When I was a boy, I once asked my father where he was on December 7, 1941, and how he heard about the Japanese attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. What did he think at that moment? How did the news affect him?
As it happened, Dad was over at the Midget Twins Service Station, across the street from my grandparents’ house on the corner of Broadway and Jackson Street in Taunton, Massachusetts. (Yes, that gas station actually was owned and operated by twin brothers who were midgets, and they were still in business when I was growing up.)
My father and some friends were in the office, playing cards and listening to the Army-Navy football game on the radio. The announcer broke in with the historic news bulletin; my father said, “Where the hell is Pearl Harbor?” Only later did it become clear what the Japanese attack meant for America. In the spring of 1942, Dad enlisted in the US Coast Guard and went off to play his part in the Second World War. It was the great adventure of his life.
But I never did get a clear answer to my question: How did it feel to live through that portentous day? But now I have the answer, because I lived through an equally portentous day: September 11, 2001.
On the morning of 9/11, I arrived at the advertising agency in St. Joseph, Michigan where I worked at the time. I got coffee, fired up my computer and, as was my habit, checked the morning’s news on the Associated Press website. An item caught my eye: A small private plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. That was how the attack was first reported. Like my father sixty years earlier, I made little of the news at that first moment, but the story developed swiftly, and it was catastrophic.
My coworkers and I spent the morning in the agency’s conference room, where there was a large-screen TV. (The memory of those hours became the basis for a passage in my short story, “Survivor.”) We watched as first the South Tower of the WTC, then the North Tower, collapsed. In between came the news that the Pentagon had also been hit. At that moment, I realized that America was now at war.
At lunchtime I took a walk through downtown St. Joe and along Lake Michigan. As in New York City, it was a brilliant summer’s day and I thought of a line from Hamlet: “…this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire…” But there wasn’t a soul in sight—no people, no traffic, just a profound, uncanny silence.
Driving home in the late afternoon, I noticed that the pump price of gasoline had almost doubled. The thought occurred to me that it might triple, so despite the fact that I had well over half a tank, I stopped and filled up.
That day, along with the day that President Kennedy was assassinated (November 22, 1963; I was a freshman in high school at the time) supply my two clearest memories of the history I’ve lived through.
Having retired from the Army Reserve in 1998, I had no role to play in the ensuing wars. But they touched our family directly nonetheless, for after graduating from high school in 2008, my daughter Alex enlisted in the US Army. She served as an MP, first in South Korea and then, in 2010-11, in Afghanistan. She and her comrades of the 511th Military Police Company arrived in country on September 11, 2010. Nine years earlier, she’d been in grade school.
Because I’m a retired soldier and the father of an Army veteran, the anniversary of 9/11 always leads me to brood over the losses our country suffered on that day and in the years that followed. That melancholy toll, and the valor it signifies, imposes an obligation on us all. Yes, the politics of 9/11 and the War on Terror are deserving of study and comment, but today’s not the day for that. Instead, I invite you to join me as a contributor to the Tunnels to Towers Foundation, a highly rated charity whose mission is to provide mortgage-free homes for the families of fallen military members, firefighters and police officers, mortgage-free, accessible smart homes for wounded warriors, and other services. It’s the least we can do for those who’ve done so much—and sacrificed so much—for us.
Thank you.