The America That 9/11 Made
I was jammed into an elevator in Minneapolis this summer, heading for the fiftieth floor, up like a shot, when someone tapped my shoulder. I wiggled in place, craned my neck around. “Hey, I know you,” a woman behind me said, smiling. “I took a class with you. I was in your lecture when the planes hit the towers.” We stepped off together—floor fifty turned out to be a wall of windows—and looked out at the city spread vertiginously below us, remembering that moment, twenty-five years ago, in a Boston University lecture hall. The class, The Emerging United States, started at 8 A.M., so early that the student athletes brought breakfast and the room smelled like Egg McMuffins. That morning, we’d been in the eighteen-twenties, and I’d been blathering about Andrew Jackson and the penny press when cellphones across the hall started bleating like lost lambs.
Goddammit, I’d thought. No phones in class. Then someone gasped, and someone shrieked, and someone called out that he’d received a text from his sister in New York, and the towers, oh my God, oh my God, the towers, thousands of people, Jesus no, oh my God. That couldn’t be true. Could it? Plenty of students didn’t have phones then (I didn’t), and texting was spotty. The phones kept ringing, baa baa. The Pentagon? The students were polite, hesitant. “Please, please answer your phones,” I said. “Pick up, call back, call.” The rest of us waited. A student talking to her father said that the planes had come from Logan and he wanted to know, Was she O.K., was Boston under attack? We knew nothing. What was safest: stay or go? Go, I decided. I ended class. Go straight to your dorms, and be safe, be safe. Then I got on my bicycle, turned on a radio bolted to the handlebars, listened to the unfathomable news, looked up at the clearest, bluest sky—no planes, no planes, no planes—and pedalled across the river to a day-care center to pick up my very little boys because mammals gather their young.
Every September 11th, people assemble near Ground Zero for the tolling of a bell, the whispering of prayers, the offering of flowers, the waving of flags. For twenty-four years, the bell has tolled six times: at 8:46 A.M., when a plane crashed into the north tower; 9:03 A.M., when a plane hit the south tower; 9:37 A.M., when a plane hit the Pentagon; 9:59 A.M., when the south tower fell; 10:03 A.M., when Flight 93 crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania; and 10:28 A.M., when the north tower fell. Between bells, mourners read aloud the names of the nearly three thousand people who died that day. There will be a seventh bell-tolling this year, for the thousands who have since died by suicide, or from cancer and other illnesses caused by the ravages of terrorism.
The day’s events are measured in minutes, a ticking clock; the grief in years, a beating heart. “When it began, September 11, 2001, seemed like just another ordinary day,” Mike Kelly writes in “After Ground Zero: Everyday Americans and the Unhealed Scars of 9/11.” Just before 7 a.m., a teen-ager heads to high school; his father goes into the city for a meeting. A young mother dresses her children; her husband begins his commute to Cantor Fitzgerald. A firefighter starts his shift in Queens. A priest dons his robes. A Morgan Stanley assistant vice-president boards a train. By noon, thousands have died, including a two-year-old girl flying to Disneyland, an eighty-five-year-old man travelling to his son’s wedding, and more than four hundred of the first responders who raced to the Twin Towers. Kelly focusses on what followed—“the emotional ruins and brokenness left behind in the lives of ordinary people”—as when, a month later, Kristen Breitweiser was informed that her husband’s left arm had been found, or when, three years later, she was notified that one of his shoulders had been identified, and that, given improved DNA testing, more news would likely follow. How long would this go on? “Would there be a call about Ron’s leg?” she wondered. “His torso? His head?”
Breitweiser has been a prominent voice among family members and survivors who have pressed for a fuller account of 9/11. Their efforts led to the 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004, which, though riveting and detailed, held no one in the U.S. government responsible for intelligence lapses that failed to stop the hijackings. For many families, the opening of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, in 2014, brought no solace. Steve Kandell—whose twenty-eight-year-old sister, Shari, was among the more than a thousand people whose remains were never identified—was an early visitor. Later, he wrote about inspecting artifacts and images in the three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar, hundred-and-ten-thousand-square-foot museum, from “the husk of an ambulance” to “handwritten pleas for help” and “dusty, ownerless Topsiders encased in glass”:
The rubble had been cleared, a report written, a museum built. Artifacts are still being collected: the Smithsonian National Museum of American History is exhibiting severed seat belts from Flight 93, singed I.D. badges from the Pentagon, battered briefcases from the Twin Towers. But there are other kinds of rubble, the dust and debris of anguish and fury.
On the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, Kristen Breitweiser told Mike Kelly, “I’ve waited fifteen years. My husband was murdered with three thousand people and not one person has been held accountable. How is that possible?”
But has no one been held accountable? Millions have suffered, and hundreds of thousands have died. George W. Bush declared a global war on terror on September 20, 2001; the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan on October 7th. That war, the longest in American history, lasted twenty years. The Iraq War began in 2003. U.S. Special Operations Forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. The global war on terror has never been declared over. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that post-9/11 American military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan killed nearly a million people between 2001 and 2023, including more than four hundred thousand civilians. Non-civilian deaths include more than seven thousand U.S. service members, more than eight thousand military contractors, more than twelve thousand allied troops, and more than twenty-eight thousand U.S. service members and veterans who have died by suicide.
Janet Reitman weaves together character sketches to reckon with the aftermath of 9/11 in “The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts.” After Marlo Cadeddu, an East Dallas lawyer who had once worked on the forty-sixth floor of the north tower, learned of the attack, Reitman writes, “she started to cry and kept on crying for what felt like five years.” She couldn’t stop thinking about how “one of the planes had flown directly into an elevator shaft, severed the cables, and sent cars filled with people plummeting seventy, eighty stories.”
The hijackers were dead. The search for their collaborators and other terrorists in what was now called the homeland proceeded under terms established by the Patriot Act. Many Muslim Americans hid or fled; between 2002 and 2003, thirteen thousand faced deportation proceedings. People around Cadeddu began disappearing: “The Lebanese stock boy at Kroger. The assistant professor of Middle Eastern history. The Palestinian grocer. The Pakistani computer scientist who spent every single night and weekend with his family. Sometimes they’d vanish for a few hours, or a day; other times they’d be gone for good.” Cadeddu became a leading defense attorney for Muslim Americans caught in dragnet sweeps that the F.B.I. was conducting across the country. Her clients included Mufid Abdulqader, whose half brother led Hamas; the F.B.I. arrested Abdulqader in 2004 and charged him with raising millions for terrorists. (Sentenced to twenty years, he was released in 2024.)
Terry Albury joined the F.B.I. as a counterterrorism expert in Minneapolis in 2001. He told Reitman that his training included viewing 9/11 footage over and over: “The planes hitting the towers, the smoke pouring out of the buildings, the people jumping to their deaths, the buildings collapsing into a toxic cloud. Death, destruction, devastation.” It was, he said, “like watching a snuff film.” He knocked on doors and grilled people based on what he considered scant evidence. In 2016, Albury began leaking documents to The Intercept. He was discovered, arrested, charged under the Espionage Act, and sentenced to four years in prison.
Nathan Damigo, a marine, completed two tours in Iraq, returned with P.T.S.D., attempted suicide twice, then committed violent crimes. He needed someone to blame—for the friends he watched die, his pain, everything. In prison, he began reading David Duke:
Out of prison, Damigo founded a white-supremacist group. In 2016, after attending the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, he went to San Francisco and called through a bullhorn, “If you are here illegally, it’s time to go home. America is not your home.” The next year, at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, neo-Nazis carrying tiki torches chanted a slogan of his coinage: “You will not replace us!” Dust and debris, anguish and fury.
In Minneapolis this summer, looking from the fiftieth-floor windows, I thought of how masked federal immigration agents had killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in this beautiful city, and how the head of the Department of Homeland Security accused them of “domestic terrorism,” digging through the rubble, in vain, for Americans to blame.
A quarter century—a generation—has passed since the towers fell. My little boys are grown men. The students from that lecture hall have children of their own. They live in a different, and even angrier, America.
For years, as a first-day icebreaker, I asked students: What’s the first event of worldwide historical significance that entered your consciousness when you were young? One year, every student said 9/11, and a sophomore said, “My father died in the towers.” The room fell silent. There was no coming back from that answer. I stopped asking the question. ♦