September 11, 2001 was a beautiful fall day in Mitchell, South Dakota. I was in school, the first period of the day, embarking on my twentieth year of teaching during a Tuesday early in the start of a new school year. It happened to be my preparation period and I was doing the things that teachers do on their “off” period; making some copies, writing up board notes, correcting papers, recording grades, answering emails etc. Doug Ellwein, an English teacher and a colleague down the hall from me said, “Mel, turn the TV on.” I said, “What channel?” He replied, “It doesn’t matter!” and he was gone.
There, on the television screen, was the smoking North Tower of the World Trade Center. The commentators were saying a plane had crashed into it. My first thought was some drunken pilot had committed the ultimate pilot error. The recent news had a Northwest flight crew involved in video games so deeply that they over shot their destination, the Minneapolis airport, and had to land in Canada. In the not so distant past more than one intoxicated pilot had been escorted off an aircraft, sometimes only after the plane had landed at its destination. On July 28, 1945 a B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building killing 14 people and injuring several others due to flying too low in dense fog conditions. Surely the “accident” I was witnessing on the television on 9/11 was akin to something like that. Then, on live television, another plane flew into the South Tower and the world forever changed.
There was confusion, what had happened (beyond the obvious) and why? Spectators on the ground watched in grim silence as people on upper floors were trapped by fire on lower floors. They stood, perched on ledges, weighing their chances. More than one chose to jump to their death rather than be burned alive. There was no way to save them, although the option of daring helicopter rescues had been proposed and its practicality looked into (unfortunately, it wasn’t practical). Then the unthinkable was followed by the impossible, the towers began to collapse on themselves filling the streets with debris and the air with smoke. The collapse of the Twin Towers led to the demise of other buildings proximate to them dousing people with more debris and clouds of dust making them ghostly white as they emerged from the toxic clouds running for their very lives.
More news, the Pentagon was hit. How many more planes were in the air? How many more structures were targeted? How many more people would die? Then United 93 plummeted to the earth; the passengers, alerted by instant news and cell phones, figured out what was going on. They didn’t know where they were going but it wasn’t to Cuba (a popular destination for hijacked planes in the 1970’s) and they knew it wasn’t back to some airport. So they did what patriotic Americans have done throughout the centuries, they stood up and fought back. We know now that they saved the US Capitol Building from a similar fate to the Pentagon and the Twin Towers.
Planes were grounded and fear ran rampant. That fear soon turned to rage and a grim determination for justice as well as death to terrorists and terrorism. Our two decades long war in Afghanistan is one of the legacies of 9/11, as is the 9/11 Museum and so is the memorial in Somerset County, Pennsylvania where United 93 went down.
There are other legacies as well. The behemoth Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11, as was the security theater of the TSA in airports. We have been relatively safe from foreign terrorists since 9/11 our law enforcement and security services have been hard working, diligent and if truth be told – lucky as well. Now “domestic” terrorists are a much larger concern than foreign terrorists, at least for the present.
The mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, is about to go on trial for his actions – twenty years after the fact. Osama Bin Laden conceived of the grand design but it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammad who recruited the flight crews and sweated the operational details of this devastating attack, my generation’s Pearl Harbor.
It is twenty years later. I can’t watch the documentaries and retrospectives without weeping in sorrow or boiling in rage, still after all these years. I’ve always been a death penalty advocate and feel if it ever is an appropriate punishment it surely is for acts of terror. Philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.” We must remember 9/11. We can’t afford to drop our guard or reduce our vigilance. The dead must be honored, those who are living and suffering from the effects of 9/11 must be cared for and those who would commit acts of terror must be hunted down like the rabid vermin they are and exterminated for the good of all decent people everywhere.