The 12th & 13th of September 2001.

Flights were grounded; military jets patrolled the breach. So, my sister and I drove East in our 'AVIS'. The rental companies had graciously permitted people to use their cars for long-distance one-way drop-offs in lieu of cancelled flights. We headed to Pittsburgh to spend the night at my Aunt Katie´s and Uncle Tucker’s house. The talk was of shock, anger and mystification of how and why these brutal attacks had taken place.

What had America done to deserve this savagery?
That question still haunts me today, ten years later, here in México.

The common feelings amongst us, beyond proper articulation, remained so paramount that the talk was filler to avoid rudeness at the dinner table. The next day, I drove my sister back to the Baltimore-Washington (Thurgood Marshall) International Airport, where she had left her car a couple of days before to fly out to Uncle Henry’s funeral. I dropped the car off at the AVIS lot.

At least, I could catch the next Amtrak to the City. On that routine ride up the coast, I read newspaper accounts of 'nine-eleven'. Some loud-mouthed woman yapped for much of the trip about how she was not about to be intimidated by “towel-heads” and other such non-sense, which (of course) I was thinking, too, but loath toward admitting.

Since she was attractive some men indulged and enabled her in holding court. Sobering was the realization that, had she not been young and attractive, she would likely have been shouted down by the rest of us, equally fearful as she. Life changes, not people.

As the train exited Newark, New Jersey and headed toward Penn station in mid-town Manhattan, I removed my nose from the newspaper at about the right time to focus on the traditional landmarks telling me I would be home soon.

Alas, the train must have been going slower or my timing was off; probably the latter as I felt very tired. In any case, I could not spot the twin towers anywhere in my visual range. Instead some factory was emitting large amounts of smoke.

What the devil? I had been on this route perhaps twenty times and could not recall that much smoke billowing out of a factory. I wondered, “This just doesn’t seem right and where are those damn towers, anyways?”

My heart freeze-dried. The train was not slowing down at all and my timing had been just fine. That smoke is – or WAS – the World Trade Center. The pain returned. We entered the Lincoln Tunnel for the home-stretch for Penn Station. As the mouth of the tunnel yawned before us, I noticed a welcome silence. The all-American magpie was quiet, her knuckles wrapped on the handle (used to help one get up from the seat) on the seat in front of her. Those joints remained white as American Standard porcelain.

Only then did I realize my previous exasperation with her lay more in my tendency to blame others for my unease than in her neurotic coquetry. The metro-liner entered the tunnel. The fear I had tried to keep away from me surfaced briefly. I said inwardly, “God, here's the deal: if now is my time to die, make it quick..." And I pushed the thought away; I do not fear being dead but dying scares me to...

Penn Station may have been crowded or it may not have been – I was oblivious. As I walked across town to my apartment, I heard many sirens. The City was different. I felt like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when he returns to ‘Pottersville’ after being granted his wish never to have lived at all.

That feeling lifted quickly as the famous resilience and under-rated friendliness of New Yorkers shone through that twilight: an unrehearsed nobility evinced by my favorite people in my favorite place on the Earth. I was home. What still clings with me now, however, was the smell – one that took a week or more to dissipate. It crawled inside my nostrils.

At that time, with my penchant for exaggeration, I assumed that within those mixed odors of burned concrete, steel, plaster-board, asbestos, etc. was also that of incinerated flesh. That was almost certainly not the case, but the trenchant odor reminded me of the carnage that had just hit my city, New York City.

When I arrived to my apartment building, the doorman and I simply looked down in grief. My practice was to chat things up with these friendly professionals about recent events. One had tipped me off that Vice President Gore might lose the 2000 election; this man disliked the Democrat due to his towering over President Bush, trying to intimidate the Republican, in the second televised debate. This time, however, what was there to say?

After shedding my suit-case, I donned my running clothes and jogged to a few hospitals to contribute blood: “brother, can you spare a pint?” After the third and last hospital that I tried without success, I gave up. My fellow New Yorkers had rallied to the call overwhelmingly. Good for them. Sadly, however, few were injured since most had been incinerated on the eleventh. As I turned to jog back to my apartment, a woman reporter from Fox News and her cameraman approached me and asked to interview me.

Why not?

By then, it was very clear that a gang of young Arabs had perpetrated this mass-murder. The reporter asked me what I felt about the attack. Of course, I opened by saying I was disheartened by the event but had gained some strength from the response of my fellow New Yorkers. All right on schedule for the reporter.

Then I said, “I hope we can remember than many Muslims died that day, too…” Instantly her plastic smile morphed into open hatred. I thought to myself, “what a bigoted bimbo” and scat from her as quickly as she from me.

Only days later would it occur to me that she had likely thought I was expressing sympathy for the nineteen suicidal sociopaths when, in fact, I was thinking of the Bangladeshis and other Muslims working hard in the Trade Center, particularly in the top-floor restaurant, to give their children some of the opportunities denied to them. All were condemned to death simply for going to work on that day of ignominy.

Last time I checked, Muslim children cry, too.

The 11th of September 2001

“Dammit, Edward, you’re forty-four f*cking years old," I chastised myself, "and you are worried about the goddam stupid knot in your neck-tie on the day you bury your god-father? Hey, pal, just grow up and go, already!” It was not an average morning. Normally, I would be walking up the Avenue of the Americas toward West Fifty-second Street and work.

No, this sunny Tuesday morning found me in Michigan, ready to attend the funeral of my Uncle Henry. In fact, at nine in the morning, the only element in common with my life in New York was that I was running late. As I strode past the reception area toward the hotel restaurant for breakfast, the Iraqi-American behind the desk, a very friendly acquaintance of five days running, said excitedly in a high-pitched voice, “A plane crashed into a building in New York!”

Too busy rehearsing an excuse for being late yet again for something important, I did not bother to break stride, figuring this nice man’s grim news was inaccurate – after all English was not his first language – or that it was something like the little plane that had smacked into the side of a hotel in Milan some time before.

As I escorted my sister through the lobby at about nine-thirty, the same gentleman, almost laughing it seemed to me, announced again in a high-pitched voice, “A large-jet has hit the other tower of the World Trade Center…” Now I realized, he was telling the truth. “Military?” I asked. “I don’t know, sir…” All these years later, I still wonder why that polite man was so out of step with the terrible tidings he was delivering.

Was he giggling because he had begun to connect the dots? Terrorism. That means it could be Middle Easterners. That means what happened in Iraq ten years ago could happen all over again, this time killing a lot more than the tens of thousands of civilians annihilated by Desert Storm. Thinking about it now, I can well understand the squeaky voice, the oddity of sideways laughter. That decent man was probably a harrowed witness of the past and scared witless for the future, as would I have been had I been an Iraqi-American living in Dearborn.

This was no accident. Nevertheless, we had to get to the funeral. During the fifteen minute drive to the church, my sister found a radio station reporting the “incident” in New York and the details of spontaneous crematoria began to focus themselves. We got to church about five minutes before the start of the ten o’clock service. My cousin Peter said, “One of the towers is listing heavily…You know what dad would be saying right now…” The priest intoned a spontaneous intention to prayer: “To the people of New York this morning.”

After the interment, we spent the day at Aunt Marion’s house just watching the television. About the only activity, outside of eating lunch, were my sister and my Aunt’s sister making frantic phone calls to see if everybody was okay. Betty Hilton, Marion McDonnell’s normally plucky sister, would spend the rest of that day in the Hell of not knowing what had happened to her son. He worked in or adjacent to the World Trade Center. A blessed e-mail came in from Westchester County later that evening; all her family was fine. The terror had worked its black magic.

People in Annapolis, where my sister lives, had heard that the Naval Academy was the target of the plane that had went missing in Pennsylvania and found as the detritus of death near some hick-town, Shanksville. Lifelong friends in Pittsburgh would later tell me how people had fled from U.S. Steel headquarters, the tallest building in town and the "probable target" of that mystery flight. Other friends in Chicago were convinced that the Sears Tower was in that unknown flight’s cross-hairs.

While these suppositions contain varying degrees of the incredible, who can blame these people for feeling this way? No one knew the location or the direction of intent of this missile of mass-murder. That not-knowing was the crux of the terror. Especially since the second mass murder in New York was replayed endlessly, often in slow motion. I remember watching that plane turning straight toward the tower to collide into it. My breath took a breather at that moment: witnessing unvarnished evil has that effect, I suppose.

On international television, innocents leapt from a thousand feet above the ground. Like a stupid ass, I thought 'compassionately', “Well, I would do the same thing if faced with the certainty of burning to death. I'd just get it over-with…” A dust storm in the City? No way. The towers were falling. Back came a very disturbing conversation some six or seven years before with one of the foremost material engineers in the East about the first bombing of the Trade Center.

That Ph.D. took the time during my family's annual Christmas party to explain to me in detail how dangerously close the blind sheik’s gangsters had come to compromising the structural integrity of the World Trade Center to tip it over in 1993. That kindly scientist, who had reviewed that bombing as an industrial ceramics expert, said that somebody had known his engineering.

With a relief removed from reality, I thanked God that the towers fell the way they did; at least they had stood long enough for most people to get out. Had they tipped, so many more would have died that day. We all watched the President state with a determination to reassure his shaken nation something to the effect, “Today was a not an act of terrorism, it was an act of war.”

Further, we felt gratitude of seeing American courage making a come-back when a politician whom I did not like, Mayor Giuliani, walked into the smoking wreckage, handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Greatness was certainly thrust upon the Mayor that hour and, as time would show, upon the President.

While I had missed Mom and Dad mightily, I was almost grateful they had not lived to see that day, the eleventh of September 2001. Time to get back to New York, now…

The Tenth of September 2001

Please note a few changes in red-font, integrated after writing this essay to reflect information received subsequently. Links are in blue-bold font.

Things had been busy for the preceding couple of days, picking up my sister and a cousine at the Detroit-Metro Airport as well as getting ready for the funeral of my Uncle Henry McDonnell the next morning. I had been in Detroit for a few days because I visited my uncle at the very end of his life to thank him for being a good uncle and attentive god-father and to say good-bye. Of course, and again, I would show up in my father’s stead; this time for his beloved brother.

The pace of preparation had finally slowed during the visitation at a local funeral home. Toward the end of the evening, I took a few moments for myself to look at the photo portrait of my Aunt Marion and Uncle Henry on their wedding day. Since a decade has elapsed, the timing of events have scrambled from memory to meaning, from sequence to significance. They looked young, lovely, expectant – my Aunt Kit and Uncle Hank did.

Years later, I would watch a scene in the movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” with Sam, the mortally wounded United States Marine, speaking with the Japanese Colonel who was comforting him with the last of the morphine available. Sam asked that officer, “Are you somebody famous?” 

Within three years, I would spend several hours in the combat hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, watching over another young United States Marine – Lance Corporal Langley – as he slowly slipped away from doctors who had tried everything to assure this boy a full life. The infantry squad whom that young man had saved single-handedly, with singular virtue and sacrifice, were hurting. Theirs was not yet the glory of combat in that room but the very human mixture of guilt, gratitude and grief.

Indeed, Sam’s wonderment in that cave in 1944 haunted me now six years before the Eastwood film flashed across the screens. You see, Hank McDonnell was much like Sam. He had learned to do the right thing – and he did so by joining the United States Army as a sergeant, fresh out of college. The differences were two. Hank McDonnell survived and he was gunned down on the beach, not of Iwo Jima, but of Okinawa, during that very bloody Spring of fifty-six years before 2001.

Hank’s squad had not made much headway when he watched the head of his radio-man shatter just feet away from him under enemy fire. Hank was soon to follow, striking the ground with at least one bullet inside him. He was probably dying and he could not move. For hours he lay there, exposed. For hours, he heard the dull thuds of bullets hitting the soil around him. Hank prayed and through the battle-field courage and medical know-how of others, he lived.

Such bravery, perhaps inborn or perhaps the grace of the moment, set Hank McDonnell above most and apart from almost everybody. My Uncle Henry took that image of a friend severed savagely, of waiting for his turn to die, with him for the rest of his life. Dancing as they do, my memories quickly shifted ahead to the quiet celebration of Henry McDonnell's eightieth birthday in Tucson, where I showed up in the stead of my father.

My birthday gift for this occasion was a thin envelope, much like the one containing the rejection letter Hank had received from Yale when he was graduating from Andover; I suffered the same tritely teen-age agony four decades later at Choate. An envelope? And a thin one? Not much. But Henry McDonnell had earned everything I could afford to buy that he might value.

After a low-key dinner with Aunt Marion, my cousin Peter, and his truly magnificent wife, Paula, I gave my gift and held my breath, anxious to make the right impression. Uncle Henry opened the envelope perhaps annoyed that I had lamely given him $80 for eighty years. He read the form-letter from one of my heroes, then recently retired Senator Robert Dole, thanking me for a $100 contribution -- in the honor of Henry Egglesoe McDonnell, Jr -- to the World War II Memorial under construction in Washington, D.C.

Hank McDonnell welcomed that gift: I had made my father proud. Two months later, at a much larger family reunion to celebrate Uncle Henry’s birthday, I happened to be alone, walking out of the powder room, when Hank McDonnell, as close to crying as the night he said good-bye to his ‘kid’ brother, just hours before my father departed, said, in what sounded to me like a stern tone, “Ned, come here.”

Anxious as always and more than a little insecure, I watched my uncle reach into a drawer and take out a leather-bound box, the type that has the royal blue velvet lining, usually containing jewelry. Opening that box, Hank McDonnell showed me his medals: a bronze star and a purple heart and one other I did not recognize. His words were barely audible, “I have hardly ever shown these, Ned, but I wanted you to see them.”

The announcement of the brother of my Aunt Marion, an Episcopal priest of many years in South Carolina, that he would lead a time of prayer to honour my uncle, snapped me out of that momentary reverie. That an Episcopal priest – my Aunt’s brother – would exhibit the grace to salute Henry McDonnell by leading a prayer made me realize that Hank had been very fortunate. The wealth he had married into turned out to be as real as it had been apparent.
After the prayers, my sister and I were walking out of the visitation room to return to our hotel, since the emotion of the past days had left me tired. My cousine, Nancy McDonnell, who had – like her father – succeeded in business and, much again like Hank, understood the importance of a personal reserve, stood near the entrance, briefly alone. My intention had been to offer her a ride to the airport after the funeral, hoping that she would somehow decide for me whether I would head back to Manhattan tomorrow, the eleventh, or wait until the twelfth.

Instead, she stood there, her eyes deep in a daughter’s grief. Notwithstanding my stupid Charlie-Brown look of not having the words to say what I should be saying, Nancy McDonnell looked at me, winced in shaking her head subtly, and said,

“You know, Ned, it’s the end of an era…”