9/11 - A personal memory

There are lots of historical events that lodge themselves indelibly in your mind, so that the question "Where were you when.....?" is asked.

JFK?  I was at a pantomime with my mum at the local WI Hall, aged 10.  I didn't understand the implications or what had happened, but it's stuck with me ever since.

England 1966?  Like a lot of people, sitting in front of a black and white TV watching it.  Then me and my mates went into the field and replicated all the goals over and over again.

Princess Diana?  Asleep.  I got up and switched on the telly and was as stunned as everybody else as the news broke.  We spent the rest of the day glued to the TV, as the news came in.

But 9/11.....well, it's in a class of its own.

It completely changed the world we live in.

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I was working at a bank in Warsaw.  We came back from lunch, and one of the guys, a Dutch bloke called Mike, booted up CNN News on his laptop.

"Look at this," he called.  "There's a plane crash at the World Trade Centre."

We all clustered round his desk and watched the drama unfold.  I remember feeling stunned that something like this could have happened in New York, given the undoubted strength of the US Military.  We all yelled in disbelief and horror when the second plane came in.  It was the same thoughout the bank, and the project managers, rightly guessing no more work would be done that day, sent us home early.

I got back to my flat and switched on the TV, which had probably the biggest screen I have ever seen, and put the kettle on for a coffee.  The news banner at the bottom of the screen was reporting the Pentagon attack and Flight 93 coming down in Pennsylvania, though details about that were still sketchy.

I was putting coffee in the cup when screaming made me turn and look round at the TV......just in time to see the first Tower crumble into dust.  The coffee went out of my mind - I poured myself a large vodka instead, and took a beer from the fridge to wash it down.  And then another.  But it was like drinking water.....

It was horrific.  I can still remember people throwing themselves out the windows, preferring to die that way, quickly, rather than be incinerated.  I remember the horror and confusion on people's faces in the Manhattan streets as they watched everything unfold.  The confusion as people ran in all directions through the choking clouds of dust.  And then the second Tower came down.  And later on the third, next door, WTC7.

I switched off then.  I had had enough.

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Not much was done at work that week.  My company had an office in one of the Towers, and for two days we didn't know if we had lost anyone.  I knew a few people there quite well.  Mercifully, there had only been a handful of people in the office and they managed to get out ok.  Everyone else was out on various sites - except for one guy, who had overslept courtesy of a hangover, and ended up stranded on the metro when it was shut down.  It took over a day to track him down.

On the Friday, I was due to fly home for a weekend in England.  US airspace was still closed, but things were getting back to normal in Europe.    On Thursday evening, Ania phoned me and pleaded with me not to fly - she even offered to take the day off work and drive me to Calais to catch a ferry: that's a long haul from Warsaw!  I tried to reassure her.  I told her that air travel would be the safest form of transport for the foreseeable future as security was sure to be ramped up.  I'm not sure she believed me, but in the end she agreed to let me fly, as long as I called her as soon as I landed at Heathrow - which of course I did.

In the event, the flight was fine: left on time and arrived a bit early.  Apart from tanks and soldiers at both Warsaw and Heathrow - a hell of a sight in itself, but reassuring - there was nothing odd about it at all.

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Since then of course the travel world has changed completely.  Security at all airports is extraordinaily tight now, what with baggage checks, personal searches and so on, meaning that now it's just not possible to turn up at the last minute and still catch your flight.  Even with hand baggage only, you need to allow at least half an hour, more at some places.  It's no fun any more.  And I can't foresee a time when the War on Terror will be won and things can return to normal - what we have now is "normal" and I believe always will be.

Are we safer now, after Iraq and Afghanistan and the assassination of bin Laden and others?  Probably yes......but not completely, because there are plenty of other nutters prepared to plan and execute their own atrocities.  Despite the tragedies in Bali and Madrid and London and elsewhere, there has mercifully been nothing on the scale of 9/11, so it would suggest the actions taken over the past 10 years is having some effect.  George Bush and especially Tony Blair have taken huge amounts of criticism over Afghanistan and Iraq, and I think a lot of it is completely unfair - here were two leaders, placed in a situation that no other leaders in history had been in before, and had to take decisions that in hindsight may (I repeat MAY) not have been 100%.  But they did what they felt was necessary to meet a threat that was largely unkown.  Could you have done any better?  Could anyone?  No.

So here we are, ten years have gone by, seemingly in the blink of an eye, and the images and sounds from that day are as clear today as they were then.   I hope to God I never see anything like it again.  And my thoughts tonight are with the 3000-odd who perished that day, and the families and friends they left behind.  It wasn't just Americans who died: 100 plus nationalities were represented in the death toll, and many religions - including Islam.