THE UNPRECEDENTED TERRORIST ATTACK AGAINST THE USA HAPPENING
BEFORE MY EYES AND CHANGING ALL MY PLANS, NOW, AND FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE
IN AMERICA
Sep. 11, 2001
I have always been aware that I was born a month after Pearl Harbor-an event the "will live in infamy" according to the immortal words of FDR's excellent speechwriters. Now, there is a new watershed over half a century later in my life and that of this still young nation with the youthful feeling of immortality and invulnerability. One nation, but under God, was visible before my eyes. Everyone will know where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001 from this point forward-a pretty Indian summer day in all but the deeds endlessly portrayed.
Right in front of me, as I was boarding the same kind of plane, I saw the quick flash of a low-plunging aircraft that hit with a surprisingly low pitched "Thump!" but with a compression that rattled the window against which I was leaning. No one moved.
I saw the mushroom cloud of black, then gray, smoke rising in the still air. It was obvious to anyone around an airport setting what had happened. It was an aircraft crash, but no more detail than that was apparent. The PA crackled with a calm voice: "All those of you about to board this United 611 flight to Chicago, please remain comfortably seated. We will not resume boarding. There is a nationwide stop-order, and this airport is 'sterilized'; that is, there will be no movement of any aircraft in or out or around this airport. You would be well advised to go back to the baggage claim area and pick up your bags since there will not be any traveling today, since there is a nationwide shutdown of all airports."
"Say what?" I asked the fellow who had given me the seat next to the electric outlet for my computer. He punched his cell phone to call his wife and said "We were just about to begin boarding, when they closed the airport and there is a big fire off the runway, so do me a favor and turn on the TV and see what is happening." He turned to me and said "There has been a bombing a the Pentagon, but she keeps saying something about New York, and then the phone went dead."
THE TEMPO AND TENOR OF THE TIME
CHANGES QUICKLY
People all around me were gathering where I was and a few of them noticed that I had a tape recorder and a camera out, and I took photographs of the ominous cloud rising, and one even brought over a video camera and was talking into it as he walked closer to the window taping all the way. I looked at my watch. It was 9:42 AM-I had been early to catch my flight and get all my bags safely checked in.
Most of the people were holding cell phones and several were shaking them. There was a rush over to the bank of phones behind the gate desk, since it seemed that the cell phones were unsatisfactory.
Abruptly came a shrill voice over the PA: "For those people trying to use the phones here, hang up immediately and make your way along toward baggage claim, and leave the airport as quickly as possible!" I stared at the smoke cloud and kept the audiotape running in a flurry of crescendoing announcements, and snapped further pictures as the cloud engulfed the end of the airport.
"For those of you who still insist on trying to use the phones, we have called security and they will be escorting you out of the airport. You must leave the airport. You must leave the airport now."
No longer was it the Pentagon alone that was a terrorist target, now it was National Airport itself under bomb threat.
The calm voice came back on: "Be sure to gather all your belongings and claim your baggage. Go back to your hotel or go home but you must leave the airport immediately."
Then a shrill voice from somewhere in the U/A terminal, not amplified by the PA, yelled, "Leave everything and run for your lives!"
The nice fellow who had been standing next to me turned and said in a tense voice made more urgent by his pale face "Let's get out of here." He dropped the book he had been reading about a third of the way through it, and left it to be trampled as he scurried down toward the Security X-Ray where people were milling around trying to go out through the detection gates. One of the Pinkerton guards waved at them to continue on and yelled, "Go! Go!"
MY THOUGHTS ON THE RUN IN A STAMPEDING
CROWD OF LEMMNGS,
FLEEING NO ONE KNOWS WHAT
TO GO NO ONE KNOWS WHERE
I was thinking of several odd things at this moment: first, I had not worn a suit nearly all summer, and now I was on a sweaty forced march overdressed, with three carry-on bags and expected to pick up three impossibly heavy checked baggage items I had tried so hard to part with that now were going to come back to me. There is no notice board for the baggage claim area for a departing flight, so I had to run along the bag claim areas until I saw a U/A baggage agent who was listening to orders through a walkie-talkie. A woman pushed by and asked "Is this where I pick up my bags?" He turned on her and shouted-"forget it! Run for the exit!"
She did.
I was relieved that I would not have to be somehow juggling six pieces of luggage I could hardly handle one at a time. We went out into the hot sun, and lined up along the steep grassy bank. I thought I should try to go back in and take the overpass to Metro, but there was a guard at the door pushing people outward. I heard a Metro rail car going overhead, but noticed it was dark and "Out of Service." I looked right and saw the rolling black cloud coming our way, and business men in suits and women in every kind of clothes from business formal to tight pants and short shorts mincing along on high heels over the grass. I stopped to hear a cop say he did not know, but just keep moving: "Go toward Crystal City-there are shops and restaurants there and it is underground. There will be no vehicles entering or leaving the airport. If you get as far as Jefferson Davis highway, you may get lucky and someone could give you a ride, but there is no where to go now, so I would advise you just keep going to Crystal City Underground."
Like a bunch of lemmings, we pushed forward up the grassy hill and over the decorative shrubs. Behind me I saw people running with handkerchiefs over their faces. One very obese woman from north Carolina with a sticky sweet drawl was perspiring and trying to get up the hill saying: "Well, I never in all my sweet days…" I was already loaded, but I tried to tug her with the hand carrying only the suit bag. Next to her was a 20-something woman who was crying, actually bawling. I looked and she had bloody knees bilaterally, having been knocked down on the cement while trying to pull her suitcase on wheelies, until she abandoned the bags.
A few folk surveyed the scene from the grassy hill under the shade of a little ornamental tree, almost as though it were picnic time. Just then, I heard the scream of jet engines and thought, "This does not sound like the airport is closed to me!" I looked up and saw a squadron of jet fighters peeling around in a tight circle overhead, and pivoting around the column of smoke billowing our way. "Why this is war!"
I said to the pilot and four crewmembers who were hurrying along with the rest of us. When a flight attendant is off the plane, there is no jurisdiction out here and one of them was trying to get ahead of the pack; she was not passing out drinks to this group-she had heard a colleague say "Get to those brick buildings over beyond George Washington Parkway-there will be 'wait areas' in there."
The pilot and I were walking along when I said to him that I was sweating more here now carrying the bags than I would be a week after I had planned to return when I would be running on this same Route One in the Marine Corps Marathon. It was then he said what I thought was hyperbole.
The World Trade Center has been hit by a 757 with a terrorist at the controls."
"How bad are the damages?" I asked.
"One of the towers is lying down on the ground," he answered. "I believe the name Osama Bin Laden will come up in this event rather soon.".
I looked at the other copilots or engineers, figuring this was worst-case scenario swagger. Then I saw tears in the eyes of the co-pilot walking behind us-not something that usually fits into exaggerated stories.
OBSERVING MY FELLOW PILGRIMS ON
THIS NEW KIND OF TERROR-FILLED ROAD TO BATH
There were good people here. There was no gallows humor that I heard-this event was not small enough for that. I saw a number of people taking turns pushing some elderly people in wheel chairs. When asked where they were going, one responded, "I sure don't know for you, since I haven't a clue for me."
The "Smart Carts" had never been so far away from home base, cutting across Route One. One man took off his luggage and put on it a woman who was old and fat. After trying to carry and push the woman, he put it down and some young tough-looking kids came behind him and picked it up to carry it along for him. I gave a napkin ironically marked "United Airline" from my pocket to a woman who said the smoke was making her have an asthmatic attack. She wasn't, but the napkin was therefore all she needed to mask her fears more than the smoke.
There was some anxiety about "Why weren't the cell phones working?" I heard later that they had closed down some cell towers. I know people who were separated were very anxious and even more anxious were the people who were together and did not want to lose their partners in the aimless forced march in the now warm sun.
I saw the parking lot for a hotel along Jefferson Davis Highway with a sign that said Crystal City Underground, and went for it knowing at least that it would be A/C cool. I went straight to a McDonald's, with an array of six TV sets, all but one of them tuned to national or New York news, and that one was showing the big cleft in the world's largest office building-the Pentagon sliced open. I looked at the charred and vacant hanging concrete and thought "I have seen that somewhere before, and the name was Potsdam, or Berlin, or Hamburg-or, Hiroshima!"
Then I watched the TV footage of the first and second hits of airliners-both American and United wide bodies-heading coast to coast, so by definition, overweight for landing at takeoff with a huge load of fuel---a big bomb with a wick at jet speed, making as precise a hit as could conceivably be possible in each tower, at just the right level to cause it to burn and buckle.
HOW CAN THEY PULL OFF A COORDINATED HIT
OF SUCH PRECISION?
I started thinking of the enormous sophistication and planning to carry out this suicide by some Jihad fanatic that could result in such a total "success" in such an evil mission. It was child's play to blow up two African embassies simultaneously in comparison. Remember that I had been close to the African event already, having been one of the last visitors to the Nairobi US Embassy before it blew up, and the place from which I had posted back the disc that became the book: "Out of Assa: Heart of the Congo."
They had had a previous shot at the WTC in 1993, and killed six and injured a thousand. This is a building that has at least nine building complexes, in addition to the twin office towers, and houses 70,000 workers and gets 90,000 visitors daily. I remember standing on a clear day on the observation deck, a la' "Sleepless in Seattle," and thinking---:"Why would anyone erect so attractive a target that is as vulnerable as if a bull's eye were painted around it for some one with a 'cause'?" To see it hit and look like a "Terminator Ten" movie set engulfed in fire, then to see each in sequence collapse---and just how many New Yorkers can a 110 story building cover when it drops? ---I thought the casualties will be in the tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand-a right respectable city in its own right.
The WTC, like Oklahoma City, housed some Federal offices, like the Bureau of Customs, Secret Service, etc, but it was the totemic value it had as the symbol of American economic imperial pride that doomed it from the get go. The same icon value would be the point of pride under attack at the Pentagon. I have many pictures with the skyline signature of Manhattan-and now, this symbol of the Big Apple is no more.
Hubris. Kismet.
But, these are no off-the-street thugs who are the terrorists. From what "Central Casting" does one order up a couple dozen 1) Expert pilots (to be one degree off on the glide path would have missed their targets by several miles-look for some Arabic manual flight instructions in a 'returned rental car', like the smoking gun of the last WTC attack!), 2) Saboteurs who could quietly avoid detection in the planning and the infiltrating and boarding of the aircraft with some kind of weapon that would escape detection going in, but cause enough fear that a few of them could overpower the cabin crew, and then in concert put it all together with a clear targeting doctrine and execution, 3) and Zealots, willing, no, eager, to die in the act? There cannot be hundreds of such around, and if there are four simultaneously hijacked wide bodies today that were masterminded, how many more such crews were out there and just did not pull off the same synchronized ballet of death on the wing?
The problems of CCCC, (I remember from my classes in the strategic planning of International Affairs and the assessment of capability and intent): Command, Communication, Coordination and Control. Amazing! And as unexpected as Pearl Harbor on a vaunted puffed up technologically impervious people, and as absolutely devastating!
IMPRISONED IN A CLOSED MCDONALD'S
They closed the McDonald's. The doors were locked with signs that said they were closing and only those inside could be let out with no new joiners. They did not serve anything either. It was there that I found the payphone that I left a message on Shirl's phone, and finally got through on the Amex card to Martheen and Don who could call Milly, Donald, Michael and GRAMEC-the latter could also see that with no airport in the US (or Canada, I now heard) open until after noon tomorrow, and with both Canada and Mexico closed borders, I would not be speaking tonight on the topic locked up in the slides in the duffel bag that was irretrievable, as was the morning lecture tomorrow.
Immediate problems include the fact that nothing is moving on the surface, and Metro was closed. The only way around in Washington was like the only way around in New York-walking-and I have three "impedimenta." I have a vehicle at GWU, but as I look at the TV screen I note that GWU closed just behind me this morning and no one is admitted, with security guards on all single access doors. It is a tough fall for education. First Lady Laura Bush was going to be the first sitting first lady Republican to testify before a congressional committee today on education policy, and that is postponed I see by McD's TV.
But GWU had already announced that it is officially closed for the week of the IMF meetings and the demonstrations that will cluster around their star tenant in GW real estate two weeks from now when I am allegedly gone abroad. And where would I be at that time? In a quiet backwater of the world-southwest Asia, the current central HQ of the same Osama Bin Laden, who is in Afghanistan-across the nearest border from the Spiti Valley where I would be at that time helping the kind of destitute people the protestors (that the DC police advised GWU to close) allegedly represent-although they do so at a far more comfortable distance.
But, gone, I am not-at least to Michigan. The next stop I must check on is the Halsted Society meeting in Boston at the Millennium Hotel-bad news-canceled. Well, I have to go to Boston under any circumstances: 1) To meet Elizabeth Yellen and pick up the MAP boxes for Nepal, 2) Meet the Harkens and transfer to them the duffel bag for Denver and the suit and slides bag for ACS New Orleans, and 3) to catch my Saturday night flight to FRA and then on to DEL, already a day late.
I sat and stared, at endlessly replayed TV clips of the same indisputable fact-the coordinated terrorists of small number and morbid determination had pulled it off-bringing the World's Remaining SuperPower to its Knees-a message that not only they can read in the events of today. It may happen to be Osama Bin Laden, but it really doesn't matter; revenge on this scale is like executing McVay one hundred times over. ---And even hanging by the neck until dead (assuring such martyrs of instant access to the idyllic gardens of paradise promised in the Koran) would not make the memorable images go away of the Super Power crumbling, and carefully recording itself doing so after furnishing the weapons in wide bodied high tech devices I was about to use-each of them named American and United.
Well, I do not know what happens next-as most Americans do not also. But what you can expect is a hypertrophied interference in everyday life and goodness in the name of security, since there should be zero risk assured in a repeat of this low probability event.
Now, meanwhile, I must be about my business in the six venues of this trip, which is postponed by the circumstances, not canceled by them..