What I Remember From 9/11

I was driving to work when the first one hit, but I wasn't listening to the radio. I worked for Ericsson at the time, and in our fancy new building built at the peak of the telecom boom, we had two large plasma tvs in the lobby, which most always showed some kind of Ericsson PR, or if not that images of whales under the ocean or something like that.

People were gathered around the two screens as I walked in, I saw that one of the Twin Towers was on fire. Someone said a plane had crashed into it, I assumed it had been a small private plane and went to my desk. The building plan was open, and my desk was near the lobby area, so I could see people milling around, and my co-workers were alternately coming to their desks and going back out to watch. So I went to have a look, and heard that it had been an airliner.

My God, how could that happen, I thought, how could an airliner get that far off course? And then we all saw the second one hit, and we all knew in that instant. Some people screamed a little, there was a lot of hubbub, I remember thinking that was impressive, that someone could have pulled off something like that. Like, Oh yeah, I guess you _could_ do that. Well, you could do it once, anyway.

Then there were the other two planes, I don't remember now the timing of them, but for a while it seemed like they just kept coming down. And they hit the Pentagon, for crying out loud!

I didn't know what to do, there seemed to be no point in standing there watching it so I went back to my desk. Then a co-worker came in and said "The Tower fell!"

We talked about how many people there would be in the WTC, they said up to 25,000 in each tower. I remember trying to comprehend 25,000 people dying in the collapsed tower, trying to get some kind of handle on what was going on. And then the other one fell.

I remember thinking God damn those people. I remembered when they had destroyed the Buddhas at Bamiyan, and I had thought then that anyone capable of destroying a world archeological treasure was capable of any kind of atrocity, and here it was, up to 50000 people killed at once, and another world treasure destroyed.

It made me even angrier that they had used our own trust of the outlaw mentality to commandeer those aircraft. Before 9/11, everyone knew that the safest course of action for everyone in a hijacking situation was to play along with the hijackers. No good to be brave and try to do something because individual bravery would only jeopardize the lives of hundreds of fellow passengers. Even though the details had not yet come out, I knew that this is what they had done.

I thought about my daughter who was born at the very end of the Cold War, and had never known what it was like to live with the spectre of total annihilation, 12 years of relative peace she had seen, and now it would never be the same in her lifetime.

I took long walks during the two days following 9/11, I wanted to experience the days when all flights were grounded as much as possible. There would never be another time in my lifetime when there would be no sound of airplanes overhead, no contrails marring the skies. I wished I were in a wilderness area so I could get the full effect of a world before flight.

God damn those people, God damn them. It still hurts to think about it, more than it should, it seems, for someone who lives so far away from where it happened. Whenever I watch documentaries of it, I still just hurt, my heart races. I want to see World Trade Center, but even just the ads for it get me so upset, I know I'd be crying through the whole movie.