9/11: A Memoir
In every generation, there are events of such obvious significance that one remembers where one was and what one was doing when one first learned what had happened. My parents remembered where they were and what they were doing when they first learned of Pearl Harbor and of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I remembered the Kennedy assassinations.
I was a high school freshman at mass at Regis High School in Denver, Colorado when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and I learned about the event as I walked back from the chapel into the main building of the school. On the blackboard, there was a short message: “The President has been shot.” I was a cub reporter working on a summer job at The Oklahoma Journal in Midwest City, Oklahoma, writing copy and glancing from time to time at the television set, where Robert F. Kennedy had just spoken, when Sirhan Sirhan murdered him. When I think of it, it seems like yesterday.
Ten years ago today, I was at home. I remember going to my computer late that morning to check on the state of the stock market. I found only a notice, indicating that the markets were closed – which seemed strange. I then went to a news website and got a hint of what had happened. In those days, I owned a television that actually worked. I turned it on in time to see a plane hit the second of the two towers. I spent the rest of the day oscillating between the television and the computer, trying to figure out precisely what had happened.
When I was in graduate school at Yale, I was a teaching assistant for a course entitled Historical Studies in the Origins of War that my Doktorvater Donald Kagan had worked up. In later years, I put together a very similar course; and, as it happened, I offered it in the Fall of 2001. So on the evening of 11 September, I drove to the campus of the University of Tulsa, fully prepared to swallow my present concerns and discuss the origins of the Peloponnesian War. Outside the entrance to the building where my office and classroom were located, I ran into a colleague who occupied the left end of the liberal spectrum. He said, “We have to talk to these people. They are obviously upset.” I suggested that the time for talking was over and that it was more appropriate that we hunt them down and kill them.
In the academy, when I was a student, it was considered bad form for professors ostentatiously to display their political views in class. In the course of my career, what had once been considered bad form had come to be the norm. I deplored this and tried to avoid it. It seemed to me that our task was to encourage students to think for themselves, not to tell them what to think, and it was and is my conviction that this means that we ought to expose them to alternative ways of looking at things. That night, I thought that I should set an example by lecturing on the subject indicated in my syllabus – which had to do with Thucydides’ account of the origins of the Peloponnesian War.
This was pure idiocy on my part. Five minutes into the lecture, a student raised his hand and said, “We do not want to hear about this. We want to know what you think about what happened today.” And, so, I bowed to necessity and told them that we were at war – that we would have to take the struggle to the enemy and that it would be a long twilight war fought out by way of kidnapping and assassination. They were, needless to say, subdued. I mentioned Pearl Harbor and the way in which entire fraternities marched down to army recruiting centers to volunteer, and I asked whether any of them intended to do so. Not a single hand went up. Seventy years before, the United States had been a very different country. By 2001, young people were more concerned with what their country could give to them than with what they could give to their country.
In the aftermath, a young woman in the course, who was editor of the campus newspaper, invited me to write a short piece on the significance of what had happened. A few days later, the Collegian published it, and it appeared some time thereafter in The American Oxonian. I will post it this afternoon.
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Dec '10
Re: 9/11: A Memoir
You've typed "2011" a couple of times where I think you meant "2001".
In 1942, a number of Japanese-Americans volunteered to join the US Army to show their contempt for what their ancestors' homeland had done. Not sure I recall seeing a Muslim-American equivalent of the Fighting 442nd being formed in the wake of 9/11.
I myself was on a shuttle from Manhattan to LaGuardia at 8:45 AM on Sept. 11, 2001, entering the Midtown Tunnel. When we emerged on the other side, the world had changed. I saw one tower on fire, and a few minutes later, I remember wondering how the fire had jumped from the first tower to the second. It wasn't until we reached the airport that we found out about the jetliners and the Pentagon.
Re: 9/11: A Memoir
Stuart Creque: You've typed "2011" a couple of times where I think you meant "2001".
· Sep 11 at 10:02am
Thanks. I will correct this. I find it remarkable how often I screw up in this fashion.