Reflections on 9/11 (now + 14)

[Mountaineer]

I remember September 11, 2001.  I had retired only a few weeks before that fateful day.  My wife and I were watching the morning news and saw some of the events unfold.  New York.  Washington DC.  Pennsylvania.  The horror of watching a plane fly into the tower.  The horror of the flames and black smoke.  Was it real?  What was happening?  The debris.  Air traffic confusion.  How many were killed?  People running.  Buildings smoldering.  Blackened faces of rescue and fire squad members.  Choking smoke and dust.  The President executing emergency plans.  Death.  Who could be so evil?  Why?  Who?  Why?
 
The following are posts in another forum I read, these reflections I thought were particularly poignant.

... M

I will let the critics exercise the freedom of speech that our military has defended over the last 14 years.

During these years, I have left my home and family four times. 2001 to the Pentagon. 2003 to Operation Iraqi Freedom with Amphibious Task Force East. 2007-2008 to Marine Forces Reserve, New Orleans when we sent over half of all Marines in theater from the Reserve Force. And 2012-13 to Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay (yes - the infamous detention facility). None were easy - the hardest was 2003 when I baptized my son and three days later kissed him goodbye.

In between, I have made too many Casualty Assistance Calls during which the family of hero is notified that their son or husband (all my calls were for men) will never again hug his loved ones, see his child grow to a young woman or feel the joy of a family reunion. At one point, my Blackberry beeped 21 times in two hours - each beep was a casualty notice of another Marine Reservist from a battalion we had sent to Iraq. I hate the sound of beeps now and my cell phone never uses that notification sound.

I have witnessed amazing acts of courage from young people in uniform. I have stood next to the true heroes of our age - the families who send their loved ones off to war, pray for their return, watch the news every moment on CNN or Fox and love their warrior when he or she returns whether whole or wounded in body, mind or spirit. I have held the hand of a 19 year old widow who spoke to say that nothing made her prouder than to be the wife of a United States Marine. These are my people - I am one of them, a shipmate and a brother.

My own family has gone through all this except that they got me back alive though not necessarily healthy. They love me, support me and take pride in what we as a family have contributed to our nation's defense.

So let the critics speak. God bless them! But I know it was all worth it. There is evil in the world and it is an evil that must be confronted. My children will live in a nation where they are free. In one year, I will retire from the Navy. I have never carried a weapon. I have never been a warrior. But I have been a pastor to men and women who have given or are willing to give their very lives for my children. And for that privilege I thank the Lord of the nations, the Prince of Peace.


I remember driving to my family to the Baltimore Science Center, only to be greeted by a friend in the parking lot whom we were meeting with, "Did you hear?"

I remember around Noon when the PA in the Center announced that Baltimore was closing and that we were to return to our cars and go home. I remember the thousands of people on the various expressways, driving crowded but polite.

I remember getting home and trying to get in touch with friends who worked downtown. One had just had his office moved from the WTC across the river to Jersey City.

I remember waiting for word from parishioners who had been in the Pentagon.

I remember opening the Church that evening for prayer. I remember  remembering as a boy shopping at the Washington Market and eating red pistachios and Golden Delicious apples with my dad, and watching those towers go up.  I remember remembering seeing them over the salt marshes of the South Shore as I life guarded my way through college and seminary.

I remember weeping for those who last moments were terror on a level I can't even begin to imagine. My prayer was for them to wake in the embrace of of the One who vanquished the powers of hell.

And I remember thinking that maybe, just maybe, if the transition of power had gone on a little more smoothly and on time, and if the previous administration had spent less time and effort dealing with fellatio, and Al Gore had shown at least the same level of class and decency as Richard Nixon (who really was robbed), then maybe, just maybe there would not have been a smoking crate where once I ate sashimi for the first time.

I am so done with everyone beating up on the Bush the Younger and his administration for what they did in the aftermath (complaints about which I do not necessarily disagree) while remaining silent on the incompetency and venality of the Clinton/Gore Administration and their complicity through negligence and ineptitude in the death of three thousand Americans.

Sorry for the bluntness. But I have been carrying that for 14 years, and this is the first time I have spoken as such publicly.


I'd like to share just a few memories.  When I commented above that I was "there" I used quotation marks rather than state lower Manhattan.  Just as 9/11 began as a normal day, so did yesterday. So has every 9/11 since 2001. But it only takes a short while to return to the images of that day.

-My Reuters screen started beeping loudly -- a scrolling message that a plane hat hit the WTC.  Within seconds, most of our trading lines went down.  Though we could see everything going on, I don't think any of us grasped what was happening.

-I walked 14 miles to my home - there was no transit.  I don't remember any discomfort of the walk - all I remember was the absolute silence of the city.  Thousands of us crossed a bridge together and none of us shared a word. 

-When I came home, I looked in my purse and found a pass for the WTC marked September 10th.  Many of the people with whom I met the day before were now dead.  We didn't realize that yet.

-The days that followed were almost worse.  Waking up and smelling the smoke and death - we couldn't open our windows at home.  Riding the elevated subway into the city and seeing the fire which went on for days.  Seeing people carrying signs with photos:  Have you seen my son, my daughter, my husband, my wife.  One of those with signs was carried by my neighbor.  Another a member of our congregation. 

-On the walk home, a few of us stopped at a hospital to donate blood.  Many others had the same idea.  They didn't need blood.  No survivors were being brought in.

-A funeral for a firefighter - his wife was the youngest widow - age 24 with two children.  She called me at 6 a.m. about five months after the attack to tell me they found a bone and she would now lay him to rest. 

-Going to a card store to buy a sympathy card for a friend on the death of her mother-in-law -- there were no sympathy cards left. 

-After weeks when it became clear that we were no longer talking about "missing" (and it was weeks), the funerals began.  We had moved into our uptown offices at Rockefeller Center across from St. Patrick's.  Every day at least one funeral. 

-Interviewing Dan Nigro, who was elevated to Chief of Dept. on site that morning after the Chief was killed.  Dan told me that he had a funeral scheduled every day from December through March.

Those are just a few of many images that remain with me.  Those images are why I think this should be a time to simply remember.  To give thanks for the lives that were lost and to give thanks for those who responded on that day and the days to come.  No more…no less.


Bishop Stephen Bouman posted this on Facebook.  As that puts it in the public arena, I'm reposting herein:

From Ground Zero: A firefighter was trying to be unemotional when he reported that they had hit a “hot spot”—the bodies of eight firefighters had been recovered Thursday afternoon and Friday morning . . . perhaps the most poignant and sad was the construction worker curled up in a fetal position on a cot, totally inaccessible to any human touch, clutching a stuffed animal, and a photo of his sister. She had been a hostess at Windows on the World. Her body has not been found. Her brother, the back hoe operator, keeps looking for her. As I passed by I saw that he was quietly sobbing.

The attacks 14 years ago unleashed a a changed world. ISIS, Syrians stuck in Hungary, the changed and charged landscape in our own country about immigrants and refugees, two wars and counting...

The 9-11 events have been commodified, politicized, used to make various points. Today I want to remember those that were actually there, on a field in Schenksville, Pennsylvania, the Pentagon, the burning towers downtown New York. First responders, eyes haunted, asking for prayer or just a squeeze on the arm...the funeral season as bagpipes wailed again and again through the streets of Queens as one fire fighter after another were remembered...knots of uniformed airline workers remembering their crews after a memorial at one of our churches near LaGuardia...bankers and insurance workers remembering their colleagues from Canter Fitzgerald and Marsch McClennan, including the president of Trinity in Brooklyn. They have names and loved ones. Lars Qualben. Vinnie Morello. Their names are being read at Ground Zero as I write this, for the fourteenth time.

I don't want to remember it again. I don't want to ever forget it. I'm as stuck as all of us are. And of course there is nothing particularly "special" about these attacks in a world of ground zeros every day. I have wept in New Orleans, the site of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, the West Bank, and on and on. But I am viscerally connected to this one and still haunted by people waiting in the narthex in the ensuing years, waiting to tell me what they saw, what they lost, how they are stuck.

No politics for me today. No wise conclusions, No piety. Still stuck. So I offer this remembrance for all of us who face tragedy and must continue to heal by telling our stories, even if thee is no easy resolution.

So,I'm remembering being with a group of local ecumenical leaders at the national headquarters of the Episcopal Church in the United States to welcome an international ecumenical delegation, “A Living Letter of Compassion to U.S. Churches.” I was pleased to meet Bishop Samuel Azariah of the Church of Pakistan; Dr. Septemmy Lakawa of Indone- sia; Jean Zaru of the Society of Friends in Palestine; and Bishop Mvume Dandala of the Methodist Church, South Africa among others. Their lands know insecurity, violence, and tragedy and they shared many of their stories. Their presence was crucial.

Kathleen O’Connor said: “To honor pain is not an invitation to solipsism, narcissism or egocentric foolishness. To honor pain means to see it, acknowledge its power, and to enter it as fully and squarely as we can, perhaps in a long spiritual process. To do so is ultimately empowering and enables genuine love, action for others, and true worshipfulness.”
When the conversation with our visitors from the World Council of Churches turned political I learned how lam- entations enables genuine love. I became agitated. I did not want to hear why people hated America or what could pos- sibly justify this mass murder in our city. Not yet. It seemed that these visitors, the “narrator” of Lamentations, were still observing our sorrow in the third person mode, passing judgment, not really seeing us. I was still lamenting. When it was my turn to speak I said something like this: “We are just so sad right now. We can still smell our brothers and sisters in the rubble downtown. We are not ready for lectures. Please, just sit down with us and share this time when our faces are in the dust. My head tells me you are probably right and we have a lot to learn and we need a better global politics. My heart is not ready.”
I rose to leave. One of the delegation of visitors, Bishop Mandala of South Africa, asked me to wait. He allowed my lamentations to enable genuine love. This dear, wise man said something like this: “In our culture when tragedy happens we don’t all visit at once. We come a few at a time so that each time the person in sorrow has to answer the door and tell the story again of what happened and shed the tears. As the story is told again and again healing can begin. We will keep knocking on the door. We will not leave you alone in your grief.”

I leave with this wonderful quote from Peter de Vries in “The Blood of the Lamb”:
“the recognition of how long, how very long, is the mourners’ bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship - all of us, brief links ourselves, in the eternal pity.”