TWENTY-ONE

A Nation Suspended

The immediate feeling was disbelief, and it was followed by a powerful and unprecedented sense of national vulnerability. Out of a clear blue sky, using our own engines against us, armed with nothing but knives, terrorists had struck simultaneously at the chief symbols of American commercial and military might. The inconceivable had happened, and it had happened even though we were supposedly protected by the world’s biggest defense budget, by the greatest military power in world history, and by an at least creditable intelligence establishment that was supposed to find out about things like terrorist attacks before they happened. The phrases that were heard over and over again were “Everything has changed” and “Nothing will be the same again.” People watched as the television news programs spent the afternoon of September 11 and all of September 12 playing their footage of the second plane hitting the south tower and of the tremendous fireball the crash caused and of the two towers collapsing in that billowing cloud of dust. If they could strike so devastatingly once, why couldn’t they do it again?

Even in the two world wars, and in the Korean War and in the Vietnam War, there had been no real worry that our enemies could hit us where we lived. And now they had—not an enemy like Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany, world-class military powers, but a few men with knives inspired and manipulated by an ascetic Saudi Arabian fanatic who lived in a cave in Afghanistan. Previously unseen things were being seen—fighter jets patrolling the skies of Manhattan against the possibility of another aerial attack, national guardsmen in combat fatigues and masks over their faces marching in lower Manhattan. The entire island of Manhattan was sealed off to vehicular traffic. The stock markets were closed, and so were the bridges and tunnels. The baseball season was suspended for a week. There was no commercial air traffic at all on Wednesday, September 3, and very little of it on Thursday, when the first national grounding of planes in American history came to an end and the FAA allowed flights to resume. On a normal day there are about forty thousand flights. In that first week there was only a small fraction of that, and the planes were so empty that the airlines were asking for federal aid to enable them to survive. It was as though life as we knew it had stopped, to be replaced by an anxious emptiness, a national stillness, immobility.

In New York, the primary election that had been under way on September 11 was canceled. The Broadway theaters were closed, and if they had been open nobody would have gone to them. People did go to grocery stores to stock up on canned goods as if getting ready for nuclear war. Police arrested people all over the country—two men with box cutter knives on a train, ten men, one carrying a false pilot’s identification, at La Guardia Airport in New York—and the country worried that there would be another attack in the days that followed. A spate of bomb scares emptied buildings, schools, and government offices across the country. In Manattan there were ninety such scares on September 13, causing evacuations of Grand Central Terminal, the MetLife Building, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, La Guardia Airport, Macy’s department store, the Condé Nast Building in Times Square, and CNN’s Manhattan bureau. For a week, people bearing snapshots of missing loved ones went to hospitals to see if they had been found, or they posted them at makeshift memorials, instant floral parks—in Washington Square, in the Times Square subway station, hoping that their husband or wife or son or mother was wandering around someplace, stunned, perhaps stricken with amnesia, but alive. None of them were. Even at the site in lower Manhattan itself, the mountain of wreckage that had once been the two tallest towers in Manhattan, only a very few people were pulled out alive.

Mayor Guiliani announced that the death toll would probably be close to five thousand and that, in the first two days of the rescue operation, only thirty-five of the dead had been identified. Was it the worst day ever on American soil? In Pearl Harbor, with which September 11 was immediately compared—another sneak attack by a determined foe—2,390 Americans had died. During the long terrible day of the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War, 3,654 soldiers died on both sides. Eventually the estimates of the number of dead on September 11 would decline, to reach the final figure of 3,056, so it was the second most fatal day in the history of the United States, and yet the events, Antietam and September 11, weren’t comparable. In one soldiers had killed soldiers, face-to-face and over the course of a day. In the other terrorists had killed civilians who had done nothing more than show up for work, and they had done their killing in a single explosive burst, lasting 102 minutes from the crash of the first plane to the fall of the second tower. It had been history’s most devastating kamikaze attack. Unlike Antietam, it had been completely unexpected. People one instant had been drinking coffee from a paper cup and reading their e-mail and the next instant they were dead or dying. These facts and reflections, which were on everybody’s mind, added to the shock and the incredulity. September 11 was the worst thing that had ever happened in so short a time. Perhaps the only comparable event in history was Hiroshima, but even Hiroshima had taken place in the context of a declared war. Hiroshima was a surprise attack but not a sneak attack. September 11 was both.

What to do? Most conspicuously, what people all over the country did was express their solidarity with the victims, and with the city of New York. Firefighters and rescue workers from many places came to the city to help at what was quickly termed Ground Zero. Indeed, a kaleidoscope of events showed the effects of the terror attacks. For several days in various places in the city—the Forty-second Street subway station and Washington Square Park, for example—people put up pictures of their missing relatives, asking other people to call them if they could give them any news. Wreathes and messages of thanks and condolences were placed by grateful citizens in front of every fire station in the city.

In Normal, Illinois, three local radio stations set up a tent in front of Schnucks Supermarket on Veterans’ Parkway to collect donations in five-gallon water bottles—and the money came in at the rate of $5,000 per hour. Blood donor centers were jammed in Denver, Colorado, and at the nearby Silver Bullet Pistol Range in Wheat Ridge, customers who flocked to take September 11-induced target practice had bought out all the available ammunition by 10 A.M. Candlelight vigils were held in many cities, and people called friends whom they hadn’t seen or spoken to in years to make sure they were all right.

New York’s two baseball teams, the Yankees and the Mets, got special permission from Major League Baseball to wear police and firemen’s and Emergency Medical Service hats to honor those who had died saving others. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish clergy joined each other in ecumenical services to condemn terror and to mourn the dead. On September 11 itself, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, sold 116,000 American flags, nineteen times the number sold on the same day the previous year.

Vigilance was the word of the hour. When airline flights resumed two days after September 11, passengers heard unusual announcements from their captains, telling them, essentially, that if someone tries to hijack this plane, to fight back with whatever is at hand.

“Throw your shoes at him,” the captain aboard a San Francisco to Charlotte flight said. “A couple of you get up and tackle him. Beat the snot out of him. I don’t care.” He said that he had an axe in the cockpit, sharp enough to shave with. “For anyone to try to break into the cockpit, it would be a very bad idea.” And then: “Having said all this, I’d like you all to sit back, relax, and enjoy the trip.”

And then there was this announcement, made by the pilot on United Airlines flight 564 from Denver to Washington, D.C.:

“If someone or several people stand up and say they are hijacking the plane, I want you to all stand up together, take whatever you have available with you, and throw it at them. Throw it at their faces and heads so they’ll have to raise their hands to protect themselves. The very best protection you have against knives are pillows and blankets. Whoever is close to these people should try to get a blanket over their heads, pull them down to the floor, and I’ll land the plane at the closest place, and then we’ll take care of them. After all, there are usually only a few of them, and we are two hundred plus strong, and we’ll not allow them to take over this plane.”

Sometime later, an apparently deranged man, not a terrorist, tried to get into the cockpit on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. Several passengers, with flight 93 in their minds, jumped up and subdued him. There was the anthrax scare, when somebody, probably a person living in the United States and unconnected with Islamic extremism, sent envelopes containing anthrax bacilli to newspapers and Senate offices—killing five people and infecting thirteen. As the United States went to war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Muslim scholars held a press conference in Washington to announce a fatwa, making it a duty for Muslims to join in the fight against terrorism. The FBI arrested six hundred people, most of them foreign Muslims living in the United States, and began investigating them for possible connections with the September 11 attacks—though almost no such connections were found. Congress passed a law requiring airports to turn over the screening of baggage and passengers to a new federal bureaucracy, taking the job out of private hands. At Ground Zero itself one month after the attack, Mayor Giuliani led a memorial service against the background of the still-smoldering wreckage.

“The fire is still burning but from it has emerged a stronger spirit,” he said.

And in Middletown, New Jersey, population sixty-six thousand, of whom thirty-six were killed on September 11, Barbara Minervo, whose husband was among them, woke up every morning to find gifts of food left at her door by strangers.

“The kindness of people is what is getting me through this,” she said. “It’s enlightening to know that I’m not entirely alone.”

*   *   *

On the afternoon of September 11, the long north-south avenues of Manhattan were filled with pedestrians, people walking solemnly home from downtown because walking was the only way to get home. There were no subways or buses for most of the day. In the hours and days that followed, people went to blood-donor centers, thinking that that would be the way to help, but they were turned away after spending hours in line, because there were too many volunteers and, in a grim paradox, there weren’t very many injured who needed the blood. People had either died or they had gotten away. Aside from several dozen people brought to the hospital with severe burns, many of whom did not survive, there seemed to be little middle ground. In front of the New York City Medical Examiner’s office, trucks laden with body parts, which would be subjected to DNA tests as the long effort to identify victims got under way, were watched over through the night by Jewish volunteers who took turns chanting the psalms of David.

In Jewish law, the dead must not be left alone from the moment of death until their burial, and so a round-the-clock vigil outside the morgue on First Avenue and Thirtieth Street was organized by an Orthodox synagogue, Ohab Zedek, on the Upper West Side. On the Sabbath, when the men from Ohab Zedek were not allowed to ride to the site of the vigil, the relay was taken up by a group of Orthodox women from Stern College who camped out in tents and fulfilled the commandment to keep the dead company, singing the Hebrew psalms from midnight until sunrise.

The girls from Stern College symbolized a collective mourning, a shared sense of both tragedy and outrage. The victims had been so innocent, so many firemen and police and others among them who had bravely rushed to the scene to help, and that made the murderers seem to belong to a category of evil that was immeasurable even in a world that has seen so much evil. In this sense tragedy and outrage mixed with a sort of incredulity and wonderment: Why were we hated so much? Hadn’t we been on the Muslim side in the war in Afghanistan? Didn’t we help Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo? Wasn’t it the case that millions of Muslims, as President Bush pointed out in his speech before Congress, practiced their religion freely in the United States of America, to which they had come of their own free will? Clearly, we had something to learn about the unreasoning and unreasonable anti-American fury that existed in the Muslim world, where Osama bin Laden was being treated not as a villain but as a hero. There was a lesson there someplace, and it would be contemplated for a long time into the future. In the meantime, public support quickly built not just for a retaliatory strike, a few cruise missiles launched at a target, but for a long and complicated war against an only semivisible adversary. The Bush administration vowed to fight that war for a long time, against the terrorists themselves and against those who harbored terrorists, which in the first instance, meant Osama bin Laden and the Taliban of Afghanistan. The country would go to war and not since Pearl Harbor had the American people seemed so ready for it.