September 11, 2001: Letters to my family

Twenty years after 9-11 ... In 2001, I spent eight days in the US waiting to be able to come home. Being a foreigner there, at a time when Americans felt so threatened by outsiders, was a deeply jarring experience. In spare moments I wrote letters to my brother – this reflection is an edited extract.

The Illinois World Trade Center, one of the tallest buildings in New Orleans, sits on the south bank of the Mississippi.

An office block in the deep South didn’t seem a likely target for a terrorist attack, and that Tuesday morning – September 11, 2001 – the US government had grounded every flight in the country. But we sat and waited anyway, drinking coffee at a riverside bar.

Our American friends had found their own places to gather and we Australians had also sought each other out. One of us had suggested going somewhere to see if planes were still flying into skyscrapers; it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Confused and dismayed, we drank a little, wondered what catastrophe might strike next, cheered ourselves with stupid jokes that seemed funny in the moment. But we must have seemed more amused than we felt. ‘You guys are enjoying this too damn much,’ the barkeep told us. ‘Some good people died today and you guys are laughing.’ He was right. We moved on.

In mid-afternoon, we heard the sound of jet engines and wondered if fighters had been mobilised, but then a passenger plane, a Boeing 747 maybe, flew overhead. It took a slow turn not far above the city until it was directly headed for the World Trade Center.

In the distance we could see a couple of fighter jets. For a moment we held our breath, but it passed overhead and disappeared again. Down the street, a small group of older tourists stood as it passed, watching in silence. It was Air Force One, with President Bush aboard.

New Orleans was quiet but America was in paralysis. Planes were grounded, the phone system was barely working, hire cars had been snapped up in the first hour after the buildings fell and the trains were booked out. The hotels had had a mass cancellation of tourists and conferences and had reacted by cutting back menus to just a few items and charging premium rates to visitors who couldn’t leave.

Many restaurants and shops were closed. Prices shot up in some of the cafes that had stayed open. Tour guide operators were standing around with nothing to do, while overseas visitors meandered past, wondering if it was still okay to try to enjoy their trip.

A local, in his 80s, was making conversation with us. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘How do we take revenge for a thing like this?’ And then he reflected. ‘I sure hope I don’t see any Arabs today. For their sake.’

My visit to New Orleans had begun a couple of days earlier, on the Sunday before 9-11. I was there for an academic conference. Hot and humid, the sun was fierce when it wasn’t raining, people drifted along the Canal St pavement outside the hotel, a car was on fire beneath the overpass and police tape marked a random shooting a couple of blocks away.

In the French Quarter, the tourist traps sold T-shirts and stuffed alligator heads. Visitors lined up for the cemetery tour and an introduction to hoodoo and voodoo. Bourbon St was not too busy, early in the afternoon, but the crowds were already drinking. Music came out of every shopfront. For a long time I stood in the shade looking at the river, watching a paddle steamer, but it was too hot for walking and a mile in any direction could take you somewhere a tourist shouldn’t be.

At the conference, I was scheduled to chair the opening session on the Tuesday morning: reflect for a few minutes, then introduce the main speaker. As people were being waved into the lecture theatre, one of the organisers came up to me with a request. ‘Could you announce something,’ she asked? Her voice was quiet, a whisper, the words catching in her throat. ‘Something about the incident?’

‘What incident?’ I asked her. It took her a moment to gather herself. ‘The towers,’ she said. ‘The World Trade Center. Some planes were flown into the towers and now they’ve come down and 50,000 people are dead.’ She was having a lot of trouble controlling her voice.

‘The World Trade Center?’ I couldn’t take it in. I didn’t know New York. I wanted to ask – was that the building that King Kong climbed in the 1976 remake? But then, I thought – what if she hasn’t seen that movie? She’ll think I’m an idiot.

‘Ok,’ I said, ‘I’ll say something.’ Then I remembered the speaker I was introducing was from New Jersey and that there would be 300 Americans in the audience, some of whom probably hadn’t heard the news, and some of whom probably knew people who worked in the twin towers. I couldn’t do it.

The speaker, an American who had grown up in Poland, had to introduce himself. He made a cryptic announcement – ‘this is not a day for clever introductions’ – and launched straight into a highly technical presentation.

The room was full, though half the attendees knew by then what had happened. Every now and again a phone rang and a few people came and left. But most people hadn’t yet thought about what else they might do and hadn’t realised that they were about to get trapped in a giant Southern cul-de-sac.

With the session over, though, the conference broke apart. Most people went in search of information. The telephone services were barely working; the simple act of lifting the receiver off the hook drains power at the switchboard and when everybody does it at once there just isn’t enough power in the system to keep the phones live.

But the internet stayed up and became a prime source of information for the TV news services and the general public alike.

Several of us piled into my hotel room for a communal television viewing. Thirty or so channels were all carrying variants of the same information, a great deal of it – as it turned out – wrong.

We know now that ‘only’ a couple of thousand people died in the attacks and that the four planes were the whole show. That morning, at least one of the four planes was still just a rumour, and there were other rumours that seemed a lot like fact. An explosion on a train in the mid-West? Dozens of planes unaccounted for? Incoming terror flights from Egypt, or was it Libya?

Some of the news was promising. Planes would be back in the air the next day, though border control issues might mean a day or two’s delay for international flights. Everything was going to be fine, real soon.

And some things were fine. The hotel staff could be great company, such as the waitresses with a drawling Southern sense of humour who found our accents hilarious and wouldn’t let go of a joke, riffing endlessly on themes such as ‘oh, were you talking English there?’ With not much better to do, we’d linger in the restaurant, wondering what might be happening next.

But staying on was not attractive. For some of the attendees, the time spent in New Orleans was pleasant enough, but for others it was not a happy experience. One person was refused service in a bar where he was told that ‘this place is for Americans’. Several of us, marked by our accents I suppose, were asked pointed questions by strangers about where we had come from and what we were doing there.

A few people became so uncomfortable that they kept to the hotel – which was tired, damp and not in the best corner of town. Most of us just wanted to leave, get out of a country that suddenly seemed so alien.

A few attendees tried to go immediately. But New Orleans is at the end of the line. Caught between river, Gulf, lake, and swamp, the roads wind out to the north-west and it is a long way from there to the west coast or the Northern states where most of the attendees lived.

It was impossible to buy a train ticket. Some had a car and simply left. The rest of us optimistically tried to reschedule our flights, figuring that the airlines would do what they could to honour their bookings. Not that rescheduling was easy. We were told that the Australian government had gotten Qantas to donate the time of its staff in the US call centre, who were now trying to track down Australians across the country and find out who was missing.

So dealing with the airline meant calling home – when the phones worked. Some of us established systems for reversing the charges, getting up in the middle of the night to make calls because of the time difference.

At the conference dinner that evening, we sat in silence as Bush gave a national address, from the heart of ‘the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world’. Many of the Americans sat in tears as he spoke; two or three drank themselves unconscious.

The next day the sky was brilliant blue and the humidity had eased, but the streets were mostly empty. Behind the levee in the French Quarter, the river seemed still. In New Orleans, it looks more like a bay than a mere river, but it has another hundred miles to go before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. Below the surface – where the only hint of the river’s power was tiny circular eddies heading downstream at high speed – the bottom few metres of the river are a scour of mud and stones being carried along at speed, collected from the whole of the Louisiana Purchase. We were beginning to wonder whether we were going to have to see the Purchase first-hand.

The airlines weren’t going to restart that day – though they would have to restart soon, because some were close to financial collapse after the dot-com bust the previous year. The borders had been closed; we might get to Los Angeles but we wouldn’t get any further.

Some of us had been told that we could expect to wait a minimum of two weeks before finding a flight. Those with a suspect passport (from Algeria, say) were frightened of what might happen if they were questioned by police.

A group of Indians working in the US considered driving to their homes in California, but didn’t like the idea of pulling into a small hotel and getting attention from locals. Would a bunch of rural folk from Texas, or Missouri, know the difference between Indians and Arabs? Would they care?

On TV and the internet the information was inconsistent and confused, with ongoing stories about possible further attacks. Talk of vengeance was everywhere, together with talk of bringing Americans together and it being a time for families to unite. Newspapers featuring gatefold flags for people to put up in their windows sold out.

It was a country in distress. So many people we spoke to were devastated by what had happened, grief-struck in ways they struggled to explain.

I had been due to leave on the Wednesday and that night found out that my flight would be taking off the following day – only a day late, which was good news in the circumstances. I was booked to fly to Minneapolis to stay with friends, not too bad a way to wait for the borders to re-open. On the Thursday morning, though, the airport was deadly quiet.

I checked in, saw my luggage disappear on the conveyor belt and waited in the departure lounge. Hours passed, while the crowd in the lounge slowly built up. No planes came or went. There were no announcements.

The security personnel were now operating under new rules that hadn’t been well explained or even written down, and did things like randomly search people in the departure lounge. It had emerged that many airports had been routinely letting passengers carry serious weapons on board and now they weren’t even sure what was dangerous.

Is a bottle a weapon? Can you make a weapon out of a plastic teaspoon? Just how dangerous is that portable CD player?

The same officer kept coming back into the lounge and checking the same people, as the wait dragged on. One time, he emptied my bag on the ground and sifted through it with the toe of an official boot, as if the contents were contaminated.

Several things have to come together to get a flight operational: a plane, a crew and fuel. When every flight in the US had been abruptly grounded, or directed to land immediately at the nearest airport, many planes ended up at small regional airports where they couldn’t be serviced, and thus couldn’t take off again. The flight crews, like pretty much every other American, wanted to be with their families and soon were a long way from the remote locations where their planes were parked. (Some of these planes, in the end, were stuck on the ground for weeks.)

And who would want to crew one of the first planes back in the air? It might get shot down. It might get hijacked. If the phone system isn’t working so well, and it wasn’t, organising even a single flight was not straightforward.

Four or five hours into my wait for departure, it was suddenly announced that the flight was cancelled and that we would need to rebook onto a new flight a few hours later. I then learnt a game that I had to play several times over the next couple of days.

In this game, all passengers ran to the booking counter, handed in their boarding passes, and in exchange got a handwritten ticket and a security pass. This could take an hour or so. One then used the security pass to go to the luggage holding areas and find one’s bag and then run back to the check-in desk to get a fresh boarding pass.

If you ended up at the back of the queue and the flight was full – too bad. Some people won this game the first time they played and left that evening. Others found themselves on the second, third, or fourth flight out, and if that was cancelled would have to play the game again.

The one exception was people with cash. A flat rate of $800 could buy front-of-queue on any flight.

At one point, exhausted, I got irritated with the woman at the check-in counter. None of it was her fault, but I was alone and frustrated and a little bit scared. She called an airport policeman, or maybe he was a state trooper, who took me out of the queue – thus meaning that I was now at least 100 seats further away from leaving – who told me ‘to get my priorities right’.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that right now Americans are trying to get home to their families and you are not helping that to happen.’ His hand shifted to his gun.

Other people had been a lot more aggressive than me, but they were distressed citizens, not unwelcome foreigners. I explained that I just wanted to go home too.

He looked sceptical. He said, ‘What you are going to do right now is leave this airport. We’ve had enough of you people in this country. Get out.’ He flicked off the leather strap that held the gun in the holster. He stared at me, daring me to provoke him. America versus the world.

I walked around the corner and back again, shaken but more than that angry (still angry now when I remember it). He was gone and I resumed the ticket game. I played it twice on Thursday, slept overnight in the departure lounge, then played a couple more times on Friday, at the end of which I was booked onto a Saturday flight out and decided to go back to New Orleans for a decent sleep in a friend’s room at the conference hotel.

And then I was away. Travel to Minneapolis was straightforward, with a brief change of flights at Memphis. On the Sunday, there was a march through the middle of Minneapolis by people calling for love for Islam and tolerance and forbearance. They were a small voice, but a welcome one.

Minneapolis was hot too, and again I stood in the shade watching the Mississippi, pondering how much it changed over the two thousand miles to New Orleans.

Waiting for a flight to Los Angeles on the Wednesday eight days after 9-11, I spent the day at the Mall of America, a massive cube of hundreds of outlets handily located at the airport for those people who do their shopping by plane. It wasn’t quite empty, but it was close. ‘No-one is buying the frivolous stuff’, a woman told me in a bookshop.

She asked me what I was doing in Minneapolis, and I told her. ‘Oh, there’s a lot of you people here!’ she said. ‘That’s so sad, that you can’t get home.’ She gave me a free coffee and we sat and chatted.

‘There were some Chinese people here and they didn’t even have money for a hotel, but we found them somewhere to sleep. Those poor people, they flew out this morning.’ She added, ‘We have Muslims who live here, too. So frightening for them.’ She was just one of several generous-minded people I met that day.

In Los Angeles, the thousands of people waiting to fly home to Australia had been managed into an orderly queue and bussed around to hotels, and were flying out in turn. But it was a long, miserable wait, around a week in some cases. Some had landed straight from Australia, got no further than Los Angeles, and had decided to simply return home.

But I was lucky. I flew into LA on the Wednesday morning, just eight days after 9-11, and continued to Australia that night. When the plane touched down in Melbourne, everyone on board clapped and cheered. It was a wonderful, teary moment of utter relief.

When I got home an hour or so later, my family was waiting near the door; my elderly stepfather had driven 60km to be there.

My six-year-old son was with a friend in the upstairs playroom. As I sat in the living room chatting, there was a terrific crash, with the sound of building blocks flying everywhere. ‘What was that?’ I asked. ‘Don’t worry dad,’ my son called down, ‘we’re just playing world trade center. KABOOM!’