“What were you doing during 9/11?”
I was ironing a shirt for work, as I always did during that time of day. I had the ironing board up, the iron passing over my shirt, and the television on to the local ABC affiliate, who had the most palatable morning news program of the few to choose from. They were enacting their usual formula of happy talk, endless weather and traffic updates, and the latest news.
Suddenly they switched to live video from the ABC-owned station in New York City, which was showing flames and smoke pouring out of the upper floors of one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The anchors, having been distracted from their usual formula of morning news, were discussing in hesitant, nervous voices what possibly could have happened. The developing story was that a plane had struck the building, but what kind of plane, and how did it get there?
They had just started to bring up the possibility of a terrorist attack when the second plane hit the south tower. (That camera angle is still the clearest view of the second plane crashing that I have seen to date.) The first thought that run through my head was, “They just f**ked with the wrong country.”
That thought was not from some jingoistic patriotic desire for revenge. It was based on my interest in World War II. I remembered that the last time the United States was attacked on its own soil at Pearl Harbor, the ultimate reply was a bloody ground battle through the islands of the Pacific Ocean to the doorstep of Japan, a fire-bombing campaign that decimated most of Japan’s cities, and ultimately the dropping of two nuclear bombs on the two cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) who were deliberately spared from the fire-bombing campaign–so they could be used as the Manhattan Project’s ultimate experiment.
I was thinking of that level of retribution when the second plane hit. I knew that the United States of America would spare nothing, not even democracy, to get back at whoever sent those planes. And history has proved me right. From the “Patriot Act” to the WMDs of Iraq to the morass in Afghanistan and the corroding of our own political structure today, the “revenge” of 9/11 has been anything but sweet.
I prefer to “never forget” every American who stood up and helped other Americans during that horrible time, without thinking and without worrying about their religious beliefs or the color of their skin. I especially prefer to “never forget” the thousands of first responders in New York City; Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, some of them not even professionals, but all of them heroes.
In the end, there is one particular person from 9/11 I will “never forget”. His name was Father Mychal Judge, and he was a chaplain with the New York City Fire Department. Father Judge prayed over bodies lying on the streets outside the South Tower before entering the lobby of the North Tower, where FDNY had an emergency command post, and continuing his ministrations to the dead and dying.
Debris from the South Tower’s collapse flew into the North Tower’s lobby, striking and killing Father Judge. The photo of his body being carried out is one of the most striking images of that day.
Father Mychal Judge was, according to the New York City coroner, the first official death resulting from the 9/11 attacks. The Catholic Church is investigating making Father Judge a saint.
Never forget.
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