I was sitting in my office at CNN Center in Atlanta early Tuesday morning September 11, 2001. I was just back from foot surgery at the end of the previous week and my crutches were askew while I went through some tapes we’d shot earlier that summer in Poland and Rome for a documentary about Pope John Paul II and the Jewish community. The day before, I’d had a conversation with my friend and colleague Peter Bergen, who had taken leave to write a book about Osama bin Laden. He was worried that no one cared; The New York Times had interviewed him for a piece that was supposed to run in the Sunday edition, on September 9, 2001, about signs pointing to an imminent attack by al Qaeda. But it had only run on their nascent website.
I was screening an interview, bandaged foot propped up on another chair, when I heard and saw the first confused reports from downtown Manhattan. At that point, a second plane was just hitting the Towers and I started screaming, scrambling and trying to make my way two stories down to the newsroom because I knew this had to be a terror attack.
After spending some time in the newsroom, I went home to pack because a caravan was going to make its way later to Washington and New York. I remember driving home, seeing those highway signs that normally warn you of traffic jams lit up with three words – AMERICA UNDER ATTACK.
I got home, hobbled around packing and was hoping our three young boys would be home from school before I left again. They didn’t come, so I headed back to CNN Center, where my boss looked at me, my bandaged foot and crutches and just shook his head. No way was I going to be able to get myself halfway down Manhattan on foot. Besides, I was needed in the newsroom to help with the investigation.
A few days later, when the stitches came out, I was off to Cairo, then Amman. Eventually I would be in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq – which never had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks but was twisted into the war on terrorism by an epic act of self-delusion and opportunism that backfired spectacularly and horrifically. Terror attacks returned to London, not by the IRA but by young men taught bomb-making skills in Pakistan.
We had the war on terror, the global war on terror, the endless war in Afghanistan where we kept repeating the same mistakes on a seemingly annual basis until Kabul fell to the Taliban, almost two decades after they had fled, seemingly defeated.
Twenty years seems like a long time, a lifetime. Or thousands of missed lifetimes.
We will shed our tears for that horrible day, that horrible morning and for all that followed. We were never really called upon to sacrifice, not as a country. There was no draft, there was no universal service. Thousands died in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places we never heard of. Most people didn’t know we were still in Afghanistan until the government there collapsed and the blame game started.
What have we learned?
I think of one story we did a few years after the attack. Not of the wars abroad but a conflict at home. There were plans to build an Islamic community center near Ground Zero and howls of outrage as it got twisted and relabeled as the mosque at Ground Zero. I went to the site, which had in a previous iteration been a clothing store that my grandfather would take us to every time we visited New York. We walked the blocks to Ground Zero which was still an open wound in lower Manhattan. When our story came out, we did something that no one else had bothered to do as the debate raged. We went to the site of the other Ground Zero, where the hijackers crashed American Airlines 77 into the Pentagon at 9:37am, murdering 184 people on the plane and on the ground.
The Pentagon had been rebuilt and at the site was an interfaith chapel, used regularly by Christians, Jews and Muslims. Every weekday at 2pm, the Islamic call to prayer was heard and Pentagon chaplain Col. Daniel Minjares told us, “I think this representative of America … not just Army values but what America, the best of what America represents, that various groups, various faith traditions can all use the same building. We understand each other better, and we support one another.”
For a moment, after our piece aired, the debate was quelled by Col. Minjares and his calm words.
For a moment, we were the country we promised ourselves we were going to be in those days after 9/11, when the unthinkable was becoming reality.
The writer is a producer for CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’.