Memoriam

I laughed. Yes, I laughed.

One of my coworkers came by my desk just before 9 am on Tuesday, saying the morning pop-talk show he listened to claimed that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. The idea had seemed so ridiculous – what kind of idiot could not see two of the largest buildings in the world? I asked him if it was a joke, another shock-radio prank.

And then for some reason I thought of the computer game SimCity 2000, in which my attempts to place a simulated airport in a sensible location within a simulated city were constantly thwarted by its digital denizens’ insistence on building large structures near the ends of the runways. Whooosh-Ka-pow, over and over. I attributed it to some fluke in the game; by no means did I find the loss of life and the carnage of destruction funny, but it was just a game, and had been amusing nonetheless.

So I had laughed, at first. A plane hitting the World Trade Center. Preposterous. If anything, it would have merely been some dolt in his Cessna, carelessly smacking into the side like a bird into glass. Well, that IS a bit insensitive - even the most innocent dolt may have a family; maybe it wasn’t even his fault. We all shared a nervous chuckle and prepared to get back to work.

But I recalled in my head a conversation I’d had long ago, and dark sensibilities started to return. Details from the morning show were sketchy, and we had no other radios tuned to other stations. Finally I remembered that working at a help desk meant I had internet access; while it was taboo to surf non-business related sites, surely this rumor warranted a quick trip to CNN.com.

There was no thought of laughter then.

When the page downloaded, underneath BREAKING NEWS POSTED 8:55 AM, was a grainy TV-cap picture of one of the Trade Center towers, with large hole billowing thick smoke. It looked quite a bit bigger than a Cessna-sized hole. I was shocked: just what the hell hit that thing? And as I scanned the quickly-written blurb under the picture I became alarmed: there was no mention of a mayday call. No reports of a disabled plane billowing smoke before impact. And I knew that no plane big enough to leave a hole like that would ever fly that close to the towers; surely if such a thing had been reported, the airport towers would have known?

We all gaped in disbelief. I bemoaned my mockery of a few moments before. So many floors exposed in the flaming hole 100 stories up. And how many people...?

Another coworker said it must have been an accident: the typical forgiving, understanding, optimistic, American view. I wanted to believe it, but the dark recollection persisted. Being from Chicago, I feel distrust and mockery from most of the people I encounter here in Kentucky where I now live. Plainly, they think I’m a cynical northern bastard, and I’m proud of it. But the hole looked too big, the fire too intense. The lack of information bothered me. I had some basic empathy for airline behavior, having lived in the shadow of Midway Airport for 22 years. And hadn’t there been an incident, oh, about 8 years ago, at the Trade Center?

“It’s a terrorist attack,” I said flatly, the horror of my words sinking in as I said them. One of my coworkers gasped in shock, and stared at me as if I were the most evil, cynical thing she’d ever encountered in her life. I glanced at another coworker whom I knew to be more sympathetic to such dark reasoning, but even he seemed loathe to back me up. “No,” she said, “It has to be an accident. Engine failure, or the pilot had a heart attack, or something”. “One heck of an accident,” I replied. I knew in my heart that no commercial pilot would ever let such an accident happen. Engine failure: he dumps the plane in the ocean. Heart attack: the co-pilot takes over.

I was unaware that at that very moment, 700 miles away, I was being proven right.

I wish I wasn’t.

I reloaded the page, hoping to get an update. It failed. I tried again; it failed. A third time: no luck. CNN.com - down? My coworkers scattered to return to work and tune their own radios; I didn’t know any stations to use on mine. CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX: all their websites were down. I had the sinking feeling that something much bigger was afoot. One of my helpdesk companions came back to the office and returned to his desk behind me, and I loaded the cached CNN page. “This may be important” was all I could say as I told him to look. He stared in disbelief, but was concerned more with the deluge of calls we’d been trying to resolve since we upgraded our company’s database. I just let the phone ring, myself. I couldn’t answer it. And I still had no idea that “important” was a gross understatement of what was going on.

Just then the first coworker returned with a stricken look. “Another plane has hit! They said it was a commercial plane, a 727! It hit the other tower!”

My heart sank. My worst fear was coming true: As a child, I'd often wondered what would happen if a plane missed Midway and hit our house instead. One way I found to cope with this small nagging fear was to build great model skyscrapers, crash toy planes into them, and have the hotwheel fire trucks and ambulances ready and waiting. It was innocent: everyone came out more or less OK by the grace of God and my imagination.

Yet during last year's presidential campaign, my fiancé and I were debating policies on military readiness, defense spending, and terrorism. She didn't seem to think that terrorism was a major concern: something that happened only in big cities, not in Kentucky. And even then, only by a few looney militants who didn’t even live in Kentucky. Let the FBI snoop ‘n snipe ‘em.

Out of the blue, on the defensive and looking for a swift knockout argument in return (I hate to lose arguments with her, and she always seems to win), I rattled off the scenario of a hijacked commercial airliner being plowed into a large building with no warning. Even more disturbing - in light of the fact that I grew up in Chicago amongst a large buffet of potential targets - was that as I said it, I thought of New York City instead. It wasn’t civic rivalry or subliminal ill-wishes, it’s just what came to mind for some reason.

That debate had been long ago, but the scenario often played out in my head like a surreal nightmare. When my best friend from college announced that he was getting married in New York over Memorial Day weekend, I initially resigned that I'd be unable to go. I wanted to but it would be a financial struggle. Yet somehow I knew I had to; a friend said I would regret it if I didn’t, and I took his words as more profound than mere encouragement. So my fiancé and I literally waited until the last moment then stretched our means beyond reason to go. We were pressed for time after the wedding, but I was determined to venture into Manhattan and see its fabled sights and skyline. When we finally did I was simply amazed and in awe, which is hard for a Chicagoan to admit. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover the old Chicago vs. NYC mistrust was unfounded, something football commentators played up. New York City impressed beyond belief. And its people - the great, innumerable, teeming lot of them - were gracious, outgoing, hard-working, and sincere. I eagerly dreamed of a more leisurely return. But now it has been forever scarred.

Had I spoken too loudly, back then? Did these unseen terrorists read my mind?

We all know how the rest of the day played out. I abandoned the helpdesk (now eerily silent) to join our shell-shocked marketing department in front of their TV, and watched with the rest of the world. I choked on unexperienced horror as the first tower vanished in smoke, live; even the seasoned news anchors couldn’t react: asking to rewind the tape to see if what they thought it looked like, and were afraid to say, had actually happened. I couldn’t believe it: the sheer unimaginable horror was too much. You read about war. You see black and white footage. You watch the old propaganda newsreels and dramatized Hollywood productions. But they don’t have the debris cloud engulfing the city. They don’t have the hundreds of terrified, discordant, civilian screams unprepared and untrained. They don’t have the unfolding of new rules that plow pacified hijack victims into buildings and catch heroic rescue workers off-guard. This is worse than war.

4 days later, I’m still numb. I won’t repeat here what others have said more eloquently. The world has been done a grave injustice.

There are those who will say that we should go on, that to alter our routines and rituals and lives is conceding victory to cowards. I won’t argue that. Some say the world is forever changed, which is doubtlessly true. It is sobering to think it takes incomprehensible tragedy to put things in perspective. All we can hope for as Americans, all we can do in heed of our noble charge, is seek out the perpetrators, obliterate them and the evil they stand for, and stand watch so that it never happens again to any people, anywhere.

Yet the terrorists have not won: God has blessed America. We have lost thousands of innocents, and some of our most cherished landmarks, but it could have been more. The twin towers collapsed vertically instead of toppling like dominoes. The Pentagon was hit on its least occupied side. And the last group of flight victims heard their call, and rallied against their captors, sacrificing themselves into the Pennsylvania countryside and sparing countless more in cities unreached. The barbarians thought they were clever using missiles emblazoned with “United” and “American” against us, on a day whose digits, 9-11, have been synonymous with a call for help. And they even had the audacity to try it again 2 days later. But they grossly underestimated our resolve. We have been lazy and complacent under the olive branch, but the eagle holds arrows for a reason.

Someday, a Phoenix will rise reborn from the rubble of the World Trade Center, in memory of our honor and in defiance of those who would destroy us. We will forever defend what we stand for. We will unite with the rest of the world, and together we will preserve the memory of those who died and those who valiantly rushed to help them. We will mend, we will heal, we will soldier on in a world whose innocence is now, inarguably, forever lost.

But I’ll never be able to play SimCity 2000 again. I won’t be able to watch Independence Day or Armageddon without realizing how despicably cheesy they are. I will never let any child build a Lego skyscraper and trash it at will.

And let there be insatiable woe, to those who would laugh and try it for real.

-Anthony W. Lucio
September 15, 2001