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Remembering 911

When I left for work on Sept. 11, 2001 there was nothing special about the day. By the time I arrived at the office, the entire world had changed. Back then I was regularly freelancing for the South China Morning Post. They had a “North America” page twice a week where they ran trend stories and interesting local color pieces or news-of-the-weird sort of stuff.

I wasn’t at my desk but ten minutes before the SCMP called and asked if I could help out with their coverage. It was pretty clear that nothing was going to get done in my office that day, and so EXPO was good enough to allow me to spend the day working for another publication. It was a very lucrative day. I filed a number of stories, and helped do research for the foreign desk as their other freelancers (and a full-time staffer) in New York and Washington reported from the scene.

Finally, at 2:00 a.m. I thought I was finished when another call came. The staffer and other freelancers weren’t American citizens. The paper wanted to know if I could write a first-person narrative of the day “as an American.” Boy, there’s nothing like being put on the spot as “the American.” Oh, and could I file it in 20 minutes? Had I more time I might have been more thoughtful, but given a tight deadline at 2:00 am, this is what I wrote:


By Heather Kirkwood
In Kansas City

When I left for work this morning, America was a different country than it became 45 minutes later when I arrived at my office, greeted by a colleague asking, “Have you heard the news?”

As she explained that an airliner had flown into the World Trade Center in New York, my journalistic mind went to the story. I envisioned several hundred dead, disrupted businesses and undoubtedly the usual rallying statements from politicians. It would be a long day, even for a trade press reporter like me.

I could not have fathomed, however, what unfolded over the next few hours. Death tolls so high no one would even hazard a guess and our President hop scotching across the country from Florida, to Louisiana, to Nebraska. Business brought to a halt as markets closed and companies across the country effectively shut down as employees huddled around television sets, or were sent home early.

From my office in a Kansas City suburb, it was almost impossible to even make phone calls. A recording announcing that all circuits were busy seemed to the only reachable source.

Although our company is not primarily made up of journalists, employees crowded into a small conference room to watch the latest news on a snowy television set that has not been used in recent memory.

As we tried to improve the picture, rumors began to circulate from those listening to a radio in a nearby office that the Pentagon had also been hit. Surely not, I thought to myself, surely it must be hysteria.

Although the Pentagon might as well have a giant bulls eye painted on its roof, I’ve always thought of it as being one of the safest places on Earth. Nothing sort of nuclear war would take out that building.

But when an antenna was added to the television, and it was moved to the large conference room, images of a smoking Pentagon became clear and the room fell silent.

Having grown up around the military, I was perhaps jaded to the emotion of the moment. Nuclear war was part of my upbringing. As a six-year-old, I remember visiting my father, a bomber pilot, as he took his turn on alert. When the claxon sounded, flight crews dropped everything and ran for their planes. Often they didn’t know if nuclear war had been declared, or if it was just another drill, until they were well off the ground. As we drove home, we never knew either.

As a high school senior attending a U.S. military dependent school in Germany, I also remember the day the U.S. invaded Iraq as we, the children of American soldiers, watched on live television in our classrooms while military police accompanied by bomb sniffing dogs and carrying automatic weapons guarded the hallways of our school.

But this time it’s different. The enemy is not defined. While everyone speculates about who is responsible, for now there is no country to point to, no rival government to hold responsible. And this time it’s on our soil.

My company allowed employees to go home early, and a nearby colleague left to collect her one-year-old daughter at daycare, her voice trembling and her face red as she fought back tears.

It wasn’t a fear that at any moment an airliner would plummet into our little suburban office building. Rather, it was the idea that our impenetrable country had been attacked, something that has rarely occurred in our history. The last time was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Most Americans don’t have an understanding of war. We are not accustomed to seeing our country in chaos or our leadership rattled. But as in 1941, there is a sense of national unity and outrage surrounding yesterday’s events.

Today, it appears the terrorists, whomever they may be, have won the battle. They have killed thousands. They have hit some of the most symbolic targets imaginable. We are shaken.

But we are looking to tomorrow. In 1941 the Japanese under estimated the response of the American public to their attack. It served to galvanize support for the war effort. Likewise, this country won’t be the same again. Today, it isn’t just the academics in think tanks that understand the U.S. is vulnerable to terrorist attack. Today, every voting American understands this reality in a new way and the war against terrorism will never be the same again.

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