Sep 11


Five years ago today

by Terry 11 September 2006


Because small personal memories are important, too.

Five years ago today, I got up at 7:00 PDT and turned on CNN while I made coffee and waited for the kids to get ready for school. I saw smoke, heard screams and knew people were dying. There was so little information at first–I had no idea what had actually happened. Then came the announcement that the Pentagon had been hit, too. All I could think of was my Cold War school exercises of “duck and cover.” I couldn’t conceive of something less than nuclear bombs causing that much damage.

I couldn’t think globally, or even locally. All I could think of was my oldest daughter in alone in Oregon, 7 hours by away by car, just a week into her freshman year at college, and how close she was to a major city. I fumbled for her phone number and woke her up, stammering about bombs and wars and was she ok. She didn’t understand what I was talking about until she turned on her tv.

I kept the younger 2 home from school that day. I couldn’t stand to let them out of my sight. I called my oldest again and frantically made plans for what she should do if Portland were attacked, where she was to go and how I would find her, somehow. I sent frantic email to friends across the country, begging reassurance that they were still ok, even though by then enough news had come out to limit the scope to New York and Washington DC. Someone in the sff.net community set up a check-in newsgroup and I kept it running, waiting for word of friends in Manhattan. It took days for some of them to be heard from.

By evening, word was out that Arabs were responsible. I loaded the family in the car and took off for a friend’s Jordanian restaurant to help stand guard against violence. The place was packed to overflowing with support but my friends kept their kids home from school for 2 weeks as the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim panic spread.

Another Arab-American friend had a convenience store. On the sign she put up “Please pray for our victims.” English wasn’t her first language and she couldn’t understand why “the victims” might be better. She considered herself an American above all else and “our,” to her, denoted shared grief, not a claim of responsibility. I feared for her safety if someone mis-interpreted it.

I kept the tv on round the clock for 3 days, not sleeping. Just watching it over and over.

That’s why I refuse to relive it on tv today. I refuse to let fear rule my life now as I did then.

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3 Comments

3 Responses to “Five years ago today”

  1. Lynn Raye Harris on September 11th, 2006 11:58 am

    Hugs, Terry. I already typed a long response elsewhere, but basically, I was in Germany (just finished having coffee with Cynthia, in fact) when I learned of the bombing. We all knew who did it. The military knew because we’d had the USS Cole and the embassy in Kenya in the past couple of years. No one I talked to or encountered had that sort of fear you are talking about. We just wanted to turn Afghanistan into a parking lot right then and there (terrible, I know, but it’s where he was and we knew it). The only thing that surprised some of us was the length of time it took to go into Afghanistan, but then the military had to get the assets into place to do it so the delay was to be expected.

    There was minor speculation from some corners that Saddam was involved, but that quickly got dismissed. It was Osama. The military knew it. The govt knew it. It was not a surprise in the sense that it happened, just in the sense that it actually happened inside our borders rather than outside them.  (Quote)

  2. Terry on September 11th, 2006 3:03 pm

    The big thing for me, Lynn, was the feeling of powerlessness. Motherhood is a big piece of that, the overwhelming need to protect my children. Also, I wasn’t medicated at the time, so I had even less control over my emotions.

    I think the military saw it differently because in some way they had a way to fight back, even if it was delayed. Does that make sense?

    My feelings are so very mixed because of my close friendships in the Arab-American community. It was too easy for them to become victims of the backlash.  (Quote)

  3. Lynn on September 12th, 2006 12:19 pm

    Yes, I understand about your Arab friends. We frequented a restaurant run by Pakistanis, and I worried about them in the days after. But, Americans kept going to their restaurant and there was no problem. This was before Musharraf started letting us into Pakistan to look for Osama, btw.

    It was a terrible time. I think the military saw it differently not because they had the means to fight back, but because that’s what they do in the first place — assess threats, act upon them. Osama and Arab militancy was a threat for a very long time. We’d been enduring terrorist threats against bases in Europe for years, and some of that carried over to bases in America as well.

    It was only after 9/11 that the rest of America realized there was a very real danger, so in a sense most Americans were plunged into a state of mind they weren’t prepared for.  (Quote)

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