9/11, eight years on

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, September 11, 2009 - 3:29 AM Share

I found out about the 9/11 on the phone in Heathrow Airport waiting to board a plane home. I was trying to call my wife (and having difficulty getting through) to let her know that my flight had been mysteriously delayed. Then she told me what happened.

My first thought once I recovered from the shock? It could have been worse.

It really could have been. For the next few weeks, I kept imagining follow-up scenarios to ratchet up the mayhem and panic. Thankfully, none of them have come to pass. But I wasn't the only one to envision ever-worsening scenarios.

Eight years on, it's good to see that the scar of 9/11, though always present, has faded. In the New York Times, N.R. Kleinfield interviews various New Yorkers about their post-9/11 expectations -- and their pleasant surprise that the city's vitality has exceeded those expectations:

So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning.
But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event’s enduring legacy.
New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.
Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the city’s skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate.
If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.
Eight years later, those presumptions are cobwebbed memories that never came to pass. Indeed, glimpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.

If the best revenge is living well, then the city of New York has exacted its revenge many times over.

EXPLORE:HOMELAND SECURITY, ANNIVERSARIES, UNITED STATES

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BLUE13326

8:03 PM ET

September 11, 2009

I was working on Wall St. on

I was working on Wall St. on 9/11 and looking back I have two main sentiments: First, was the sheer unreality of it, how it really did seem like a movie. Maybe this was just an escape mechanism or some commentary on modern culture, I just don't know. The second is exactly what you wrote: It could have been worse. The people that I spoke to that day were all convinced this was just the first stage in a bigger attack. And there were so many rumors. I remember being afraid to drink or use the water, because there was a rumor that the water supply had been poisoned. It's hard to put myself back into the sheer paranoia of that day, but it's a big reason why I'm willing to cut people like the CIA interrogators and the like a good deal of slack

BRETT

9:54 PM ET

September 11, 2009

I was on my way to school,

I was on my way to school, when one of the people I rode with mentioned the attack. I had no idea what was going on until I got to school, at which point the Geography Teacher turned on the tv and let us watch it the whole class period, because "this is history."

ZATHRAS

10:34 PM ET

September 11, 2009

I was getting a cup of coffee

I was getting a cup of coffee from the local shop in Eau Claire, WI, listening to the ESPN morning show hosts discussing in an oddly distracted way the first week of the NFL season. The hosts, who as I recall were Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic, kept throwing in comments about something on their TV monitors, something about a plane having hit one of the Trade Center towers in New York.

That was information I didn't process at first. I knew New York City well enough to know that no civil or commercial airplane is allowed to get anywhere near close enough to lower Manhattan skyscrapers to hit one accidently, and the radio brought word of cloudless skies over New York that day. As I drove down Golf Road in Eau Claire with my coffee, I thought some civil air pilot must have been incredibly reckless and then lost control of his airplane, because otherwise the only way a plane could hit one of the World Trade Center towers is if the pilot did so deliberately.

As it gradually became clear that this is what had actually been done -- twice -- I had one of those strange, irrelevant thoughts that sometimes occur at unfamiliar moments. I thought I could almost hear blood draining from the faces of Mike and Mike at ESPN as they watched the television images. These poor guys, I remember thinking; they do the best they can every day to make their living from amusement and diversion, and here is real life, squared and squared again, hitting them right in the face. A pretty good metaphor for the whole country at that time, I suppose.

HCT408

7:51 AM ET

September 13, 2009

I was a senior in college,

I was a senior in college, heading from the library to the cafeteria. When I walked in, everyone was crowded around the lobby television. I walked in right after the second plane hit. I went to college in Northern Virginia, so many of the students' parents worked in DC and specifically at the Pentagon. It was gut wrenching, especially seeing friends and people you knew who had a parent at the Pentagon that day. I can honestly say that 9/11 changed the course of my life. I had one of my final interviews in Arlington at the Peace Corps office on September 27th. After 9/11 I thought really hard about what I wanted to do, and I realized that if I went through with the Peace Corps, I would never be authorized to work in the Intelligence Community and vice versa. So when I went to my final interview at the Peace Corps, I flat out told them to pull my application. I am now in the Army. Never, never, never would I have ever thought I would be in the military prior to 9/11. There is a lot of talk about our policies and our reactions militarizing a lot of Muslims, well the media should notice that 9/11 and many follow on attacks around the world has militarized an untold number of Americans who never would have been militarized in the first place. It is sad, as a nation we are already forgetting 9/11. Our people are starting to question our role in Afghanistan. True, we need to change our ways, but we also do not need to leave, nor do we need to stop targeted strikes on Al-Qa'ida leaders in Pakistan and elsewhere.