Stories of 9/11

Certain iconic events in history cause people to remember exactly where they were in that moment. Neil Armstrong stepping out on the moon. The day Reagan got shot. And 9/11. This week is the 20th anniversary of a day like no other day.

There are parallels between 9/11 and the current Pandemic. Both changed the way we travel. Both highlighted the need for risk management, disaster and contingency planning for every company in the world. Both impacted global economies. Both almost destroyed the travel and leisure industry. And both distracted us from doing our jobs. We will never work the same as we did before those disasters.

Over the years, I’ve collected many stories of 9/11, too many to recite here. It’s right and proper that we tell our stories. That day changed our lives going forward forever. It led to decades of wars that may or may not have recently ended. It triggered a host of surveillance technology, laws, and rules of engagement that do not mix well with more recent attempts to protect personal privacy. And it took the lives of 2996 people.

Even my youngest daughter, who was not yet 4 years old, remembers that day on September 11, 2001, because my wife wanted to distract the kids from the panic and anxiety every adult was feeling, so she took them to the animal shelter to get a kitten, who they christened "Spunky".

My Tuesday in California started at 6am at a friend’s house. While the coffee was brewing, he got a text from our mutual friend on the east coast. “A plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York”, he said. We assumed that meant an accident with something like a single engine Cessna and paid no further mind to it. This was before smartphones and social media, so we all got our news from radio and tv. On my way home before 7am, to get my kids ready for school, the radio told me that both Twin Towers had been hit by jets and were burning. And the Pentagon had been hit by another jet. The story was very confused. But it became clear that America was under a coordinated attack.

My wife was very worried. We often carpooled our kids with other families to the school. They were all calling and checking in, asking what each other had heard, what anybody knew. They all decided to stay home and keep the kids away from the tv and radio while the parents all watched and listened.

For reasons I cannot comprehend now, I decided to go to work that morning. I told my wife that my company, with employees all over the world, might be a better source of information than the broadcast news. So I drove 50 miles to my office in Redwood City. There was no traffic. It was like a holiday morning.

When I got to work, I went into the cafeteria where we had large tv’s mounted on the walls. I stood beside my CEO, one of the scant few people at work, and we watched the Twin Towers collapse on tv, over and over again, from different camera angles. He turned to me and said, “I don’t think we should have come to work today”.

I went to my office, logged into my computer, and started instant-messaging my coworkers in Europe. Nobody knew anything. But there was an announcement that all the planes in the air were being grounded.

One of my coworkers later told me his story. He was on a Lufthansa flight to the Bay Area coming from Germany. He had noticed that there were several US military dogs in crates loaded into the cargo hold. Somewhere over the Atlantic, the pilot suddenly made an announcement, “the United States has been attacked. We are returning to Germany.” That was all he said. The passengers all looked at each other, highly confused. Then the plane banked sharply and u-turned. At that moment, the military dogs started howling like wolves. It was eerie. The passengers wondered in hushed voices with others, “what does it mean ‘the United States has been attacked’? Has there been a nuclear attack?” There was no other information available until the flight landed in Germany.

Another coworker was on a flight from Canada. The pilot announced an emergency order to land the plane in Omaha. As they approached the airport, she could see dozens of planes taxiing off the runways. It seemed every plane in the world had already landed in Omaha and overcrowded the terminals. Before the plane’s wheels touched down, she was on her phone, calling her secretary. “Book me a room for tonight and get me a rental car outside of the airport”. She got one of the only rooms left in town, the honeymoon suite at a fancy hotel. She watched the tv and made calls home and determined the only thing to do was get up and leave immediately in the dark and drive back to Canada. When she finally got to the border near Toronto, the Americans let her cross back home. But America had closed its border to all incoming traffic. Hundreds of semi-trucks were stacked up in line waiting to cross from Canada full of dairy and produce and meat. Truckers had built campfires on the side of the road and were cooking whole sides of beef. It seemed medieval.

Another coworker was not so lucky. He was coming from Japan on a JAL flight headed to San Francisco. The order to land came too late to turn back, so they were forced down in Vancouver. Again, there were so many jets that they were parked all over the taxi paths. Portable stairs had to deplane people when the gates filled up. JAL rounded up all the passengers, put them on a bus and took them to a hotel an hour away from the airport. For over ten days, they all got up at 6am, got on the bus, went to the airport, and sat there until 10pm, waiting for permission to re-board and depart.

My coworker is Japanese, and his flight was full of older Japanese going on vacation to America. He was one of the few passengers who spoke English. The entire Japanese tour group quickly latched onto him. He was their lifeline to information in a foreign land. Every time he got up to go to the bathroom, he got escorted by a half dozen old Japanese men. They had no intention of letting him out of their sight. By the end of the ordeal, several older Japanese women were suggesting he should marry their eligible daughters when they got home. He didn’t.

My wife’s cousin and her husband are dual citizens, French and American. They both work in the food and beverage import business and they live in New York, and they were both going about their business on September 11, keeping early appointments with restaurants. They were both in Manhattan when the planes struck. Manhattan was full of noise and confusion. Sirens wailed, people were running and shouting, even before the towers collapsed. But when they collapsed, a cloud of dust and smoke filled the streets. The wife retreated to her favorite French restaurant. The cellphones didn’t work, all circuits were busy. She didn’t know where her husband was, but she knew he had accounts in the Twin Towers. So she sat in the restaurant, worrying, in shock, looking out the windows at masses of people marching past, many covered in grey dust. Eventually, her husband appeared at the window. Somehow he knew to go to this same French restaurant to look for her. She later told us, “French people always look for food and drink when there is a disaster”. All traffic was stopped on the bridges out of Manhattan. The subways were stopped. So people walked. The cousin and her husband walked home that day with tens of thousands of others.

An American man I interviewed in Japan told me his story. He was on a finance team in New York, and there was a big meeting with another company to review a merger-acquisition proposal. Dozens of people from his office were involved, with dozens from the other firm. The meeting was on an upper floor in the Twin Towers. When the first plane struck, it hit the other tower, not the one he was in. Smoke and papers started flying past the large windows of his conference room, but it faced away from the other tower, so they couldn’t see what was happening. Somebody turned on the tv and people watched in real time as the other tower burned. The building security made an announcement on the public-address system to shelter in-place, and that the elevators were turned off. Realizing that no business meeting could take place, and feeling very unnerved, he and one other person from his office determined to exit the building even though it meant walking a hundred flights of stairs down. This was against the advice of the authorities, but he left anyway. When he got to the bottom, the second jet hit his tower. Nobody else from his office survived.

Another friend told about a suburb in New Jersey, where the commuter train took dozens of workers every day into Manhattan for work. Neither cellphones nor landlines worked that day, so nobody could communicate with their loved ones. As the day wore on, many spouses went to the train station waiting for news. As trains trickled in all day and into the night, there were highly emotional reunions as loved ones finally were able to come home. The last train arrived very late, but there were still people at the station with no word. As the town realized there were still people at the station waiting, entire families went there just to stand in the dark with their neighbors for loved ones who never returned.

Back in California, my friend was at San Francisco International Airport waiting for his room mate from college. They hadn’t seen each other in years. My friend and his wife waited hours at the airport for any news. Even after all planes were grounded, very little information was available from the authorities as to what was going on. My friend’s college room mate was on United Airlines flight 93. He found out later that day that it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. We all wept together.

America remained closed for many days. Many coworkers were stranded in foreign countries for the duration. One coworker was stuck in Berlin at a hotel. When he finally got word that planes were flying again, he booked the first available flight back to Silicon Valley. He jumped into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. The driver was not German, but rather was from somewhere in the Middle East. He did not speak English well, but he asked, “are you American?” to which my coworker replied, “yes”. Suddenly the taxi driver veered off the route and started driving very fast down side streets. My coworker started to get nervous, “where are we going?” to which the driver replied, “you will see”. My coworker contemplated how he might open the door and just jump out, but before he acted, the driver slowed down and said, “Look! Look!” as they drove past the American Embassy in Berlin. My coworker saw piles and piles of flowers forming a wall around the embassy. German people stood silently, reverently keeping vigil around the embassy.

I remember the aftermath of 9/11. There was a strange camaraderie that broke the ice and caused us to look at people differently, look them in the eye and actually see a fellow human being instead of a total stranger. I remember neighbors who had never even waved at us suddenly walking across the street to say hello and introduce themselves when the opportunity came. The workers in stores acted differently, and we acted differently towards them. Suddenly everybody cared. And the rest of the world poured out compassion for America. Even the French said, “we are all Americans”, and a huge crowd gathered at Notre Dame in Paris and sang The Star Spangled Banner.

9/11 was a tragedy. But we learned things about ourselves. We all stopped our hectic schedules and evaluated our values, our motivations, the things we cherished, the people we cherished. It was a valuable lesson in solidarity that many have forgotten recently. I hope to God that it doesn’t take another tragedy to remind us.