I was driving to work at Trader Joe’s, listening to KLOS 95.5, not thinking about anything in particular. The DJ cut into whatever song was playing and said something I had never heard a rock radio host say: “You need to go turn on your TV right now.” His voice was wrong.
Not joking, not doing a bit. Something in the way he said it made my stomach drop before I even knew why. For more, see how to preserve a story that matters.
When I got to the office, I rushed to the small television we had and turned it on.
The North Tower was burning. Nobody understood what was happening yet. Then the second plane hit the South Tower while I stood there watching, and everything changed. The air went out of the room. People grabbed each other. Most of us cried. I couldn’t stop shaking. I was so angry I could barely see straight.
I watched both towers collapse live on that little screen.
Steel and glass and concrete and people, just gone. My boss walked in at some point and told us to get back to work. I looked at him like he’d lost his mind. Nobody moved. We didn’t get much done that week. I’m not sure any of us slept much either.
A friend of mine was in the Pentagon when the plane hit. He walked through the wreckage afterward. Just walking, not knowing what else to do. Staring at what used to be hallways and offices where people had been sitting at their desks minutes earlier. Another friend was on the street in New York when one of the towers came down. A wall of dust and debris slammed into him.
He couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, didn’t know if he was going to live through the next thirty seconds. He made it. A lot of people next to him didn’t.
We had people from Trader Joe’s out east at a conference. They had to figure out how to get home with no planes flying. The skies were completely empty for days. If you have never experienced total silence where you’re used to hearing aircraft, it’s unsettling in a way that’s hard to describe. The absence felt like the country was holding its breath.
For a couple of years afterward, Marines stood in the airports with automatic weapons, eyes scanning every person who walked past. The first time I saw them I felt safer and sicker at the same time. This was America now. I never once complained about TSA. I knew exactly what they were standing between us and.
I remember the night President Obama announced that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden.
I sat in my living room and cried again. Not the same tears as September 11th. Not grief. Something that had been clenched in my chest for ten years finally loosened, just slightly. The people with the power to do something about it hadn’t forgotten the people who died that morning. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. But it was something.
Twenty-some years later, I still hear the DJ’s voice when September comes around. I still feel the anger. Everyone who was alive that day carries their own version of that morning, and every version matters, because for us it’s memory. And memory doesn’t heal the way people tell you it does. It just becomes something you carry.
What happened on September 11th?
At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. An initial wave of disbelief swept across the country, many people assuming it was a terrible accident. At 9:03 am, United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower on live television, and the world understood: this was deliberate.
At 9:37 am, American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. At 10:03 am, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against the hijackers, preventing the plane from reaching its intended target. By late morning, both towers had collapsed. Nearly 3,000 people were dead.
The timeline spans just over an hour. The consequences span generations.
Why do we remember September 11th?
Memory isn’t passive. Remembering September 11th means honoring the people who died. The first responders who ran into buildings that were falling. The passengers on Flight 93 who decided to fight. And the ordinary people who did extraordinary things when the world broke apart around them.
Each year the ceremonies, the moments of silence, and the reading of names serve a purpose beyond ritual. They’re a promise that the people lost that day aren’t reduced to a number. They had names, families, morning routines, plans for the evening. They were on their way to work, same as I was.
For families directly affected, the anniversary is a continuation of a day that never fully ended. Their grief is present, and recognizing that matters.
How America Changed
September 11th tore apart the assumption that American soil was untouchable. The country that woke up that morning believing in its own invulnerability went to bed knowing otherwise.
The changes were immediate and structural. Airport security transformed overnight. The Department of Homeland Security was created. The Patriot Act reshaped the relationship between government surveillance and individual privacy. Two wars followed, spanning decades and costing thousands more lives.
The cultural changes were subtler and in some ways more lasting. Communities that had come together in shared grief also fractured along lines of suspicion and fear. Muslim Americans and people perceived as Middle Eastern faced hostility that contradicted the unity the country claimed to embody. The tension between security and freedom, between fear and principle, became a defining characteristic of post-9/11 America.
That tension hasn’t resolved. It evolved into debates about immigration, surveillance, civil liberties, and the use of military force that continue today. September 11th didn’t just change policy. It changed the questions America asks itself about who it is.
Writing About September 11th
For writers, September 11th presents a challenge that sits at the intersection of responsibility and craft. The events are real, the grief is real, the people were real. Fiction set against this backdrop carries an obligation that fiction set in invented worlds doesn’t.
The obligation is to approach the subject with the seriousness it demands.
I wrote my own account the evening it happened and published it unedited twenty-five years later, in What I Wrote on September 11, 2001, along with what it got right and what it got wrong. For more on grief and starting over, hear Richard on Adversity to Strength. Fiction can convey truth through imagined experience. A novel about a firefighter’s family in the years after 9/11 can illuminate grief in ways that journalism cannot, because fiction gives readers access to interior experience. A thriller built around the intelligence failures that preceded the attacks can explore systemic problems through the lens of individual characters making decisions under impossible pressure.
But the line between honoring the event and exploiting it’s real. Writers who use September 11th as a backdrop for stories that have nothing to do with its meaning are borrowing gravity they haven’t earned. The setting demands that the story engage with what happened.
The stories that matter most are often the smallest. Not the geopolitical analysis or the thriller plot.
The person who didn’t make it to work that day because their child was sick. The phone call from the 94th floor. The firefighter who went up the stairs. The stranger who held someone’s hand on the street while the towers burned. These stories are where the human truth is, and they’re the stories that deserve to be written and read for as long as people are capable of remembering.
Never Forget
“Never forget” is a responsibility. As the years pass and September 11th moves further into history, the people who remember that morning firsthand become the bridge between lived experience and inherited knowledge. The generation born after 2001 knows September 11th the way my generation knows the Kennedy assassination or Pearl Harbor: as history they didn’t live through.
That transition from memory to history is where stories become essential. The facts will always be available.
The timeline, the death toll, the policy changes. But the feeling of that morning, the silence in an office full of people watching a small television, the DJ’s voice breaking through a rock station, the fury and the grief and the helplessness, those things survive only in the telling.
If you have a September 11th story, tell it.
Write it down. Share it with someone who wasn’t there. The details you think are insignificant, the radio station, the walk to the television, the boss who said get back to work, those are the details that make history feel real to someone who didn’t live it.
If you want to understand what happened that day beyond what the news showed, read Touching History by Lynn Spencer. It tells the story of the FAA and Air Force personnel who had to respond in real time to an attack nobody had planned for. I’ve read it a dozen times and I still cry. It’s among the most powerful accounts of September 11th ever written because it puts you inside the decisions being made while the sky was falling.
That’s what writers do. We make sure the stories survive.
September 11th FAQ
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 running the lobby. American Phoenix covers the Pentagon, the part of that day almost nobody writes about.
