Collateral Damage
For twenty-five years, I have avoided nearly-religiously any commenting upon 9/11 when the day reappears on the calendar. This year, given the tenor and tone of our times, it seems like the right time to tell a story.
For what it’s worth…
The ripples travel much farther, and stay afloat far longer, than you realise.
My Senior year in college, the year I was fortunate enough (and, by the college’s standards, apparently intelligent enough) to study in England at Oxford, I lived as an impoverished student, but when I could, I “played tourist”, seeing as much as I could of a land much older than my birthplace. Often, North Americans, with their blinkered sense of the weight and import of history, feel that weight in ways they never have when first travelling (or living, in my case) abroad. Having once wanted to be an architect, the buildings alone were enough to change my perspective on life, the universe, and everything (to quote Douglas Adams, a graduate of my temporary rival, Cambridge University). I walked the streets of London many days, and was struck not only by the age, grandeur, and stories attached to its physical self — its monuments, governmental buildings, museums, concert-halls, and the like — that were still part of the life of the city, but also by those that stood only as memorials. One was the shattered remains of St. Dunstan-in-the-East Church.
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St. Dunstan-in-the-East, an Anglican cathedral first erected in 1100, and later redesigned and restored by the renowned British architect Sir Christopher Wren after the Great London Fire of 1666, was levelled in 1941 during the Blitz. The few sections of sanctuary-wall that survived were not torn down, but were maintained as a remembrance of those civilians killed during the German aerial-attack (as well, they are now surrounded by a memorial-garden). Standing beside them, “absorbing the moment” as one attached to New-Age clichés might remark, was one of the moments wherein I became attached to my own, then-newly-minted (to me) cliché: “the weight of history”. Of war, I knew only stories and histories from books, tales of my Grandfather’s time serving with the R.C.A.F. in North Africa and Italy during WWII. The only Americans, so I felt, who could have any of the same sense, any of the same awareness, would be the comparative few who were living and working in Pearl Harbour the same year St. Dunstan-in-the-East breathed its ecclesiastical last. (They who lived through the Civil War were long-gone, and they who lived through the subjugation of America’s original peoples too often dismissed it as simply part of the march of American time.) This was a loss, a moment, a reckoning, Americans could only understand at-a-remove. Then, seventeen years after my time in Merry Olde, came 9/11.
For all of us who lived through that day, there are now in the formal histories and informal narratives two Americas: the one before 9/11, and the one after. Briefly, far-too briefly, in its immediate aftermath, it brought us together in a shared grief of who and what we lost, and an understanding of what so much of the rest of the world has felt and experienced for ages. Too quickly, though, and even more-forcefully, it brought our darkest and most-xenophobic demons to the surface, and those demons have refused to retreat into the shadows ever since. To often, we pay lip-service, if even that, to our individual losses, their stories, instead reasserting and reinvigorating our hatred of “the other”. That our greatest grief should give birth to the greatest hate should never be the ultimate, the final, response.
My connexion to the day is the most-tangential of ones. As a thirteen-year law-enforcement veteran at the time, our fire-department sent men and equipment to New York City, as did dozens of departments nationwide. It was the least we could do. At home, my home, however, the tale unfolding was different.
My wife has spent most of her adult working-life as an I.T. database-design, maintenance, and security-expert for the airlines. Her company handled domestic and international business-travel accounts, and as such, was directly-connected to every aspect of the aviation-field, down to knowing F.A.A.-regulations better than many F.A.A. employees. Her company, her team, her people booked the passengers on American Airlines Flight 77, the passenger-plane that slammed into the Pentagon. Her company, her team, her people knew every passenger and crew-name on the manifest. Her company, her team, her people had to make the calls to the victims’ family-members and friends, their “in case of emergency” contacts, to try to explain to them what had happened that morning. In the end, beyond all the public-posturing, all the phony remembrances, all the efforts to turn a tragedy into a socio-political agenda, those are the times we need each other, just each other, free of labels and stereotypes the most.
I was in-uniform for twenty-two years, leaving the service in 2010. P.T.S.D. set in early, and I have ridden its roller-coaster almost every day for more than three decades. It is not for nothing that when people ask me, “What was it like?”, I answer, “Did a lot of good, saw a lot of bad, have a lot of nightmares.” For all that time, with every high and through every low, my wife has stood beside me. Today, every 11th of September, I put aside my demons, and, should she need it, I return the favour. It’s the least I can do. It’s the least any of us can do.
