What happened on 11 September 25 years ago

“I will never come to terms with it, nor will any of us who were in the city that day,” writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. “If we were trees felled after a century and cut open to reveal our growth rings, a tree surgeon would notice one darker than the others, denser and marked by resin, and say: ‘What happened there?’. And you would reply: ‘That was 11 September’, and he would nod, because he has seen rings like that before. It has now been 25 years, and perhaps this will be the last time I write about what happened; I ask for your indulgence because I spent much of last week rereading what I have written over the years, and I saw all the things I had thought. I wrote about 11 September and the issues surrounding it every week for a year; I felt that my readers and I were coming to terms with it together. Two days after 11 September – before it had a name, and people were calling it ‘what happened’, as in ‘they think he died in what happened’ – I wrote a piece entitled ‘What I Saw in the Devastation’, in which I said that Americans were experiencing the end of the illusion ‘that we, as rich and powerful people, will be kept safe by our status, wealth and good fortune’. History had come knocking. The column marking the tenth anniversary, in 2011, was about what we owe to the dead: namely, memory itself. On 11 September, my fourteen-year-old son was on his second day at a new school just across the East River from the towers. The phone lines were down; I couldn’t reach him, nor could he reach me, but that afternoon he managed to get through from a phone box in Brooklyn, with a queue of students waiting behind him. He assured me he was safe; he said there were rumours everywhere – what do we really know? I updated him and suddenly heard something muffled, his hand over the microphone. Whatever I was telling him, he would pass on down the queue to the other students. That fourteen-year-old boy didn’t go home that night; instead, he stayed, along with other students, at a teacher’s house in Brooklyn. The next morning, he took the underground back home to Manhattan, and the train emerged from a tunnel and began to curve northwards. At that point, he was told, the passengers would always look to the left, just for a second, at the towers and the glimmer of downtown Manhattan in the sunlight. And that morning everyone turned as usual, and saw the cloud of debris where the towers had stood. From everyone in the carriage came a soft collective sigh, a groan, an ‘ohhhhhhh’. There was a big man, a trade unionist, a tough sort, standing in the middle of the carriage; he looked with everyone else, and then sank down onto a seat and began to cry. When my son told me this, I thought of the story of the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, on 3 July 1913. The surviving participants, in their seventies and eighties, turned up in their old uniforms. It was a massive event: 50,000 returned. The old Confederates emerged from the line of trees and began to climb the long slope. The Union soldiers were waiting for them at the famous stone wall, and when they saw the Confederates struggling in their doomed charge, the Union soldiers let out a sound — an ‘ohhhhhhh’, ‘a gigantic sigh of disbelief’, as David McCullough described it in Ken Burns’ The Civil War. It was a sound of pity and wonder, a sound that said: this is not just history, it is human tragedy. The Union soldiers found themselves unable to come to terms with their defeat. They embraced them. That is how I feel now, on the 25th anniversary, when someone tells a story of those days, of 11 September and its heroes. Many years have now passed; my son has a son of his own and is expecting a second soon, and life goes on and fills you up. Yet we must never lie about the things that break our hearts. I will never come to terms with it, and none of us will. The line in the tree trunk, the darkened ring, will never go away. And every now and then, someone will ask, ‘What happened there?’ and you’ll tell them.”