“Hello Claims Department.”
“Hi Vin it’s John.”
“Alright John, how’s tricks over there?”
“The World Trade Center is on fire it’s on the news.”
“Is it? Oh, er, right.”
“Yeah, a plane has flown into it.”
That relatively low key phone call was how I found out about the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001, an attack that forever would be referred to as 9/11. It is hard to put into words one’s feelings about that day. The surreal quiet in the office, anyone who has ever worked in an insurance office will know how busy the telephones can be but on that day the phones were eerily quiet as people at home stayed glued to their television sets for news of what was happening in the United States.
It may seem bizarre now but at the time it was before our office computers all had internet access as a matter of course so any news we could get was from phoning home or from the television set in the canteen. Break times and dinners were spent sat watching the news as the awful reality of what was happening started to sink in. That day four airplanes had been hijacked. Two had been flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, one was flown into the seat of American military power, The Pentagon, the fourth crashed when the passengers fought back bravely against the hijackers as suspicions rose that it was heading towards the White House.
In today’s era of 24 hour rolling news coverage it is easy for people to numb themselves to moments of tragedy but the sheer horror of what happened on that day still shocks. The hellish scream of the airplane engines as they head for the towers, the fireball shooting up the buildings, the final collapse of the World Trade Center. My wife will not watch the footage of those poor souls falling out of the towers, in a recent interview Rudy Giuliani says he refuses to say those people jumped but rather they were forced out by the heat and the flames. I agree with him. One does not wish to make their families grief any harder by saying they committed suicide by jumping. They were killed by the terrorists like all the other poor people were that day.
I recall getting home later that evening. I went to my bedroom in my parents’ house and switched on my television. If I remember rightly practically all programmes had been cancelled for news coverage of the attacks, my girlfriend who was to be my wife sat beside me on my bed watching in almost shocked silence. We often like to discuss what is going on in the news, it is something I love about my wife the fact we have intelligent discussions and debates about issues of the day, but on this day what was there that we could possibly say to one another? Here are two people watching at home in a small bedroom thousands of miles away from New York and Washington yet numbed by it all.
Hundreds of articles and thousands of words have been written about that day, the decade after and the reaction of America and its allies. I am not writing this to provide any kind of judgement on that other than to say why should anyone be surprised by the fact that America struck back? I am also proud of the fact that Britain stood by our greatest ally in her darkest hour. Friends stick together and that is what we did.
9/11 will go down as the day the world changed forever. Has it changed for the better? That is for future historians to judge I suppose it is certainly a less innocent place than it was before that day. One can only hope and pray that we never see that kind of day again.
