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While Memory Remains
9/11 is both a national tragedy and a source of deep personal trauma. Our memory, grief, and generational distance shape the way we Americans continue to understand that day.

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Dear Friend,

Nearly a third of today’s Americans were born after 9/11. To grow up in the shadow of an epochal event is not unusual. There were generations of Americans born in the years after the Revolution, after the Civil War, and after WWI. I was born eight years after the end of World War II, as part of the Baby Boom generation. The fathers of nearly all the children I knew had served in the war. But as we are often reminded of these days, they didn’t talk about it. And they didn’t talk about not talking about it. The war was somehow there without being conspicuous.

I didn’t know much about my father’s service in the Pacific until after he died and I was in my mid-40s. By then I had seen plenty of WWII movies and had read enough books, both history and fiction, to have a good picture of the era. I had both the cold facts and the deeply imagined versions such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I grew up playing board games such as Midway, based on the battle that changed the tide of the Pacific War. After my father died, I went through his papers and discovered a man I never knew, one who served four years in naval intelligence and kept his lifelong vow of confidentiality. He was one of many, of course, who just went on with his life, not hiding secrets about his past but seeing no need to build a story around the common experience of the many who served.

How different it has been for those who grew up in the shadow of 9/11.

They have been inundated their whole lives with accounts of the horrific attacks of that date, the heroics of first responders, and the valiant sacrifice of the men on Flight 93. They have heard the “9/11 truthers” spinning out fables aimed at debunking what happened. They may have visited the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center or the other sites. There are more than a thousand memorials across the country and around the world. Everyone who was of an age to register the event has a memory and a story to tell. And those stories, unlike WWII stories, are readily told.

Here’s mine.

I was an administrator at Boston University, working for the president. At 9:00 each Tuesday morning, all the vice presidents met. When the president’s secretary told me about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center at 8:46, I had a TV monitor wheeled into the meeting room. We watched as the second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03, and collapsed at 9:59.

By then we knew that planes had been hijacked out of Boston and that some of our staff and students had been killed. And I knew that my wife had been on a westbound United flight that morning. It took another hour before I was sure her flight wasn’t one of those hijacked. It was many hours before I heard from her, safe on the ground in St. Louis. Later that afternoon I taught my graduate anthropology seminar. The president had decided not to cancel classes. Somehow that seemed right.

But in the days and weeks that followed, nothing else seemed right. My wife rented a car and drove back to Boston. She and I talked endlessly about what the terrorists’ next target might be. We lived in fear. It is not my place to tell her story, but the trauma brought an end to my marriage. It also led to the university president’s resignation and, soon after, to my decision to leave Boston for good.

All of this is to say that the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,977 innocent victims also spread trauma within a much wider circle. Within a few years, I moved to New York City and found that everyone who had been here at the time had a story, mostly focused on the suffering of others but fringed with personal shock and anguish.

The third of today’s Americans who didn’t experience this are usually polite when they hear the stories. They are fortunate to know those events secondhand, or through polished memorial plaques for firefighters and others consumed by the catastrophe. Every now and then another victim is identified. In mid-August, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner announced that the 1,654th victim had been positively recognized. This will continue, as in fact does the recovery of remains from World War II battlefields. We now speak of “closure,” but grief is unending. As long as there are those to remember, we will experience echoes of that fateful day.

I don’t think I can end this without noticing that our current mayor was born in 1991 and came with his family to New York City in 1998, so he was 10 when the 9/11 terrorist attack occurred. He has been criticized for speaking of 9/11 as a time when members of his family—especially his aunt— experienced “Islamophobia.” He said his aunt “did not feel safe in her hijab.” But he has also spoken of the events as a “horrific terror attack.” I don’t pretend to know how deeply and in what ways the attack shaped him. But I can say many New Yorkers do not sense that he shares the visceral repugnance to the hijackers and the lingering horror of the rest of us.

A time will come when the last remnants of that dissipate, like the last battlefield nightmares of Antietam or Gettysburg, or those of Belleau Wood. But we aren’t there yet.

Yours,
Peter Wood
President
National Association of Scholars
Read More at Minding the Campus ([link removed])

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