United States Today: Legacy Of 9/11

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks comprise one of those events that you remember where you heard of it and how, like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was for old-timers and JFK’s assassination was for middle-timers.

I had recently retired (for the first time) and was sitting at an outdoor café in Bethesda, Md. A stranger came up and said: “A plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.”

I immediately thought of that time decades before when a plane had plowed into an upper floor of the Empire State Building in a fog. This had to be some version of that.

I have a gift for understatement. As the morning wore on the bad news mounted. Another plane hit the Trade Center. Thousands dead. The Pentagon itself hit. There were reports of a fourth hijacked plane, possibly on its way to Washington, that crashed in Pennsylvania.

At the end of the day, although we didn’t realize it at the time, we had become a different nation — one less confident and more fearful than the one we’d been on September 10, 2001.

It was, as much as we hate to admit it, one of the greatest, most effective sneak attacks in the history of modern warfare. A handful of Islamic extremists armed with box cutters — box cutters! — in one swift strike had reduced to rubble the reigning symbol of American capitalism, set ablaze the headquarters of our military establishment, and come oh so close to putting a flying bomb into our nation’s political heart.

Our days as a fat, dumb, complacent democracy were over.

Within months we’d gone to war in retaliation for the attack, even though the ghostly nature of our attackers made a coherent war — one in which you were absolutely sure who your enemy was — impossible. That was followed by another war, that one absolutely incomprehensible to many of us.