Welcome back to DOOMSDAY SCENARIO, my semi-regular newsletter about my work, politics, national security and whether things are really as bad as they seem. I’ve got a lot more to say this fall about some upcoming projects, but today I wanted to mark 9/11.
It may be 22 years past now, but somehow this day every fall still hits me hard. As we’ve gotten further removed, and an entire generation today has grown up never knowing that day’s confusion and trauma, it’s hard to know how to remember it and discuss it. It’s a day of immense tragedy, incredible hope, and a turning point in US history that increasingly looks dark.
To me, as a historian, the value of teaching 9/11 and remembering that day has always been in trying to understand what it did to our country—how innocent America was at 8:46 a.m. on that blue-sky September Tuesday. It’s impossible, really, to understand everything that comes after without understanding how completely out of the blue the attacks that morning came.
In that spirit, I wanted to share one chapter from the audiobook of THE ONLY PLANE IN THE SKY that I’ve listened to countless times—it takes place between 8:09 a.m. and 8:44 a.m., and consists entirely of the real-life recordings from air traffic control and the emergency operations centers of the airlines as they begin to understand and reckon with what’s happening in the skies over Massachusetts.
The voices across these 17 minutes of recordings—including Betty Ong, memorialized above at the 9/11 Memorial in New York—capture for me the incredible confusion and challenge of that day as the unimaginable becomes reality:
When I talk about 9/11, I usually end up winding my way to Will Jimeno, the Port Authority police officer who was among the last—and very few—rescued from the wreckage of the towers. He and his sergeant, in fact, were the third-to-last and second-to-last to be rescued.
I featured Will’s story in the final episode of the first season of my podcast LONG SHADOW, where we looked at the lingering questions of September 11th, from the destination of Flight 93 to the role of Saudi Arabia. Will, though, was meant as a story of hope.
You may know Will’s story from that 2006 Oliver Stone movie, World Trade Center, with Nicolas Cage, which highlighted his incredible tale of survival. And yet I went back to write about Will for the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in 2021 because from the first time I spoke with Jimeno, as part of my 2019 book, I’ve been drawn back to him not because of what he endured on that day, but because of what came after.
As I wrote in POLITICO then, “It’s the part of Jimeno’s story that most Americans don’t know — the part that happened after he was rescued from the rubble and after the Oliver Stone movie ended, one told for the first time in his new memoir, Sunrise Through the Darkness — that makes his story worth remembering as we look back on the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, the ensuing two decades of the War on Terror, and the legacies of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, while Jimeno didn’t break any bones on 9/11, he was among the first to face what’s become perhaps the defining injury of the War on Terror.”
If you’re looking for a story of hope today, read or listen to Will.
More soon, on a bunch of other non-9/11 topics, but today it’s worth the pause to think back.
GMG