before the first anniversary of 9/11, I went back to the fire hall and spent a week doing a “ride along” with the men. This involved a lot of grocery store visits. The Pride of Midtown may be the busiest station in the city, but there always seemed time to get ingredients and create elaborate meals. It was almost inevitable, however, that the bell would ring just as the plates were served and the men would run cursing toward the trucks as mouthwatering scents wafting like fingers from the kitchen tried to pull them back to their seats.
The anniversary was hard on the New York City firefighters. They lost 343 members. Stories of some of their dead had reached near-mythical status. The commander, the rookie, the father and son under the rubble; sixty-eight-year-old Fire Chaplain Reverend Mychal F. Judge, who was killed by falling debris in the lobby of the north tower after giving the last rites to firefighter Daniel Suhr. The Reuters photo of Father Judge as he was carried out by firefighters on a tipped chair, his head slumped sideways, became one of the most enduring images of 9/11.
But at the Pride of Midtown in particular, the anniversary was excruciating. Firefighter Richard Kane came off a twenty-four-hour shift one day in early September 2002 and walked out bleary-eyed smack into a busload of earnest children, all gripping hand-drawn pictures and lined up shyly behind their teacher. They wanted to deliver the drawings and could they maybe hug the firefighters, the teacher asked? A few nights earlier, a group of inebriated women had come to buy commemorative 9/11 T-shirts that most of the stations sold for charity, and then just stared at the firefighters with drunken tears and slurred their admiration. On this morning, Kane looked down at the children and wanted to tell them to go away. He needed a shower and a bed.
In the first months after 9/11, the focus on the firefighters made it okay for the normally macho men to break down. It was expected that you would cry and more of an issue if you didn’t. The Pride of Midtown became a shrine of candle wax and flowers that stretched from the driveway into the road, blocking two lanes of traffic. Whenever you passed that corner, all noise ceased. Even the cabbies wouldn’t honk.
But then fall turned to winter, the missing became the dead, and the steady stream of well-meaning visitors and mourners turned into a daily sucker punch in the gut. You’re the ones who survived, those well-meaning hugs and tears said. Your buddies are all dead. And if the firefighters didn’t already think about that almost every minute at that fire hall, then all they had to do was look up at the Ladder 4 sign that had been brought back after it was discovered in the rubble of Ground Zero in the spring of 2002, twenty metres below ground. Or they would see O’Callaghan’s spare coat, which remained where it was on the morning of 9/11. “All gave some, some gave all,” screamed a sign read by only those who gave some. The firefighters were working, cursing, sweating, guilt-ridden, pissed-off actors in a living memorial.
“It’s really the toughest place in the city to work. No one wants to say that because we’re just so grateful for the public support we’ve received, but it has to end soon. Everybody just wants it to stop,” Richard Kane said after smiling and accepting the drawings from the children. Seeing a penny on the ground, he kicked it absentmindedly. I wrote in my notebook that Kane did not put that penny in his pocket. Probably just an act of frustration but it felt significant. See a penny pick it up all day long you’ll have good luck. None of the firefighters wanted to talk about luck as the reason they survived.
So call it timing. Five trucks responded to the 9:04 call. Only one made it back—Kane’s. His lieutenant turned around after realizing he had left his helmet behind. “Leave it, we’ve got to go, leave it,” Kane remembered yelling. But they went back to get it and then their truck was stopped en route. They were two blocks away when the second tower fell.
FEW WOULD PREDICT how a terrorist attack on U.S. soil could usher in a such a dark, divisive period in history, one that not only failed to quash the threat of global terrorism, but instead created a whole new generation raised on war and rhetoric and bent on revenge.
In the early days, those few voices who called for a measured response and urged the United States to look inward and take a deep, collective breath were branded traitors and told they did not appreciate just how profoundly the world had changed. The world was indeed a different place. “Patriotic” and “anti-American” became buzzwords. A rabid new breed of so-called security experts hit the airwaves, talking in concise 15-second clips about the near and the far enemy that now, looking back, does not seem that different from the rhetoric Osama bin Laden spewed. I was part of the media machine that churned out these stories, which were heavy on drama and outrage, and light on analysis.
Hindsight makes it easy to judge how things went so disastrously wrong, how the goodwill for the United States turned to international condemnation. What is harder to recall and for many of us to admit now was how we felt then. People were scared. We wanted strong leaders. Many wanted revenge. The sepia-toned Western posters demanding Osama bin Laden be captured Dead or Alive were flying off the racks. I bought a roll of toilet paper with the al Qaeda’s leader’s face on every square above the words Wipe Out Terrorism.
Subways and tunnels turned ominous, as did tall buildings. No one wanted to fly and the airline industry, already hit by a recession, spiralled downward. On October 5, less than a month after the attacks, Robert Stevens, a sixty-three-year-old photo editor of the Boca Raton, Florida, tabloid, the Sun, inhaled anthrax spores after opening his mail. Targeting a newspaper, of course, also had the chilling effect of putting all journalists on alert and making them personally invested in the story. By mid-November, five people were dead or dying of anthrax, dozens injured. Senators and Supreme Court justices were also targeted. Everyone was on edge. The FBI began tracking leads from Washington to Florida and the fear grew that if al Qaeda had anthrax maybe they had smallpox too, or plans to poison the water supply. Maybe nuclear weapons? It would take a multi-million-dollar investigation and nearly seven years for the FBI to dismiss an al Qaeda connection to the anthrax and conclude that the likely perpetrator was an army scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins, a troubled doctor who had helped develop an anthrax vaccine and had even been advising the FBI in its investigation. Dr. Ivins had been tormented by alcohol and mental illness and took his own life in 2008 when the FBI turned its focus on him.
Fear is a powerful motivator that our brains process in strange ways. We know that obesity and smoking are killers, but it’s the idea that a murderer is lurking in the basement or under our bed that scares us. How often are nervous flyers told that they are more likely to die in an accident driving to the airport than flying? But knowing the statistics doesn’t stop their palms from sweating during takeoff. Even after 9/11, the risk of being struck by lightning was greater than dying in a terrorist attack in North America. But we had heard f-16s soar across Manhattan, and that was the thunder that made us shudder.
If you didn’t feel afraid instinctively, then you were told you should. In fact we were bombarded with fear, warned to be in a constant state of readiness and to heed the colour-coded threat level. It was usually red (severe risk), sometimes on good days maybe orange (high risk). If you see a red flag on Hawaii’s North Shore you probably don’t go swimming. A black weather flag at a military base means it’s not the smartest idea to run a marathon at noon. But how do you live with severe risk when you don’t know what the risk is?
Fear explained the billions spent on airport security even though there is no way to plug all the holes. The box cutters used on 9/11 caused airlines to give us plastic cutlery on flights. Shoe bomber Richard Reid caused us to take off our footwear. In 2006, after British police thwarted a liquid bomb plot, water bottles were deemed dangerous. After the so-called underwear bomber failed to bring down a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, Canadian passengers flying to the United States had to put their hands in their pockets, rub them around and extend their palms for an explosives test. Minutes before undergoing this routine at Toronto’s Pearson Airport in February 2010, I had stood in a customs line that snaked out the door to the check-in counters. No one had passed through security yet or checked their luggage. A bomb detonated there could have killed hundreds.
Fear helps explain why there was little debate over Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act or the sweeping October 2001 U.S. Patriot Act that undermined decades of civil rights protections. It had passed 96 to 1. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold was