On September 11, 2001, I was asleep and late for work, when a phone call jolted me awake with the devastating news of the attacks, marking my first significant “I remember where I was” moment in history.
Everyone has their “I remember where I was” stories, the ones they’d say about the day Kennedy got assassinated or The Wall came down, or whatever big event happened. When it comes up, everyone will go around and say where they were and what they were doing. I wasn’t even three yet when the Challenger exploded, so I didn’t have any stories of my own about big events, but that changed – the whole world changed – on September 11th, 2001.
That morning when the first plane hit, I was asleep. I was also very late for my shift at ‘Pizza Hut’. I had dropped out of High School and was working full-time. At 18, I was embracing the life ahead of me of working instead of furthering any sort of academic career. On that fateful day I was very late for my shift. Like so many others that day, my phone rang with someone on the other line ready to break the news to me.
“We’re under attack!” said my buddy. “And you’re late.”
“Pizza Hut is under attack?” I asked groggily trying to find my bearings.
“No, man. The country is.”
I turned on my TV while I got ready which when you’re 18 and work at Pizza Hut is as simple as brushing your teeth, putting on deodorant and walking out the door.
On the drive to work I listened to Howard Stern and co-hosts discussing what authorities were still saying was an accidental plane crash. That was the story, but almost nobody believed it. Everyone knew it was terrorists. We had been primed for this moment for decades. After defeating the communist boogieman, all the action stars switched from liberating small counties, to fighting bands of terrorists with some radical cause. The cause was always vague and presented as meritless or misguided. Never was there a terrorist that fought on the side of good. All the action stars of the 90s had their battles with violent extremists from John McClain to Stallone, and we all knew this was an attack.
I was still halfway to my job when they announced the second plane hit the south tower. It was real and I was driving to work listening to Howard Stern of all people. Looking back, I’m not sure why I put on Stern for that historic morning. It isn’t like I ever listened to him. Sure, sometimes at work we’d put him on in the background, but it wasn’t something I listened to regularly. I could’ve switched it over to straight news, but I think I was in too much shock.
When I pulled up to the Pizza Hut parking lot, it was empty except my buddy’s car. We didn’t open for a little bit, but we had to prep for the lunch buffet. I walked and got started. My buddy and I listened to Stern more before going over to the gas station next door. The lady that worked in the mornings always had a little black and white TV on, so we walked over there to check things out.
An event so big, so encompassing that it changed geopolitics for our lifetime, and we watched it on 10-inch camping TV. Later that day, I had talked with friends who hadn’t dropped out of school to pursue low-wage fiefdom, and they had a much more direct experience where the big TVs on carts were rolled in and they all watched it unfold together. But me and my buddy had to make sure the lunch buffet wasn’t a victim of the world that the terrorists were trying to take away from us.
As we watched the tiny TV, Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. The TV announcers were aghast. It’s hard to explain these days, but when you hear “the Pentagon has been hit” you think this is full-scale war for sure. Planes were grounded, the world of travel grounded to a halt. We watched as much as we could before making our way back to ‘The Hut’ to finish getting the buffet ready. It was absurd that here we were both at an age where we’d be drafted for sure if there was a war and we were still obligated to make sure hot and ready pizzas were available for the lunch buffet that started when we opened our doors at 10.
That’s a thing about life at 18 that really starts to gnaw at you. You’re standing there, contemplating the consequences of these tragedies, just staring down at the pizza dough, thinking about your choices and the choices of others and how little what you’re doing seems to matter. Over and over, you hear the phrase about your whole life being ahead of you, but it is uttered by people whose own decisions make that future bleaker and bleaker.
The entire world outside felt like it was on fire. Schools paused any classes, everything stopped. But not the classic all-you-can-eat experience of Pizza Hut’s lunch buffet. Radical Islamist terrorists were threatening our whole way of life, but for the low-wage workers, it didn’t matter. So, we listened to it on the radio and waited until our shift was over before we could sit down and take it in like the rest of the country was doing.
There’s a perspective that changes when you’re listening to tragedy unfold, but your mundane existence plods on through the motions that are required of you. People came in, some aware, others not but all of them were hungry. At the time, it was surreal, but now after so much has happened, and so many friends never came back from endless wars of the Middle East, it’s not really surreal anymore.
After my shift, I found my way to the diner where all of my friends would gather night after night for cigarettes, coffee, and what from that day on would include a heavy dose of fatalism. We were all mortified about the loss of life, the families forever broken, the plague of despair and death that was on full display. In our group of Generation X and the newly minted “Millennials” the stark awareness that the consequences of our country’s reaction to this event were going to shape the rest of our lives was clear. “So many people are going to die…” was what I remember my brother saying. He said it from the place of understanding geopolitics, and unlike the brewing patriotic fervor that was stirring from the blood in the water, his tone was grave.
It was absurd that here we were both at an age where we’d be drafted for sure if there was a war and we were still obligated to make sure hot and ready pizzas were available for the lunch buffet that started when we opened our doors at 10.
It was the first day of mourning, not the last. Thousands upon thousands—an incredibly conservative estimate—paid the price for the actions of the hijackers. Whole countries were going to be torn apart. Think tanks were ready to exploit it for their own state-building dreams. Military contractors were lining up to be handed a stack of blank checks.
Those are the easy targets. The damage they all did was clear, and the carnage leaves a visceral image in one’s mind. The other side of that was the conspiracy theorists who were sowing doubt and mistrust from the first plane hitting the first tower. Poisoning every piece of information by twisting it nicely into any open mind. It was a turning point for skepticism of government actions. Not only was the government so obviously inept, but the story was that they were so good that they plotted the whole thing. The proliferation of different theories created a template that is followed to this day from school shootings to hurricanes. A black void of information that is fed into and feeds the desperate lonely people looking for answers in search results and social media posts or comments.
Beliefs absent of facts, fear as a replacement for education, and the propagating of a “you’re with us or you are with the terrorists” viewpoint destroyed beautiful parts of our country. That is the pre-9/11 world I miss. It was far from perfect, but the cultural schism that occurred that day and the weeks that followed was much worse than taking your shoes off before taking a flight.
