September 11 and the Loss of Certainty

I slept through the attacks on the Twin Towers, which, as a New Yorker, I find slightly shaming. I was unemployed then, and on the morning of September 11, 2001, I slept in. I awoke at 10:30 a.m., lifted my shades, and saw people in office attire, some of them very dirty, walking up the middle of Central Park West where there should have been vehicle traffic. This was an odd sight, but I was not especially alarmed. The city teaches you to cultivate a certain indifference.

I discovered that I had no telephone service which, because I lived alone, effectively cut me off from the world. Finally, I walked down to the lobby to talk to the doorman just to confirm that I hadn’t lost my mind. By then I had seen the Towers collapse over and over on television. Like the rest of us, he was trying to think of something to do. “I’ve been putting water bottles out on the steps,” he said. “Some of these people have to be pretty thirsty, right?”

I remember saying to someone, a few weeks after the event, “All the people in those countries combined don’t mean as much to me as a single New York City firefighter.” It felt true to me then.

Shortly after the attacks, I began working in one of the largest office buildings in Manhattan. American Airlines Flight 11 would have been visible through my office window as it bulleted down the Hudson toward the North Tower. We all assumed that more attacks were coming. In November, American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Queens shortly after taking off from JFK. The cause of the crash turned out to be pilot error. The NTSB report did not reset the hypervigilance that now dominated my moods.

I was beginning my career as a lawyer after having forsworn the profession upon finishing law school years earlier. I needed the job, so I worked long hours, desperate to make myself indispensable. Law firms are happy to leverage their younger lawyers’ insecurities against them, and I was soon assigned to several busy matters. The borrowed prestige of the firm’s famous name quickly went to my head. I shook my finger in the face of a partner from another firm when he argued with me over a minor issue of attorney-client privilege. He backed down, which sent me exactly the wrong message. In a sense, this workaholism was a rational response to my circumstances. I was past 30, had no vocation, and had been given an unlikely opportunity. What I had to offer was a willingness to be used. But all those long days did not help my emotional equilibrium.

The atmosphere of those first months following 9/11 was intense and unstable, as Americans debated the meaning of the attacks in public and in private. The New York Times undertook an enormous project of commemoration, running an obituary for nearly every victim. I tried to read them all. I thought a nation that paid such lavish attention to anonymous office workers, security guards, and waiters had to be morally exceptional. I also thought that nations whose citizens celebrated the attacks were something else entirely. I think these sentiments are forgivable under the tremendous emotional pressure of that time. That they hardened into something like orthodoxy became a costly cognitive error. How quickly the old atavisms return under duress.

The pleasures of my certainty were considerable. Certainty ratified my new sense of myself as a hardened realist. It seemed to bring the world into sharper relief. It gave focus—and license—to a more generalized anger I had been carrying for a long time. It gave me access to a broader culture of feeling that carried me through the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and those initial months when we seemed to be winning. And then, as the insurgency spread, facts reasserted themselves. My certainty did not survive them.  

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been buried under enough cant that by now they hardly register as events. Let us begin, then, by invoking some of the places where U.S. and Coalition soldiers fought: Ramadi; Tora Bora; Mosul; Kandahar; Fallujah. I resist the idea that the sacrifices made there were for no good purpose. Afghan women voted for 20 years. But the world resists our attempts to remake it with a tenacity that I was too innocent to appreciate. After we left Afghanistan, the Taliban swiftly undid what we had accomplished there at great cost.

We need our emotions to give us depth perception: What do I care about? What would I sacrifice for? My error was in allowing my emotional response to September 11 to narrow my field of vision. It’s not that I did not care what would happen to Iraqi civilians when we invaded but that I assumed away that difficult question to arrive at a conclusion—this is a problem for the U.S. Army—that I had preordained. I did not support the war because I thought Saddam Hussein was a security threat to the United States. I supported it in the quixotic belief that my wanting something badly enough was ample justification. What exactly I wanted, I could not have told you. Perhaps it was to see my sense of order restored to the world.

Here’s an incomplete list of the misunderstandings and failures of imagination that led me to support the Iraq War. I knew that Iraq was divided between Sunni and Shia, but I had no understanding of the origin of that division or the depth of the hatred it engendered. I did not understand that, as the region’s largest Shia power, Iran would take a lively and hostile interest in our efforts in Iraq. The commitments of the U.K. and Australia to the war effort bolstered my confidence. Like someone evaluating his future in-laws, I concluded that Tony Blair and John Howard were the right sort of people, unlikely to make catastrophic misjudgments. I did not consider that they might be suppressing their own doubts. To have had such misconceptions now seems embarrassing, the product of a culpable incuriosity about the world.

Once I was committed, I was slow to consider evidence that our goals in Iraq and Afghanistan might not be achievable. In fact, I felt a kind of moral valor standing behind the war effort even as the obstacles to Coalition victory became apparent. I seized on the competence of David Petraeus, the momentum of the surge, growing Sunni impatience with al-Qaeda—whatever supported my position. Something was at stake for me that I could not acknowledge. Rather than ask myself what that might be, I consumed more news coverage, filtering for hope.

I now think my rigidity had a lot to do with the people who jumped from the Towers on 9/11. The video of those falling bodies was somehow harder to metabolize than the collapse of the buildings themselves—the specificity of lives lost one by one. If not for the sight of those jumpers, might I have judged better?

I recently tried to reconstruct a mental timeline of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I got almost everything wrong. I thought the Petraeus-led counterinsurgency happened under Barack Obama, but it was actually at the end of George W. Bush’s second term. I conflated the two al-Qaeda commanders in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu al-Masri, into a single supervillain. I would not have thought it possible to confuse such matters, which were once above-the-fold news day after day. The emotions of that period have proved more durable than the facts. I remember the despair of the Camp Speicher massacre, in which ISIS executed 1,700 Shiite Air Force cadets, though I could not tell you today where Camp Speicher was or the name of the ISIS commander who led the operation. Just a few televised memories of Iraq remain: the first bombs falling on nighttime Baghdad; the president in his flight suit standing before the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner; the beheading by ISIS of the journalist James Foley.

For those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, the problem is not forgetting but the inability to forget. They have memories that do not resolve cleanly. I thought that my own work of understanding was just waiting to be done. Where the evidence was ambiguous or my knowledge incomplete, I substituted prejudices and received ideas. I tried to impose my assumptions on alien cultures. I believed that the people of Iraq and Afghanistan would fight as hard for themselves as we were fighting for them—and that they would share my idea of what their interests were. It did not occur to me that they might have a different vision for the future of their countries. I met with the results I should have expected all along.

Some years after 9/11, I got in a confrontation with a homeless man who was harassing women on the C train. I had had a bitterly frustrating day. It was starting to dawn on me that the practice of law was not going to solve all my problems. I invited him to turn his attention to me. He pulled a knife out of his gym bag and said to me, very calmly, “Look at you. Young guy, nice suit. I bet you’ve got a good job, don’t you? I bet you’ve got something to lose. Me? I got nothing to lose.” Another passenger took me by the elbow and steered me off the train at the next stop.

Consciously, my support for our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan was based on idealism. I thought we would show the world that American power could be used for good. But a much stronger unconscious motive had been in control all along. Over time, I began to understand the limits of what certainty could do for me. And I saw that my certainty was joined to darker motives.

This might be the last anniversary on which 9/11 will be “memory.” For many younger New Yorkers and Americans, it is already “history.” As living memory becomes historical memory, the emotional intensity of events fades. But the need to impose meaning never disappears. We continue to build superstructures of remembrance and myth around 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Those events mean different things to different people. And what each of us makes of them may reveal more about our present emotional needs—the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves—than about the events themselves.

Every year, the Tunnel to Towers 5K Run & Walk is held to honor the memory of Stephen Siller, an FDNY veteran whose shift at Squad 1 in Park Slope had ended when he heard about the attack on the Towers. He put his 60 pounds of firefighting gear back on and, finding the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel closed to vehicle traffic, jogged through the tunnel to the World Trade Center, where he died in the collapse of the South Tower.

Every year, I tell myself that I will run the race. Every year so far, it has come and gone without me. I’m still not ready.