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The Horrors That You Have Seen |
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I’d just finished taping up the last of the moving boxes when I heard the news on the radio. A plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. A moment later, the phone rang. “Look out your window,” my dad, who was watching it on TV, said from Colorado. “Do you see it?” From my apartment in Jersey City, I could see smoke coming from the top of Tower One. I knew I’d get a better view from the banks of Liberty State Park. So I jumped in my car and drove over there. It was a beautiful sunny day. Not a natural cloud in the sky. On the way, new news came across the radio. A second plane had crashed into the WTC, this one striking Tower Two. “What the hell is going on here?” As I turned the corner into Liberty State Park, the towers came back into view. Both of them were billowing black smoke. I drove down the cobblestone road that leads to the ferries to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, but was stopped half-way by a police barricade. “Turn back or you will be arrested,” one of the cops was repeating through a bullhorn. “Turn back now.” As I made my U-turn, I noticed orange flames flare out of Tower Two. When I got home, I flipped on the television just in time to watch that tower collapse. It was a magnificent spectacle. I felt a bit evil for thinking that, but then I remembered a book I’d read by J. Glenn Gray called “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle.” In it, there are many recollections of World War II infantry veterans describing the carnage they witnessed as visually appealing and strangely beautiful. Only the screams of their wounded buddies brought them back to reality. And soon, I too, began to consider just how much suffering was going on behind that pillar of smoke. “Oh my God…Heidi!” My friend Harry’s girlfriend worked in Tower Two. “Harry,” I said into the phone, “have you heard from Heidi?” “No I haven’t,” Harry replied from his home in Hoboken. “I’ve left her several messages on her cell phone, but she hasn’t called back.” After a pause, Harry asked me, “You know some guys in the FBI, right?” I told him that I did. “See if you can find out anything from them.” Harry was incredibly calm, a fact that I pointed out to him. “What am I gonna do?” he asked. “I can’t react until I know something for sure.” I told Harry that I’d try to get in touch with the agents I knew in Manhattan, but that I was having trouble getting a line into New York. All the circuits were busy. “Just do what you can, when you can,” he concluded politely. I tried calling the Bureau’s Manhattan office, but it was no use. I also tried calling my National Guard armory on Lexington Avenue, but I couldn’t get through to them either. So I did what most everyone around the country did…watched TV. My apartment was empty except for the television and the boxes of clothes I’d be taking with me to Oxford and the boxes I’d be putting in storage in Jersey City. After I’d packed the latter away, all that was left to do was load my car and get out of town. I needed to drive to Colorado to drop off my car and my dog with my parents. Then I’d fly out to England to begin school. But I couldn’t leave today. Not with all this. I’d just poured a glass of water when Tower One collapsed. “Dear Lord,” I thought, “I’d hosted a party at the top of that building just three weeks before.” For some reason, I remembered the bathroom attendant at Windows on the World / The Greatest Bar on Earth and wondered if he worked mornings. “Any word from Heidi, Harry?” I checked again. “Not yet.” On Fifth Street in Jersey City, every apartment
dweller seemed to be outside. Strangers
were talking to strangers about their shared disbelief. In the bodega on the corner a woman was frantically trying to
call Puerto Rico. She had
relatives in the one of the towers and was crying loudly into the phone. I suppose they really didn’t need me there anyway. I’d already handed over command of my infantry company to the incoming captain. As far as they knew, I’d already left for school. But it just didn’t seem right to leave like this. As darkness fell, the news reporters said that emergency medical personnel were being ferried across the Hudson from Jersey City to Battery Park. “The ferry…of course.” I found the box containing my army fatigues and ripped it open. After lacing my boots, slipping on my West Point class ring, and donning my black beret, I stepped out into the night and headed for the piers. Normally I felt self-conscious in my uniform. But not that night. “Good luck to you,” people said to me as I passed. “Be careful.” “Hey soldier!” a voice called out from behind me. I turned around to see a police car. “Where you heading?” the Jersey City cop asked. When I told him the piers, he told me to hop in. When we arrived at the piers near the Exchange Place PATH stop, things were fully in motion. Police, firemen, medical workers, and civilian volunteers were loading supplies and themselves onto tugboats and ferries. It seemed that every seaworthy craft was docked at those piers. It reminded me of footage I’d seen on the History Channel of the evacuation of Dunkirk. “Can I get a ride across?” I asked one of the volunteer boat captains. “Sure thing, but you’ll need to help us load supplies first.” We must have loaded 300 cases of Poland Spring water onto the tiny little craft. I was sweating like a fool by the time we got done. The army’s new wool black beret was doing a fine drop trapping heat. “That’s it,” one of the cops on board shouted to the human chain of water-passers on the dock. “We can’t fit anymore.” With that, the skipper fired up the engine and we took off across the dark waters. The breeze blowing across the deck felt great. It quickly dried the sweat on my face. Had it been under different circumstances, the boat ride would have been quite enjoyable. The night was perfectly clear. Stars twinkled above and the lights of Manhattan glowed romantically. Only at the southern end of the island was there ugly, smoky darkness. South of that, in the middle of the harbor, the illuminated Statue of Liberty stood proudly and defiantly. (Actually, it stood the same as it always did. I guess I was just projecting my own defiance onto it.) As soon as we reached the piers at Battery Park, we began to unload our liquid cargo. My sweating returned. The work was made more difficult by the acrid smell that filled the air. “Here,” one of the Jersey City cops said as he handed me a surgical mask, “you’d better wear this.” After we were done unloading the boat, I walked up to a mess tent that was set up outside of the American Park grille steps away from the pier. Tired and hungry rescue workers were gorging themselves on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, granola bars, potato chips, ice cream, and other food that had been ferried across the river from generous grocery stores in Jersey City. In the battle between ravenous hunger and irritating smoke, ravenous hunger won out. As I had done nothing so far but load and unload water, I passed on the food, but did twist open a bottle of Poland Spring to cut the dust. “Have you seen any National Guard guys?” I asked one of the cops. “I think I saw some up near the site. Just walk north and you’ll find ‘em.” The cop looked across Battery Park toward the lights of the disaster area. “Just walk straight through the park. This is one night I don’t think you’ll have to worry about getting mugged.” Just as I stepped away, a call came over the policeman’s walkie-talkie. “We’ve run out of body bags. They’ve ordered more from upstate, but they’ll take awhile to get here.” I walked alone through Battery Park. The acrid smell got stronger as I got closer to the blast area. As I emerged onto the street, the first thing I noticed was the gray powder. The street, the sidewalks, the parked cars, the windows, the window ledges, the newspaper distribution boxes, even the famous giant bronze bull at the north end of Bowling Green were covered with this gray powder. At that time of night, it looked like snow. Dry, odorous snow. As I walked in front of Trinity Church, I spied on the ground a woman’s shoe. It was half-buried in the gray dust. I picked it up and examined it. It was from Bisou Bisou. Left foot. Faux snakeskin. The heel was broken, but still hanging on. Its toe was filled with ash. This was the shoe of a survivor. The woman must have been running from the chaos, broke her shoe, and kicked it aside. I picked up the shoe and examined it more closely. This was a moment in history frozen in time. Had the heel been intact, it wouldn’t have been as powerful. The brokenness of it captured an event in motion. I put the shoe in my backpack. Continuing northward I saw a couple humvees. I approached the soldiers, who quickly saluted my captain’s bars. “How you guys doing?” I asked. “Okay sir.” “Who you with?” I asked. They were with the 101 CAV out of Staten Island. My old unit. I soon found a couple officers that I knew. Captain Dave Willis and Lieutenant Tracey Young. Three weeks before, Captain Willis and I had guzzled beer atop Tower One. “I thought you’d gone for England,” he said. “Not yet,” I replied, adding, “I wish I didn’t have to see you under these circumstances.” Willis was in charge of the Guardsmen on the scene. They were there to run generators where needed. Beyond that, they were waiting for a mission. I tried calling my unit, the 69th Infantry, again on my cell phone. This time I got a line. Lieutenant Adam Headrick was on the other end. He told me that they were all gathered in the armory on Lexington and 26th, waiting for orders to deploy somewhere in the city. “Well I’ll just stay down here and help the 101 until you guys actually move,” I told him. “Sounds good. Be safe,” he replied. I then placed another call. “Harry, it’s Jim. Any news?” “She’s alive,” Harry replied. A feeling of joy rushed through me. Harry continued. “I got a call from her a couple hours ago. She was in Tower Two when Tower One got hit. She left everything at her desk and headed for the stairwell. While she was in the stairwell, her building got hit by the second plane. But she kept running and running and finally made it outside. She lost her shoes out there and cut up her feet on the broken glass. She kept running though and didn’t stop until she was damn near SoHo. She tried calling me several times but couldn’t get through. She’s pretty shaken up, as you can imagine. And she can’t get out of Manhattan to come home to Hoboken, so she’s staying in a hotel.” “Thank God,” I replied. I wondered if the shoe I’d picked up was Heidi’s. Lieutenant Young came up to me as I hung up the phone and said, “Let’s go take a look at what’s going on.” We walked north until we reached One Liberty Plaza then turned left. There before me was a pile of what used to be Tower Two. It was a real mess. It wasn’t horrific, just real messy. Had there been bodies strewn all around, it would have been horrific. But any bodies that had been lying on top of the pile had since been carted away. I will attempt to describe, in no particular order, what the scene looked like around Tower Two. There were many recovery vehicles. So many that there were temporary traffic jams at times when these vehicles were trying to maneuver around each other. There were fire trucks and police cars. Ambulances and humvees. Cranes and forklifts. Electric company utility trucks and dump trucks. There was even a police “gut truck” providing sodas and food to the hungry recovery workers. Seeing firemen eating ice cream cones amidst the destruction was, for some reason, reassuring. Life does, in fact, go on. There were lights everywhere. Flood lights erected in the middle of the street. Flood lights mounted on cranes. Flash lights in the hands of rescue workers. Lights mounted on some people’s hard hats. Lights from the buildings that surrounded the scene. There was dust everywhere. On the buildings, in the streets, and in the air. Consequently, everyone was wearing either a surgical mask or a respirator. It was very quiet and the mood was calm. The firemen, who were doing most of the labor, worked silently and methodically. When they got tired, they sat down on a sidewalk or on a piece of rubble and rested or smoked a cigarette or drank water. They were filthy and covered with sweat and grime. Some folks—not firemen--with nothing to do took pictures of the scene. Some of them even posed in the pictures. This seemed a bit much to me. I left my camera at home all together, feeling it somehow inappropriate to photograph such a tragedy like a tourist. (Although, I will admit, that when I went to the Federal Building in Oklahoma City two days after that blast, I did take pictures. I never thought I’d see anything like that again.) Tower Two itself was a big pile. Concrete chunks, twisted steel beams, torn insulation, busted office equipment, ripped out wires. It was just a mess, as if someone had put the World Trade Center in a box, shook it up violently, and then dumped it all over the ground. The only recognizable remains of this once magnificent building was a section of lower-level window frames that punched out at an angle from the ground. There was a lot of collateral damage too. Buildings that hadn’t been knocked down still had all of their windows shattered and many had large holes bitten out of their superstructures. But again, the feeling I had was not, “Oh my God, this is so sad,” but rather, “what a mess.” Had there been bodies, I’m sure I would have felt differently. Lieutenant Young and I continued to walk around the scene. A fireman approached him and the two of them embraced. I was introduced to the man. He was a guardsman in the 101 CAV with Lieutenant Young. I’d never seen him before. His duties at the fire department overrode the call-up by the governor. “We lost 300 guys in there,” he said somberly as he lit up a cigarette. The number was so big that it transcended emotion and sadly meant nothing. Kind of like Stalin’s observation that one death was a tragedy, but a million was a statistic. Then I remembered Al Trentalange. He was a lieutenant in the 69th Infantry and a fireman stationed on 34th and 8th. We’d had drinks together up in Kingston, Ontario during a break from two weeks of military training at Fort Drum. We’d had drinks down in the City, too, ending up one night, as a goof, sitting across the table from a psychic in the West Village. Al was a little fireplug of a guy with scars on his knuckles and a nose that had been broken about fifty times. I called him on his cell. Just voicemail. “Al, it’s Jim, call me when you get this message.” Then I called the armory. “Have you guys heard from Lieutenant Trentalange?” They hadn’t. Looking around, I saw a half dozen abandoned fire trucks. Their frames dented, their windows smashed. They belonged to the guys who were first to respond to the disaster. These firemen parked their trucks and ran inside. Soon after, the building collapsed on them. The trucks reminded me of faithful hounds waiting in vain for their masters to return. I wondered if Al was among the dead. A side street just north of Tower Two was clogged with destroyed police, fire, and civilian vehicles. They were almost all completely burned out hulks. The fact that they weren’t parked by the curbs of the street, but rather filled the entire roadway led me to conclude that these cars were in motion when they were destroyed. It reminded me of the images I’d seen on TV of the Highway of Death in Iraq after the Gulf War. Destruction frozen in time. That, coupled with the overwhelming gray dust, gave me a flashback of Pompeii. I’d been there the summer before my junior year at West Point. Lower Manhattan felt just the same to me that night as that ancient Roman city had ten years earlier. Aside from the occasional beep-beep of trucks backing up, or the periodic grind of a crane in motion, the whole disaster area was quiet. No one spoke above a whisper. As Gordon Lightfoot sang in his Canadian Railroad Trilogy, it was “too silent to be real.” Run-off from the fire hoses combined with the ash on the ground to create a mushy gray soup in the depressions and gutters of every street. In no time, my shined boots were caked in gray clay. But I was still relatively clean. Most of the police, fire, and medical workers were completely powdered from head to toe. It was then I realized that I wasn’t really contributing anything to the effort. Instead, I was just a spectator and a tourist and that made me feel creepy and low. I took some solace in the fact that I’d helped out a teeny bit by loading and unloading water, but that was nearly an hour ago and I’d done nothing really since. So I called the 69th once again and asked them what was up. The admin officer there, Lieutenant Sean Flynn, told me they were setting up a command post at a PathMark under the Manhattan Bridge. So I walked for about twenty minutes to link up with them there. I arrived in the middle of a briefing from some city emergency management official. The Guard’s mission was to be a necessary, but mundane one—man roadblocks so as to keep away looters and sightseers. My battalion commander saw me during the briefing and nodded his head. Afterwards he came over and said, “It’s good to see you, Jim. I thought you’d gone to England.” “I’m leaving tomorrow, sir.” “You’re welcome to stay,” he said. A pang of guilt came over me. “I’d like to, sir. But I really do have to go. If this thing escalates, you’ll see me very soon.” Truth be told, I wasn’t going to give up Oxford to man a roadblock. If we got orders to deploy overseas, well then I would drop everything and go. I walked south all the way back to Battery Park, through the public housing projects on the lower east side. Along the way, a teenager approached me and asked if martial law had been declared. He’d probably never seen a soldier before, let alone on his own front doorstep. Police, yes. But not the military. How sad that it was now necessary. “No, martial law has not been declared,” I assured him. “That’s cool,” he replied, somewhat understatedly. At Battery Park, the volunteer navy was still ferrying people back and forth across the Hudson. “Do you think I could get a ride?” I asked one of the crewmembers of a little tug. “Sure, come aboard. You can come up to the wheelhouse if you’d like.” I was the only passenger aboard this little boat with a captain and two-man crew. “Where you guys from?” I asked. Louisiana was the reply. They fly up to New York a few times a years to “push oil”…or move oil barges up and down the Hudson. They’d suspended their normal work to help out in this crisis. “You hungry?” the first mate asked. “Now that you mention it, I am,” I replied. I hadn’t thought about it, but I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunchtime Tuesday. It was now two in the morning on Wednesday. “We’ve got some beef stew downstairs. And some coffee. And ice cream. Pretty much anything you want.” He was being so nice. Everybody was so nice that night. I went down to the galley and slopped two ladlefuls of thick, delicious beef stew onto a plate. I shoveled it into my mouth, washing it down with huge gulps of milk. When we were about halfway across the river, the boat’s captain came staggering down the stairs from the wheelhouse and flopped down into a seat in the galley. He was sweating profusely. His shirt was open and his large gut hung over his shorts. A tattoo of an anchor was inked in blue above his left breast. “Are you okay?” I asked. The man took deep breaths and clutched his chest. The first mate got him a glass of water. “Sip this.” When we got to Jersey City, I hopped off the boat and ran up the dock to some medical personnel who were preparing to go into Manhattan. “There’s a man on the boat who’s having chest pains,” I told them. Two paramedics boarded the tug and determined that the skipper was going into cardiac arrest. They lifted him off the boat and onto a stretcher. Within moments, he was off to a nearby hospital. His ultimate fate, I do not know. I slept soundly that night. When I awoke, I picked up my uniform from the floor. It smelled horribly of smoke. In the shower, I washed all of the stink and soot off of my body. The rest of the day I spent loading the stuff I wasn’t taking to England into storage. At one point I went to the supermarket to buy some cleaning supplies. It was odd to see people going about their business as if nothing had happened. Directly behind the supermarket was the black/brown cloud still billowing from the destroyed World Trade Center. Above them, F-18 Hornets noisily patrolled the skies. Yet in the foreground of this picture, people walked and laughed and loaded groceries into their cars. More than even being at Ground Zero itself, this picture at the ShopRite in Jersey City of normalcy silhouetted by destruction was the most surreal scene I observed. Email in Jersey City was working that day. I got a message from my cousin reminding me of a party we’d attended in London two years earlier. Bunch of American expats working for a U.S. firm overseas. They were there for a year, then returned to the home office in New York. That firm was Cantor Fitzgerald and all those guys and gals were now dead. That night, my final night in New York, I met up with an old friend for dinner on the Upper West Side. PATH train service had been restored along the 33rd Street line, so I could get into Manhattan easily. The other PATH line—the one that runs directly into the basement of the World Trade Center—was obviously still out of service. The $1.50 fare was waived that night. Transferring to a subway once in Manhattan, I noticed that every car had an armed policeman on board. That was weird. My friend and I ate dinner at a sidewalk café. The food and drink and company was excellent. But the acrid smell of blast smoke filled our nostrils. The wind had shifted and was blowing the cloud due north. Late in the evening, a drunk approached us and started babbling nonsense. After trying to ignore him, I finally said sternly, “Sir, go away or I will call the police.” The drunk looked at me and said, “I am the police.” He then pulled off the vest he was wearing and turned around, revealing the big red letters “FDNY” on his back. He wasn’t really the police, but I got his point. He wandered off into the night, presumably to get even more drunk until this whole thing made sense…or until he had to go back for another shift working on the pile. At that point, I called my fireman friend, Al Trentalange, again on his cell phone. Voicemail. The
next morning I loaded my boxes and my dog, Jack, in to my Subaru wagon and
rolled west. Across New Jersey
and Pennsylvania we travelled. I
heard Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” four times on the radio that
day. I hadn’t heard that since
the Gulf War. On a news station,
I heard a survivor speak of the sweat on the handrails in the stairwell left
by the thousands of people running for their lives.
That single description was the most powerful one I’d heard about the
whole thing. I
stopped in Pittsburgh that night and stayed with two sisters I know.
They are both students at Pitt. We
watched the continuous TV coverage of the disaster.
“America Under Attack” was the marketing catch phrase of the day.
Mood music accompanied most news pieces. Perfect fade-ins and cut-aways.
This music videozation of an honest to God tragedy made me cynical and
unfortunately blunted my emotions to the devastation.
Over bacon and eggs the next morning, I read the student daily
newspaper. Its editorial section
reflected competing viewpoints on how America should best respond.
Some kids were overly gung-ho. Some
were overly passive. Both
reflected an unmovable American immaturity, born from the blessings of living
without suffering for more than a generation. This American immaturity continued as I drove across West Virginia, Ohio, and into Indianapolis. Defiant flag-waving songs from the Charlie Daniels Band and, of all people, John Wayne, floated across the airwaves. As did a whole host of popular tunes from the likes of U2 and Sarah McGlaughlin that were interspersed with sound bites from survivors, the President, and Mayor Giulliani. And of course there was Lee Greenwood again, with his God Bless the USA. I wondered if Lee Greenwood was normally kept in a temperature-controlled bell jar with a label attached that read, “In case of national emergency, break glass.” At that moment, Americans wanted to kill somebody. We’re not that complex of a people. At least that’s what I was starting to think. In Indianapolis, I hung out with a young wife and husband in their beautiful home on the north side of town. While our dogs played together, we talked of what was to come and hoped that wise, cool minds were running the show in Washington. We watched TV, too. “America Mourns” was the theme this time. Fucking television. Awhile later, three of their friends came over and we hung out and drank all night. Except for the one girl, Erin, who preferred to ease her pain with the help of rolled up Mother Nature. She told me she smoked pot because things were so depressing. “You mean the World Trade Center?” I asked. “Life,” she replied. In retrospect, it was probably foolish to show such a girl my morbid memento of the devastation, but I did pull out my ash-covered woman’s shoe for her inspection. She broke down in tears and talked about how sad everything was and wondered how on earth I could be seemingly so strong after having witnessed some of it first hand. Her tears and her question took me off guard. I didn’t feel strong at all. Nor did I feel weak. I felt completely unfazed by the whole thing. I wanted to feel something, but I just felt blank inside. I wondered then if I may have been in some sort of shock. But I don’t think so. In Kurt Vonnegut’s, “Slaughterhouse Five,” the narrator accepts large and small acts of cruel fate by uttering, “So it goes.” Bad things happen and to get all stirred up about them is as futile as being against glaciers. Glaciers happen. Life happens. So it goes. “We should bomb them all!” Erin announced to our group. “Who?” we asked. “Whoever,” she replied. So it goes. Across the rest of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri I drove, stopping in Kansas City to stay with a friend of mine who is an airline pilot for Northwest. More bad news on the radio, more musical remix tributes, more Lee Greenwood. Walmart had sold out of American flags across the country and army recruiting centers had seen a spike in enlistments. “American Fights Back!” No one seemed to be asking why this happened. What behaviors did American businesses and the American government demonstrate around the globe that stirred such hatred. I am not being an apologist and I do think that the individuals responsible should be hunted down, captured, and brought to trial. But this mentality of lets go wave the flag and kill people really saddened me. At West Point and ever since, I have read scores of accounts of battles from across the ages. War is bad. Always. There is not a good thing to be had by engaging in it. Grant and Lee shared this perspective. So did Eisenhower and MacArthur. “The soldier, above all others, prays for peace,” MacArthur said, “for it is he who must suffer and bear the wounds and scars of war.” And all wars seem to begin the same way. After the first stinging attack, patriotism grips the offended nation. Enlistments rise. Patriotic songs are song. Patriotic stories are written. Boys march off to war with clean uniforms and visions of adventure in their heads. But after the first battle, reality sets in for the blooded soldiers, and all the pomp and patriotism seems hollow and undignified. Casualty lists published back home in local newspapers also tends to dampen the enthusiasm for what once seemed such a glorious cause. Again, I am not naďve enough to think that no military action should be taken. Wishing for peace will not make it so. As Plato said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” But if we’re going to do this, let’s go into it with our eyes open and our head on straight. No music videos, no American flag T-shirts. Steely-eyed, not starry-eyed. Cold-blooded, not hot. But even then, who are we going to kill? And how? You can’t stamp out terrorism with a tank. Terrorism is a method, not a thing. The army is but a tiny piece of the solution. All kinds of agencies need to be involved. The FBI, CIA, INS, National Guard, state border patrols, the NSA, FAA, everyone. Everyone would have to tighten up on little details so as to prevent such a dramatic and devastating act from happening again. I hadn’t seen my pilot friend in eight years. I asked him his professional opinion as to who actually flew the planes into the buildings. Terrorized pilots or the terrorists themselves? He was unwavering in this certainty that no airline pilot would ever do such a thing. “He’d plunge the plane into the water or into a field before killing innocents on the ground.” Nearly 500 miles of Kansas took up the next day. I stopped in Manhattan, where I’d lived while stationed at Fort Riley. In Rusty’s Last Chance bar and grill in Aggieville, I ate a taco salad and placed a dollar in a barrel marked, “From the Little Apple to the Big Apple Relief Fund.” At the gate to Fort Riley, the underside of my car was checked for bombs and my ID was double-checked front and back. That was sad. Riley had always been an open post, allowing free access to all coming and going. Atop Custer Hill, where all of the barracks and motor pools are, I saw men of the 1-16 Infantry battalion, in uniform, loading their gear up onto trucks. As this was a Sunday, it was odd to see them in uniform. But this was the first Sunday after the attack and these men were on their way somewhere. Whether that was simply to the field for long-planned maneuvers or whether they were heading to a staging area for some real-world mission I do not know. But what was sad to see was that these men were actually boys. The majority of privates and PFCs were somewhere between 17 and 20. These young bodies and trusting minds are the tools of our foreign policy. They are the ones who, like MacArthur said, “will suffer and bear the wounds and scars of war.” I thought of the youngest person in my office back in New York City. These infantry soldiers were even younger than they. Very strange and very sad. On my way out of Fort Riley, I passed by the Dreamland Motel in Junction City. This is where Timothy McVeigh stayed the night before he blew up the Murra Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Past Salina and Russell and Hays and Colby I drove. An unending sea of prairie spreading over the horizon. An unending barrage of Lee Greenwood up and down the dial. The town of Goodland was where I finally stopped for the night. Nineteen miles east of the Colorado border. The clerk at the motel looked at my New Jersey driver’s license and asked me if I’d seen any of the destruction. I told her that I had. She shook her head and said what a shame, then added, “But the country sure is coming together. Too bad it takes something like this to make that happen.” Across the state line into Burlington. Gassed up in Limon. “United We Stand,” said a sign in front of the pump. It was a “United We Stand Weekend” theme on a few Denver radio stations. At my old high school in Castle Rock, I stopped in and shared my tale with a few students and teachers. I could tell that, while they were empathetic, it was still something that happened on TV. It wasn’t real to them. Then I showed them the shoe. That freaked them out. That made it real. I was glad I kept the shoe. It was for exactly this reason. Good news came on my cell phone. Al Trentalange was alive. He’d been too busy doing cleanup to call me. But he was safe and sound. Thank god. “I really thought you were dead, Al,” I said. Al told me something I hadn’t heard on the news. The planes hit the WTC during the middle of the firemen’s shift change. The guys who’d just been relieved didn’t go home. They went down to the Trade Center to help out, too. That was a reason for so many casualties. There were two shifts working the scene. Later that night, I met my best friend, Shane, for beers at a little redneck bar in Littleton, just a few miles from Columbine High School. The waitress wore a tight gray T-shirt with an American Flag stretched across her big tits. “Now those are some twin towers,” a drunk pool player remarked. It wasn’t real to him either. I wish I’d had the shoe with me. Shane agreed. “When Columbine happened, I was there. I helped out as a volunteer. When people made jokes about it later, I got pissed. But now I understand. Unless you’re there, you can’t really feel it. No matter how much you should.” At home that night, I answered the dozens of emails that had poured in while I was on my drive across country. Friends asking me if I was alive. Glad to know people cared. I emailed friends in New York. The feeling there was a mix of sadness and fear. More sadness than fear. But everyone I knew was staying. It was their city now, more than ever. Although, one girl told me she was going to order a gas mask over the Internet. A week earlier, that would have sounded totally paranoid. Now it really didn’t. The President got his speech to Congress right. It will be a new kind of war. Actually, it’ll probably be more like a major law enforcement action. Preventative medicine. We might use troops to get Bin Laden. But after that, it’ll all be detail work by a plethora of agencies. Time to go to England. In Denver International Airport, I waited in line for a long time due to the security checks. At the gate, I heard Lee Greenwood again on the public sound system. (And I’d heard he’d be singing on “Live with Regis and Kelly” Monday morning. Thankfully, I’d be gone by then.) I looked everyone over on the plane to see who was Arab. Yes, I did do that. I flew from Denver to Heathrow with a one hour layover in Newark. It was weird to fly in and not see the towers. There wasn’t any smoke either. There was nothing. Just empty sky where two incomprehensibly huge buildings once stood like protective giants. But to the left was the good old Empire State Building. And, of course, the Chrysler Building. New York still has its fair share of shiny buildings. On the plane to Heathrow, I sat next to a fierce-looking Arab. “Just my luck,” I thought. But my worries were soon allayed. He turned out to be a chatty English hairdresser. So much for appearances. When I unpacked my bags in my room at the Hertford College Graduate Center, I took out the plastic bag with the broken shoe and ash and placed it in a desk drawer. Its purposes now are to serve as a constant reminder to me of what happened on September 11, 2001 and to make the event real to others who may be a bit cynical and jaded for one reason or another. The flags are at full-staff again in the United States. Everyone is waiting to see what we’re going to do next. “America’s New War” the TV slime have been calling it since the President’s speech. So far, my Guard unit hasn’t been called up for Federal service. I hope wise, cool-headed people are making the decisions. So far, they seem to be. Knock on wood. Broadway Jim Sosnicky
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