I heard it on the car radio. An announcer describing a fire in one tower of the World Trade Center, and a fireman being interviewed about how hard that kind of fire would be to fight. Then, partway through the interview, the announcer broke in. A second plane. By the time I reached the office the first tower was down.
That night I wrote about it. Not for anyone, and not for publication. I wrote it because writing is what I do when something is too large to hold, and then I left it alone for twenty-five years.
Why publish an old journal entry unedited?
Because the value is in what it doesn’t know.
Everyone who has written about that day since knows what came next. Two wars. Twenty years in Afghanistan. The Patriot Act. The security apparatus that grew up around all of it. A generation that’s no memory of airports before the queues. A document written that evening knows none of that. It’s a record of one mind at one hour, and every prediction in it is still open. Edit it, and it becomes a commentary on history. Leave it alone, and it stays evidence. So here it is, with nothing changed but two typos.
What I wrote on 11 September 2001
As I drove to work this morning I turned on the radio as usual, and heard the announcer talking about a major fire in one tower of the World Trade Center in New York. They were interviewing a fireman who was informing us as to how difficult it would be to put out this kind of fire. I soon found out that an airplane had crashed into the side of the building.
As the man talked he was interrupted by a horrified announcer, a second plane had crashed into the second tower of the World Trade Center. The world watched in horror as, on live television, a plane blew through one side of the building and flames jetted out hundreds of feet. By the time I arrived at work, the first tower had collapsed.
I rushed into the office to discover this was a major terrorist attack. Three targets had been hit, both towers of the World Trade Center and a real portion of the Pentagon had ceased to exist.
There were reports of a fourth attack, a crash, a car bomb and dozens of other stories of incredible violence flying around the news. It was terrifying, horrible and without doubt one of the worst things that I’ve ever seen.
What has happened? A small army of terrorists, the forces of evil, have taken their war to the shores of the United States. They have struck a blow typical of all cowards, they’ve convinced simple-minded, easily manipulated people of the necessity to kill thousands or even tens of thousands of innocent human beings. They’ve caused mindless destruction in the name of their cause. These are the forces of chaos, and make absolutely no mistake about it, today we’ve seen the effects of pure, evil unmasked.
What’s a terrorist? This is a special brand of scum. They’re not fit to be called human beings, and I wouldn’t call them animals as that would be degrading those other beings that share our planet with us. Terrorists are the kind of scum that even drug dealers and hardened criminals wouldn’t want to be associated with.
Why didn’t the United States see this coming? The people of the United States are, for the most part, civilized, good human beings. It can be very difficult for a good being to recognize evil in the first place, and it can be virtually impossible for any of us to understand to what this kind of scum is capable of.
We in the United States have our shortcomings. We don’t always do the right thing, and sometimes we do some pretty silly things, but overall, we’re a good and caring people who want to see the rest of the planet do well. What should the United States do now? First of all, we need to understand that this attack came from a small group of evil creatures. These creatures don’t deserve mercy as they aren’t civilized in any definition of the word.
It also needs to be understood that we MUST REMAIN CIVILIZED. We’re not barbarians, we’re good human beings. We don’t need to needlessly strike out at innocents without cause.
We must and we’ll strike back. However, we must be absolutely sure that we strike intelligently and with the precision of a surgeon who knows exactly what manner of cancerous tumor he’s removing. It’s our right to defend ourselves, and it’s our right to demand and establish justice, it’s our duty to ensure that justice is indeed served properly and in good time.
One critical goal of this attack was to destroy some of the symbols of American power. The biggest symbol is the World Trade Center.
We MUST rebuild the twin towers, grander and more beautiful than ever before. We must clean up the damage, plan a new set of towers, and get them reconstructed as fast as possible. The towers must be rebuilt to show these uncivilized sub-human beings that they can’t do permanent damage.
We MUST identify, with certainty, who’s responsible for this attack, and we must do it quickly. The United States spends billions or even tens of billions of dollars every year on intelligence, every single piece must be turned towards finding the culprits.
Once we do identify, with certainty, the responsible parties, they must be destroyed, without mercy and without delay. It’s imperative that evil not be tolerated when it’s unmasked itself for all to see.
Most important of all, we must now understand that we’re at war with these terrorists. We’re at war and we must act as if we’re at war. All of our military power must be channeled towards finding these creatures and taking them out. Fast.
Finally, we Mustn’t allow evil to corrupt our basic good. We must continue to hold out our hand to the rest of the world. We must continue to help establish order on the planet. And we mustn’t harm innocents in our search for the guilty.
What the document gets right about that day
The reporting is accurate. That surprised me. Radio first, then the second plane during a live interview, then the collapse before I reached the office. The confusion about a fourth attack and a car bomb is exactly right, because that’s what was on the air for hours.
The structural instinct holds too. Almost every paragraph is a question with an attempt at an answer. What has happened. Why didn’t we see it coming. What should we do now. A mind under that much load reaches for a structure, and questions are the cheapest structure available.
And the last paragraph is the one I’m gladdest about. Don’t let this change what we are. Don’t harm innocents while looking for the guilty. Someone furious enough to spend three paragraphs on the word scum wrote that, and he still put the restraint at the end, in the position of most weight.
What it gets wrong
Three things, and they’re wrong in different ways.
The towers. I wanted them rebuilt exactly as they were, grander, and fast. That never happened and was never going to. What went up instead was one building, One World Trade Center, opened thirteen years later, alongside a memorial occupying the footprints of the originals. Two voids in the ground where the towers stood, with the names cut into the parapets.
I was wrong about what the response should be, and I was wrong for a reason worth naming. I was thinking about the buildings as symbols of power and about defiance as the answer.
What was built is a place about the people who died. That’s the better decision and I wouldn’t have reached it that night.
The language. Scum, creatures, sub-human, not fit to be called human beings. Three paragraphs of it. I understand the man who wrote that and I’m not going to pretend I would have written differently at nine that evening.
But the essay argues against itself and doesn’t notice.
It insists we must remain civilized and mustn’t harm innocents, and it spends its first third establishing that the enemy isn’t human. Those two positions don’t sit together. Once a category of person is placed outside the human, the restraint has nothing to hold on to.
Certainty. The word appears twice, both times in capitals or close to it. Identify with certainty. Once we identify with certainty. I was insisting on it because I could feel how easily it would be skipped.
It was the right thing to insist on and it’s the part of the essay that reads most like a warning to its own author. Whether the standard was met in what followed is an argument people are still having, and the version of me writing that night had no idea he was setting a test that the next several years would be graded against.
What a document written in the moment can do
Knowing how it came out shapes anything written after an event. That shaping is invisible to the writer. You can’t un-know the ending, and every sentence you produce arranges itself around it, selecting the details that led there and dropping the ones that pointed elsewhere.
A contemporaneous document has none of that. It preserves the wrong theories, the rumors that turned out to be nothing, the emotional tone before it was tidied up, and the things a person believed would happen. All of that is information, and none of it survives in a memoir written later, because a memoir written later is a story and a story needs the parts to fit.
The car bomb in my second paragraph is a good example. There was no car bomb. But it was on the radio, and a record that includes it tells you something true about that morning that a corrected account can’t.
The same goes for the fury. A version written now would be measured, and measured would be false. Nobody was measured that night.
Why should you write things down on the day?
The practical version, for anyone who wants a record worth having in twenty-five years.
Write it the same day, badly. Quality isn’t the point and revision is the enemy. What you want is the state of your mind before it settles, and it starts settling within hours.
Include what you don’t know. The rumors, the wrong numbers, the thing you were told that turned out to be untrue. Those are the parts that prove the document is contemporaneous, and the parts that show how it felt.
Don’t tidy it later. The moment you go back and fix it, it becomes a hybrid, and a hybrid has the authority of neither. Keep the original and write a new document if your view changes.
Say what you expect to happen. This is the hardest and the most valuable. Predictions written before the outcome are the only honest test of how you were thinking. Mine were partly wrong. That’s why they’re worth reading.
Date it and put it somewhere it’ll survive. An undated file is worth a fraction of a dated one. Mine survived on a hard drive through several computers, mostly by luck.
What would you say to your younger self twenty-five years later?
Not much, and none of it corrective. He was right that it was one of the worst things he’d ever see. He was right to write it down. He was right, in the last paragraph, about the only thing that turned out to matter.
He was wrong about the towers, and the country made a better choice than the one he wanted. What I notice most is how badly he wanted the response to be precise. A surgeon who knows exactly which tumor he’s removing. That’s a good image, and it’s asking for something enormously harder than it sounds.
Twenty-five years on, the document is valuable because it was written before anyone knew, and there’s no way to produce that after the fact. If something is happening to you now that you’ll still be thinking about in 2051, write it down tonight, and don’t fix it later.
The wider entry on the day, and what writers owe a subject like this, is September 11th: A Writer’s Tribute. More of the argument for writing it down while it’s happening is in the memoir hub, and the family version of it is Behind the Wire. That exists because my grandfather wrote his own account down after the war.
Three books that record the day properly
Touching History covers the air side, from the FAA command floor to the fighter cockpits. Ordinary Heroes is the first chief on the scene at the towers, written by the man who was running the lobby. American Phoenix covers the Pentagon. It’s the part of that day almost nobody writes about.