I suspect many people kept newspapers about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Before the Internet and its seeming permanence, keeping newspapers and magazines of important events was common.
Instead, I kept the newspaper about September 10th. I’ll tell you why.
Obviously, it was dated September 11th but it was news from September 10th, there being no real-time print. The smoking buildings wouldn’t be in papers until the following day.
I was in a hotel in Santa Clara and I woke up as I usually do, had a coffee, dressed and went to the car. I had left my cell phone in the car and saw there were 16 messages, all from Kim. That annoyed me a little. Jesus Christ, I am in a hotel working, why would you need to call me 16 times? I listened to one, it said something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. Annoying little planes were losing their way every 3 months and buzzing NYC back then, that seemed to be no big deal.
But she sounded awfully excited. That concerned me.
I got to the office and turned on my computer – by the time people were in the office on the west coast it was reasonably established that this had been a terrorist attack.
Well, I thought, how long we are going to let that go? The WTC had been attacked almost a decade earlier and that was still in court (it was a criminal event, not a military one, to the government) but we had embassy bombings, the USS Cole and numerous other things. At some point the CIA – well, if you were in the military when I was, you didn’t think much of the CIA. The guys who were running things in the mid-East for the CIA in 2001 were the same people who never heard of Ayatollah Khomeini before he took over Iran in 1979 so they were generally regarded as useless and the peace dividend after the fall of the USSR had resulted in solid domestic economics but cuts in the military and intelligence were making it difficult to fight a lot of fires, as the dozen terrorist attacks before 9/11 had shown.
I saw a news flash that there were explosions and gunfire in Kabul. Please let it be that the Afghans have seen reason and are handling this problem for us. That would have been ideal; someone in power that didn’t want to go from war against the USSR to war against the US had enough authority to cap the terrorists even though they were providing money and a worldview to people who had otherwise been forgotten once the commies left. It was not to be, the gunfire was celebrations.
My next concern after attacking Afghanistan was not attacking Afghanistan. From Pres. George H.W. Bush on I’d had a persistent feeling that America was so jaded by Viet Nam we might not fight no matter what. Yes, Pres. Bush had defended Kuwait but I hadn’t been convinced even then he would attack – I had accepted an offer from the Army to go back in, to fly Cobra helicopters (the newer Apaches were single engine and prone to maintenance issues in the desert environment – the Army is always preparing to fight the last war it was in – but Cobras, though older, performed much better) and I felt like I had plenty of time. I didn’t believe his ultimatum was real. In reality, it did happen, and while CNN had predicted another Viet Nam and touted ‘the elite Republican Guard’ and ‘fourth largest army in the world’, giving the Iraq army the best propaganda campaign possible, the Iraqis folded easily.
But the Clinton things in Somalia and in Kosovo looked bad; there was a lot of concerns about body bags and anything related to the UN or even NATO was going to end up with US soldiers unable to fight and Kosovo had just been leveling the place with bombs. There was no reason to expect Pres. George W. Bush – the Bush I did not want to run for president (I liked this brother Jeb) – would be any more immune to public opinion polls than his father or Pres. Clinton.
In 2001 I was working for an electromagnetics/physics software company in sales. The fellow running the group was a good guy but not a thinker and not a student of history – he didn’t get what was happening. The meeting went and later that day various people found out that no one was flying home anyway. It may seem silly now that commerce and business did not just stop but it made no sense to stop. We had a meeting and discussed meaningless, picayune things as if they were important.
When I got back to my car I looked at the newspaper I kept from Sept 11, 2001. They had stories about Katie Couric absolving a woman in Texas who had drowned her children from all blame, instead laying it on her husband, her doctor, society. An environmental group was hyperventilating that toilets were using too much water flushing.
That was what editors considered news on September 11th, 2001 – how crazy mothers who drown their kids aren’t wrong if a morning show host says so and toilets flushing. I kept the paper. I don’t have one of the smoking buildings printed September 12th, I kept the one from September 11th – I kept perspective.