Street, and especially south of Houston). But that is a story for another day. For that night, we had persevered as a city through the worst terrorist attack in US history, and could be counted among the lucky ones that grim and fateful day. An old classmate was not so lucky, as were so many of the other victims of this odious attack on innocents, whom we must always remember. Much has happened, both in the world at large, and in my little life, these five years. I moved to London, and then back to New York, I got married, I changed jobs. But now half a decade on, that day still remains firmly etched in my memory, and it's a rare day that I do not think about it at least once. I suspect that will always be the case, for the rest of my life.

Posted by Gregory at September 12, 2006 12:05 AM