I could feel it coming as August ended and September began. Images would arise in my mind’s eye as I went about my daily activities. But it was at night, as the psyche’s defenses relaxed and prepared for the restoration sleep is supposed to bring, that the pictures and feelings were the most vivid.
It has been twenty-one years since the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed taking with them several surrounding buildings. It has been almost twenty-one years since I stood looking into the deep wound in the earth that had been the foundation of those two out-sized symbols of American self-confidence. I knew why I was there, I just wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.
On September 11th, I stood in my living room and saw the live feed of two commercial airliners diving into the towers, I went to my phone and called the Red Cross. I was already on their list of mental health providers for community disaster response. I got a recording and instructions to leave my name and number. No doubt their staff was already activated and planning for a response to this man-made catastrophe.
A few weeks after that call, there I was on a cold New York day assigned to work at the “Pit” as everyone called it. Cranes lifted huge mouthful’s of twisted steel and unidentifiable mass and moved it to a huge pile at the bottom of a ramp that had been created to allow dump trucks to drive into the Pit where they could receive their load of debris. Smoke rose from where the material had been scooped up releasing stored heat still contained in the compressed remains of the once impossibly tall skyscrapers that had dominated the skyline of the lower west side of Manhattan.
I wondered if my feelings of rage and sorrow were anything like the feelings the survivors felt when they looked over Pearl Harbor a generation ago. Did they sense, as I did, that life in America had irrevocably changed? Any remnants of youthful innocence I had managed to hold onto at fifty, rose up out of my consciousness and drifted away with the puffs of smoke coming from the Pit.
I once worked with a man who had been in the U.S. Navy in WWII. He recounted to me how in the weeks leading up to the anniversary of the battle to take the island of Iwo Jima, he started having unsettling dreams of what he had experienced. As September 11th approached, I found myself, as did this aging gentleman, pulled back to my time in New York by images I don’t want to lose but sometimes wish I could.
It seems that history or, perhaps more accurately, fate takes us to places and experiences we never planned or wished for. When I became a licensed psychotherapist, I could not have imagined I would find myself toward the end of my career, working with military personnel at locations around the world. How could I have known that there was an invisible thread that ran from my father’s war, WWII, to my response at the “Pit”? Perhaps the author, William Faulkner, was correct when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
So on this Sunday morning, September 11, 2022, I sit in front of my computer returning to a day twenty-one years ago that altered mine and so many other’s lives. I am aware of how it and the experiences I’ve had since then, have shaped how I see life and the world around me.
I think I believed, like so many others, that the attack on the United States would unite the country as Pearl Harbor did sixty years before. It appears it did not. Why it did not will be fodder for generations of historians to write about. It does seem clear that one of reasons is that the wrath of America was misdirected. It was unleashed on a country that had no involvement in the attacks on that September day. Evil as the dictator of Iraq might have been, he was not our foe nor were the people of Afghanistan.
Our leaders gave us an enemy to destroy that was not our actual enemy. We poured blood and national treasure into a prolonged conflict that resulted in an embarrassing retreat and a nation divided and at war with itself. It’s as if that line from an old Sunday paper comic strip, Pogo, was more prophetic than anyone imagined, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I was quick, maybe even impulsive in retrospect, to be part of my country’s response to the attacks on September 11th. On this September 11, 2022, I am wiser about the effects of war on soldiers and their families and how to help them but I am at a loss about what to do about the effects of the uncivil war I see in my own country. The enemy that our leaders led us to believe was real was only a relatively small band of hate-filled people financed by a country that pretended to be our friend. Afghanistan and Iraq were only our enemies because we made them our enemies.
If Osama bin Laden and his followers wished to harm the United States, it appears they succeeded mightily. They didn’t have to defeat us, they only needed to turn us against ourselves. One only needs look at the video of the January 6, 2021 mob in our nation’s capitol to see how we have turned on ourselves, spurred on by self-serving political and civic leaders who lack the patience and wisdom to air grievances in ways prescribed in our laws and customs.
The destruction of the World Trade Centers didn’t just kill 2,977 innocent people and injure more than 6,000 others, it opened a chasm in the American psyche that has only widened since then.
It exposed our vulnerabilities, our inability to identify our real enemies because our leaders were either too devious or too naive to identify them. Perhaps in doing so, it would expose the mendacity and greed that perpetrates wars.
I wish I could say that the attack on September 11th has been righteously avenged and the U.S. and the world is safer because of our response. I wish I could. I saw truly patriotic men and women fight their hardest for their country because they believed it was necessary. I do not fault them for their patriotism. I do not fault myself for mine. I, along with them, went to war. I went because I thought I could help ease the psychological pain of war, they because they believed their country was at risk.
On this September 11th, I now see that my country was truly at risk, I just didn’t see then the underlying source of that risk. Osama and his followers were the catalyst for the ensuing war but the war itself was about our inability to function as a united country. We fought a war overseas that had no clear victory and then brought the war home in ways that continue to fail to identify who is the enemy. Instead we have allowed a hollow man and his mendacious, self-serving followers to turn truth into a dirty word that is to be expunged from political and social discourse.
The lesson of September 11, 2001, as I reflect on this September day 21 years later, seems to me to be that if we ever go to war again we should insist our leaders be a lot more truthful about who the enemy is. If not, the enemy will be us.
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Wonderful Bruce! So well said.