38 minutes of terror in Hawaii
No one doubted missile attack was imminent
My partner, Eric, and I landed in Maui late Friday for an impromptu long weekend getaway. So impromptu that Eric had to pack for me while I was in a Friday afternoon meeting, and my biggest concern upon landing was that I was in Hawaii wearing a turtleneck, black wool pants and winter dress shoes. I fell asleep Friday night fretting about whether Eric had packed the right beach sandals for me.
I was semi-awake Saturday morning, lying in bed and still worrying about my shoes, when Eric barreled into the room from the balcony, shouting “Get up! Get up! There’s a missile attack headed for Hawaii!” At that same instant, my cell phone lit up.
“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
I jumped out of bed, scrambling to get dressed as Eric nervously shouted questions as much to himself as to me: “Long pants? Car keys? Where’s the bottled water? Grab the cell phone charger!” And then, “What’s that sound?!”
We both stopped and listened, and there indeed seemed to be the sound of movement in the sky above. I ran out onto our 22nd-floor balcony and scanned the horizon. No missile in sight, but a truly surreal scene worthy of a Hollywood disaster film.
Everywhere I looked, people below me were running for cover. I saw one man who had gone for a morning swim come racing out of the water and run up the beach toward the nearest building, soaking wet and not stopping for his little pile of clothes and beach towel. By now, sirens were sounding, and the hotel’s intercom system was repeatedly announcing, “Seek shelter inside. Stay away from windows. If you can, please make your way to the basement or the ballroom and await further instructions.”
We grabbed our backpacks and ran down the stairwell to the basement.
The hotel basement wouldn’t have been the prettiest place in the best of circumstances, but it felt even more claustrophobic and tomb-like in the current one. It was eerily quiet — some people scanning their phones for information, others trying to call loved ones, a few praying or quietly crying. Some of us started to debate whether it made more sense to try to head for high ground and risk radiation poisoning from nuclear fallout, or stay underground and face drowning from the inevitable tsunami that would hit post-blast impact. We would later learn from a friend at a neighboring property that hotel staff in their location were going around instructing people to limit cell phone usage or otherwise save battery power because, “That is how they are going to find you when this is over.”
What most struck me, as we sat there during that interminable 38 minutes before the alert was declared false, was that EVERY person in that room fully believed that a nuclear attack was imminent. Even as the social media reports started trickling in about a false alarm, nobody moved to leave.
An hour later, as we were sitting on the beach on a gloriously sunny day, I found myself thinking, “If I were Kim Jung Un, this would be the exact time that I would launch a strike against the U.S., because no one would believe it now.” But the fallacy in that bit of my own twisted logic is that I now
do believe that such a strike is possible.
I believed it all morning, as did the million-plus residents of Hawaii. The White House has created a climate in which anything (and therefore everything) is completely plausible, from hush money to cover up an affair between President Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels to Kim Jung Un rising to the bait of “My button is bigger than yours” and taking a preemptive strike against Honolulu — or San Francisco. And I say the latter in complete seriousness.
So what is my call to action (to myself or others) from my morning date with the bomb that stood me up? The easy one is to stop worrying about the correct shoes for the beach. The harder one is to not allow myself to become desensitized and inured to the constant stream of reckless and irresponsible comments emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And I say that not as a Democrat (which I am) or a Republican (which I’m not), but as a proud American who is worried that our country’s vitally important role as a stabilizing force in the geo-political safety of the planet is being undermined every day by this White House.
I’ve become so accustomed to the constant barrage of misinformation and disinformation saturating my world every day that it took the threat of death from a nuclear missile to shake me out of my sense of complacency. I’m glad that it did so, but hope that it won’t take something similar or worse to keep me vigilant. But perhaps that’s what it takes. Back down in the basement, I had called my sister. When she answered, I shouted, “We’re in Maui and they just said a ballistic missile is heading this way!” To which she replied, “You didn’t tell me you were going to Hawaii.”
Timothy Wu is the former deputy director of the September 11th Fund, created in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. He is an attorney and philanthropic giving expert serving as the vice president of philanthropy at the San Francisco Zoological Society.