Circumnavigating the frozen zone              

A fortnight walking the perimeter

Notes: 11 September 2001,
before, during, and after

Every narrow vista westward from Fulton south to a block or two below Liberty Street reveals a different section of the wreckage, each appalling in a different way and absent familiar references pretty much unidentifiable. (A kiosk on the east side of Nassau just south of Cedar, and another on Broadway just north of Liberty Street, display useful area buildings maps.) Because of the way Maiden Lane meanders, it's impossible to see from Nassau into Cortlandt Street--that's Century 21 and an Odd-Job Trading store I like--my regular route eastward out of the WTC when I wanted to shop the farmers' market or I'd dawdled to admire the immense and immensely graceful ketch Rebecca close up when she was docked at North Cove.
 

The bridge's collapse a couple of days after the attack allowed in earth-moving equipment larger than had been able to get in.

photo: Mark Mozaffari Remains of the north bridge. (Detail: click image to see full shot.)

I never failed to glance out a window to note the Vista Hotel, spiffy after repairs for the fatal '93 bomb blast in the adjacent garage. Starting when it happened, I witnessed that aftermath too from points up and down the river. On the Tuesday morning in 2001, where were the helicopters that lifted survivors from the roof in '93, I kept wondering.

photo: Terry Schmidt Beyond 3 WFC, fighting the 6WTC fire, 11 September. (Detail: click image to see full shot.)

Turning the revolving doors in all those buildings took the strength of a body-builder. I loathed them. I always hurried in and out of 6WTC and across the plaza, sometimes while a concert was under way. No music I ever heard was good enough to make me want to linger on that vast, sterile plain with its earache acoustics and modernistic fountain as charmless in its way as the monstrosity that has replaced the Delacorte fountain in City Hall Park.

Nor did the view from the top tempt me, having seen it once. The perspective was so remote it turned the city below into a dehumanized map with none of the embracing warmth of the view from restaurants high in midtown skyscrapers.

photo: Mark Mozaffari WTC plaza, 11 September <update, 6 July 2002> (detail: click image to see full shot).

From 5WTC it was then past St. Paul's cemetery and chapel--up Vesey Street, always, always, to Park Row and J&R, electronic shop-till-you-drop bliss, and my intended destination after voting that Tuesday morning. Half of New York pronounces Vesey Street like vestry less the tr, my half rhymes it with Easy Street. I don't know if anyone knows which is right.

By the second Friday, sidewalks on the east side of Broadway were open. Still only the narrow cross streets allowed witness, but Broadway places you a block closer than Nassau to, and one block from, ground zero. I walked south on Nassau because it was less congested, and through Liberty Street to Broadway.

Broadway across from 1 Liberty Plaza--not in danger of collapse at all, engineers say now--offers the widest vista of all intersections. After the first shock subsides, the self-containment of the damage is a surprise. If the owner had planned to raze the WTC it could hardly have been done more neatly except for broken windows nearby and the ubiquitous gray dust. Can't see the Liberty Street Amish store, another ongoing concern of mine. The closest building looks ok. The Amish store has relocated before, and I guess must again now. Tastiest sweet butter this side of Denmark.

It's true that photos just can't convey the scene, and that's not just the unmediated sight. In the first days the smoke smelled like a normal office or residental fire, burnt paper, I guess; then it acquired a chemical taint. Or maybe it was electrical. PCs? (Later, I heard a volunteer tell a radio talk-show host who'd been tiptoeing around the subject, "It's not what you think it is." He probably wasn't the only one who'd wondered. I also later saw a Times piece that discussed the smell permeating various neighborhoods and New Jersey and said it had reached even Greenwich Village, suggesting that the reporter and editor may believe Greenwich Village to be a section of Greenwich, Connecticut.) It's most noticeable in the Village, and my apartment, in the evening, when the wind seems to have a tendency to back to the south. Sometimes on a clear day the smoke's so thick you can't see the Woolworth Building. My eyes sting at night.

"BROADWAY/Canyon of Heroes," the street signs say. A votive candle near me had blown out at City Hall Monday, and a cop directing foot traffic asked me to relight it. "We'll never know how many acts of heroism will never be known because they were buried in those buildings," he said. Before September 2001, for the most part in recent years those signs on Broadway have meant sports "heroes," still so full of self-importance the first week they thought that visiting what a New York cleric termed "ground hero" and interrupting the ironworkers, police and firefighters, and emergency service personnel searching for the remains of friends and colleagues would be just the thing to cheer them up. The mayor finally had to ask them publicly to visit grieving centers instead.

I started up Broadway from Liberty Friday thinking I'd already taken it all in. I hadn't counted on till-then out-of-view Cortlandt Street. The crashes shattered the east side of the Winter Garden. When I looked west into Cortlandt for the first time, I felt the same way myself. On tv you see one aspect or another of the wreckage or a bird's-eye view. At Cortlandt you come upon it all at once in three dimensions, in context, closer than at Liberty--and in a perspective that I have in fact not seen photographed.

I must have looked as stricken as I felt. A Japanese businessman stopped, put a reassuring arm on my shoulder, smiled, and said to me, "Don't be sad. Everything will be all right." I thanked him, tried to smile back, and succeeded as I have every time in suppressing tears. Before I started home I stopped in a bar off Nassau Street and had a beer.

That moment is indelible and I doubt I'll ever forget other spontaneous kindnesses up at West and Houston streets, in the first days when that was as close as civilians could get. The first time the breeze shifted and we were downwind, I'd hardly pressed a tissue to my nostrils when a woman placed a mask in my hand. Where did she come from? Was she constantly scanning that crowd with a remedy for every practical need? Another woman announced herself as a trauma counselor, then mingled, asking each person individually if he or she could use some help. Despite being warned by strangers three different times that I was getting burned, I fried my legs, arms, and face during those three gloriously warm, cloudfree days mocked by the horror just south of us. I thanked one and said I'd just applied sunscreen and actually had got the burn the day before. "Yes," she said, "I saw you on tv" (in a pan of the crowd).

Families, teachers, and counselors will work hard to exterminate the phantoms that will lurk under the beds of the children who live south of the Holland Tunnel. Those kids have experienced the real thing, war at first hand. I never have. I was, after all, safe, about a mile north when it started. Seconds later I hear a WNYC salesman, an eyewitness from his office window about six blocks east and north, on the air describing an American Airlines plane crashing into the north tower. After I watch the second plane crash and the south tower collapse in real time on the tube I grab the nifty SW/AM/FM pocket radio my Vancouver angel sent me and hit the street running.

Clusters of strangers are gathered at every break in the skyline that allows views of lower floors. Nobody says a word. A car barrels out of the parking lot on Hudson at Clarkson Street, the driver's face a portrait of grim determination. I go to the bank branch a block south for cash. The guard's face is a study in misery. As I'm leaving, he says the whole city is going to shut down. Then, after--talk about your denial--I vote and get a muffin and coffee, I hasten downtown, traveling against the other foot traffic, some hurrying northward in tears. No. Talk about dumb luck. If I hadn't done those things, I shudder to think where I'd have been when the north tower came down. I'd've had more than enough time to put myself in its shadow.

I pause momentarily at the already closed entrance to the Holland Tunnel at Canal Street and join a cluster to ponder the ugly black horizontal gash and the floor below, a perfect necklace of furious orange flame, each window a bead framed by those familiar verticals. ...

It is the tower's last moment upright. We watch in proverbial stunned silence--except I hear an awed, low "Oh, my god" coming out of my own mouth again and again. The tape looping in my head is "Oh, the humanity. ..." A boom is audible some seconds later. I can't estimate how many, so surreal is the event in memory, slow motion, time stretched. I thought then the boom was something secondary, but the sound of the crash must have taken that long to travel 15 blocks. I talked an hour later with two women who'd seen it happen from West 18th Street, who also thought it strange they'd heard nothing then and were puzzled by the crash they'd heard a bit later. You naturally take the speed of sound into consideration in a thunderstorm or at a fireworks display, not when skyscrapers vanish from the New York City skyline. In a movie, image and sound are simultaneous.

Details of what I saw and did in the blocks between Canal and Chambers Street are hard to reconstruct. When I try, my heart pounds. I was on autopilot. I have no memory at all of getting from West Broadway to Greenwich Street. I don't know what I was doing or why. I felt no fear. I was riding an adrenalin rush that had no rational goal. No time to lose till what? I was speeding toward danger, not away from it, yet I had no illusion that I could help; I have no skills of value in a crisis, not even a strong back.

photo: Mark Mozaffari After the fall

I'm an editor by trade, not a reporter, and at that a newspaperwoman with no newspaper or even freelance contacts. Conditioning? I can't think what else was fueling that overwhelming, inexplicable drive to get there--or, for that matter, the urge to write this. It had to be done, that's all.

Nobody would want to breathe that stuff. When the WTC was being built, the dangers of asbestos had just been established and much hoo-ha raised anxieties about what was being blown into the air downtown. When uncertainty surrounding the Three Mile Island near-meltdown was at its most tense I heard a friend, an environmentalist expert on the U.S. nuclear industry and its dubious regulation, interviewed on the radio. I called him in Boston to ask what to do. "Watch which way the wind blows," Dick advised. ... With asbestos blowing around, that seems like good counsel to follow again.

I turn and walk north to the first street, Harrison, that will take me to the nearest pier. At water's edge, everyone is purposefully scurrying someplace, all directions, except one black man wearing a green police shield that entitles him to go where other civilians can't but who stands long in decidedly unjournalistic immobility. I see him twice and will continue to regret that I didn't stop and talk to him. His troubled expression haunts me. Did he have someone in one of those buildings? Perhaps 10 other people have settled on this pier, the first north of Stuyvesant High School, to collect wits and watch. I compare notes with two women who've walked down here from Chelsea.

7WTC was, and 1 Liberty Plaza is, huge yet had so little presence I'd never noticed either despite seeing them thousands of times: downtown sliver buildings that raised neither the eye nor the spirit. Granted, they had some stiff competition across the street. I was baffled when two tourists a short walk away once asked me how to get to the World Trade Center. I pointed up to the towers and said, "Uh, see them? Well, just keep walking that direction."

The fact that the reddish brown building nobody could identify and not the fallen towers was billowing the most voluminous smoke had to be pointed out to other people watching, even on the nearest pier. Radio news probably mentioned 7WTC, but we didn't connect it with the building we were watching. The sides we could see looked normal except for one slightly raggedy edge if you looked closely enough at the top southwest corner.

photo: Terry Schmidt Almost obscured by smoke, 7WTC's raggedy top southwest corner. (Detail: click image to see full shot.)

photo: Terry Schmidt

photo: Mark Mozaffari Another little mystery. (Details: click an image to see full shots and a six-months-later 7WTC update.)

Yet the building was so engulfed the fire couldn't be fought, a cop told one of the women from Chelsea.

So eerie, the fire reaching across Vesey Street to destroy the one building out of the WTC's trapezoidal site with a WTC address, leaving the two adjacent buildings on Vesey sound.

Later I heard a structural engineer who'd studied the 7WTC wreckage say in a radio interview that no one so far had been able to explain that fire: It burned too hot, too long, for an office fire. No photo I've seen of the towers while they still were standing after the attack suggests any involvement of 7WTC.

The engineer speculated tentatively that parts of the plane may have been projected into 7WTC. During the many hours that fire raged--till 7WTC collapsed--rescue operations were on hold.

photo: Mark Mozaffari Battered engine part three blocks from WTC. (Detail: click image to see full shot.)

And I was obsessing over forest-firefighting choppers. A Dutch print journalist who interviewed me the next day said he'd done the same. (I was interviewed twice simply for existing.) He and I then came up with several reasons why cannoning water from the air into 7WTC might have been hazardous--jet fuel in the WTC rubble, water peril to survivors, steam, danger to pilots, etc. Why, Viktor asked, are American publications so squeamish? He said he had learned more about what was happening and had happened at ground zero from European than from U.S. media.

A high floor of 7WTC was where the Rudy we loved to hate insisted on moving the mayor's emergency bunker at great cost to taxpayers from the unsexy but secure basement of 1 Police Plaza. You can be sure he was fulfilling a tacit contract with some real estate industry supporter. Unsavory but legal; every mayor does it. He barely escaped with his life Tuesday morning. With the emergency center in ruins, till he could get back into City Hall the second week, the mayor's bunker was space appropriated on the fly.

I'm eternally grateful to Richard Haik (?sp), who I learned later took courageous measures to keep WNYC-AM on the air. When the rest of the staff were evacuated from the Municipal Building, he stayed, and later that day--after officials forced the few people remaining to leave the building--he snuck back in and resumed broadcasting news, staying on the air till finally electricity went out in that part of town. His broadcasts were my principal source of information.

I knew nobody in any affected building, not even friends of friends. I learned later that a friend had a job in one tower but didn't go to work that day; that was the closest I came to personal loss. That "Oh the humanity" moment totally blocked, I wasn't the only one who by then expected a few melancholy fatalities and 49,999 tales of miraculous escapes. The vocabulary of rescue was in use. A few blocks away, St. Vincent's Hospital--already world-renowned for emergency services long ago when I moved to NYC--was in civic disaster mode. Five survivors were reported rescued Wednesday morning, and for several hours people asked each other hopefully, "Anyone else saved?" Later that day the report turned out to be erroneous. To me at that point the event was a spectacle. When a CNN reporter asked, I said that the attack meant the loss of an icon, but that architecturally I wouldn't miss the towers. Only the shock that flickered across her face, then quickly was gone, told me how callous that sounded.

The mayor's eloquent warning that the toll would be "more than any of us can bear" foretold what was to come. In truth, only when every post and piece of sidewalk furniture that's embedded in concrete downtown suddenly was plastered with as many homemade 8 1/2x11 MISSING notices as space allowed did the reality become unavoidable. A husband. A mother. A brother. A daughter. A friend. Always smiling, always celebrating some happy event in those photos, 23 years old, aged 66, all colors, all national origins, worked on 102nd floor, worked on 93rd floor, dishwashers and executives, an M.D. (a woman), brokers and secretaries, worked for. ... Hope still prevailed: last seen wearing blue name-brand shirt, jeans, trophy watch, designer glasses. ... Then the notices began including identifying physical characteristics, a mole here, a scar or tattoo there. Streetcorner obits. Read one and weep, read more and you'll need grief counseling.

Within 24 hours, block after block of New Yorkers lined West Street and waved Thank You signs and applauded everything on wheels that moved--even Con Ed trucks, highest utility rates in the country. Except the cars bearing Donald Trump (not one to waste time staking his claim) and his escorts on Thursday--or was it Wednesday?--everything that moved on wheels was an emergency vehicle from somewhere, anywhere, coast to coast. At least one fatality was a Jersey fireman. Not just rescue squads and fire engines. Convoys of vans and trucks and 18-wheelers arrived with donated provisions. Thank you, America! We thought you hated us. Thank you, World. Who will ever forget the tv images during that global moment of silence, cars stopped, drivers standing alongside in the Paris street, Czech firemen lined up at attention? I've never heard any band play the "Star Spangled Banner" with more conviction than the band of the Brigade of Guards in that unprecedented performance at the daily changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. I'm bemused that the bland "America the Beautiful" has become the anthem of this event and not the "Star Spangled Banner"; the relevance of the words is now sadly contemporary.

Our flag is still there--and how. American flags became even more ubiquitous than votive candles--small flags hanging in apartment windows and on apartment doors, huge flags hanging from apartment windows and the roofs of commercial buildings, flags in storefront windows, flags stuck in cap visors, on vehicles, worn on T-shirts or as lapel pins or as capes, a triumphant flag on a makeshift pole on the roof of a smashed WFC building, a flag in the window of Unoppressive Non-Imperialistic Bargain ("Bargain" used to be "Women's") Books (above a beautiful shot of the WFC and WTC, taken from the water the Sunday night after the Saturday afternoon that was the last time I saw that view). Across the street a video rental store showed no flag but a Martin Amis Guardian piece advising restraint that seemed reasonable till you got to the preposterous assertion that the plane that crashed the north tower swooped down Fifth Avenue so low it had to lift to clear the Washington Square Arch. Since the arch is maybe seven or eight storeys high <update photo>, the piece lost some credibility at that point. I walked in and told the woman behind the counter we must make sure the radical right doesn't hijack the flag again this time. Flags glow artfully from an electronic billboard on Canal Street near where I stood that Tuesday morning and where now, a few blocks east, every merchant who can get his hands on a few is hawking them. The factories in China that manufacture American flags can't keep up with the sudden demand. But also on one Canal Street corner the first Sunday: that chainlink fence festooned with the inevitable yellow ribbons tv cameras understand, a solitary woman playing hymns as sweetly pure flute solos. She'd then move to another corner and play some more. Another woman was handing out a home-printed poem signed "RN Betty" with a healing message to passersby on Broadway down in the financial district during the week.

I read that New Yorkers are jumpy--start at the sound of a plane kind of thing. Uptown they may be, and downtown kids and displaced workers and residents no doubt are. Beyond the strike zone, the rest of us aren't scared--at least not about terrorists targeting our neighborhood thrice. Maybe something about being involved, or about expressing ourselves in ways more generous than buying gasmasks and hoarding prescription anthrax vaccine--one East Side matron stockpiled $7000 worth, according to a tv news report--or evacuating to the Hamptons. I've asked friends and strangers. These days it's ok to walk up to a stranger and ask a question like Are you scared? Not only are strangers making eye contact, they're laying reassuring hands on each other. My closest supermarkets had no runs on milk or bread.

I'd like to believe that landscape architects had nothing to do with the design of Hoboken's riverfront park. A pierful of trees is planted in uniform, view-blocking rows (in the distance at right in this shot of the towers' last stand); one must walk beyond the boring, military-formation fake woods to see Wall Street. Not that anything is special about this perspective of the devastation except: The towers were part of the awesome view Hoboken and all those Jersey Hudson River towns have of Manhattan. Now they're not. From each new angle, that's a shock. (Excuse me if I can't let go of this, but where urban land meets water, the kneejerk notion that park=trees is misguided. The only fully realized riverside park I've seen on flat land was the Battery Park landfill before building began: sand dunes, much loved during their brief moment and much used for art events, rallies, and romping. The focus was the river, and the open vista through access streets promised infinity. A Tribeca pier--as I recall, Pier 25, that first pier north of Stuyvesant High School--also was sand-filled--with beach chairs already--for a while and also was a delightful low-key success. In neither case was the sand a natural phenomenon, but the trees aren't either. People never can leave well enough alone, but at least should omit trees where streets reach the water and on piers.) <correction, 9 February 2002, and photo, 1 May 2002>

From the South Street dock at Gouverneur Lane I walked northwest to the intersection of Greenwich and Rector streets to see the perspective from due south. Rarely seen east and north of the site except while in transit, National Guard troops are stationed to the south and on the southern tip of the island camouflage can be seen in all directions.

When I'd stood a while, getting my breath after the punch in the gut that intersection delivers, a tall Guardsman from Buffalo walked over to chat. They're not finding "anything" in the debris, he volunteered. It seems unlikely now that anyone will have a chance to grow indifferent to FDNY ambulance sirens wailing their way out of the site; first they stopped being a constant, and you don't hear them at all anymore. (An old friend told me later that he'd watched a tv interview with a rescuer: We understand that you're not finding bodies anymore? the interviewer queried. Bodies!? the rescuer exclaimed. There are bodies everywhere. I have bodies all over me--pointing to the gray ash.)

Firefighter funerals in ordinary times are big, ceremonial, and familial. One of the most heartbreaking footnotes to this catastrophe is that with so very many and the department stretched so thin, the public is invited to attend individual funerals. The Daily News lists them.

Now when lights flash in the streets, the vehicle usually is attached to the bomb squad. Except for my first job, I've never worked anyplace in New York that wasn't subject to bomb threats. Usually employees are given an option to stay put. I always have taken it, from incredulity so far always borne out, not bravery.

The Guardsman told me about an encounter with an Indian man who lived in Battery Park City (he knew because he'd carded the man). Taking in the scope of the devastation for the first time, the man said in disbelief, "How could they do such a thing? ... I can't bring my children back here." He shook his head and slowly started walking toward home crying.

Blue NYPD sawhorses near City Hall now bear "crime scene" keep-out notices. (As of Wednesday, "crime scene" also was being used as one questionable excuse to ban photographing ground zero. The law of physics does still apply even if the First Amendment continues to take a beating under the Rudy we love to hate.) Lights still were burning in the mayor's office as dusk turned to darkness on Monday, and in a swampy little planting area on the lawn outside his office lightning bugs were swarming, more than I've seen at one time anytime this season, which a New Yorker item said recently had been a good one for lightning bugs. <photo update, 6 April 2002> As I completed an unintended circumnavigation of the perimeter of the frozen zone over the course of a fortnight, the lightning bugs were a nice lift.

In the first day or two, a friend told me that a tv interviewer asked Ed Koch how long it would take for New York City to return to normal, clearly expecting an answer of years or never. "Three weeks," Koch answered. Right! I said. After two weeks you can see it happening. We'll never be the same, but NYC will be itself again. Some things actually are better, for now, albeit for the wrong reason--single-occupant autos banned below 63rd Street, Holland Tunnel closed (if they had to bomb something, I wish they'd chosen that tunnel, but of course improving the city wasn't the goal). You see folks forget for a moment and smile. Then they remember. The fires still burn. Victims' families who want to see are being escorted to the pile, and death certificate paperwork has been streamlined. But the debate over what's to become of the site is churning and so are mayoral politics. The familiar Rudy we love to hate has reemerged. The aftermath is in gear. Contention is back.

For almost two weeks, the Rudy we hate to love had perfect pitch. A friend who worked closely with him for a few years used to lament how different the public Rudy was from the private, who was a very decent guy, my friend would insist to listeners who simply couldn't imagine such a thing was true. Too bad it took a disaster seven and three-quarter years into his term for what I take to be the private Rudy to emerge publicly. The most striking aspect of the new Rudy is the abrupt absence of belligerence. I've heard not one word about revenge or retaliation escape his lips when he, perhaps more than any other single American, has just personal cause for rage.

I never crossed 14th Street, around the Jersey barriers--"U.S. out of the Middle East" graffiti in dayglo orange no less--to the park, George Washington statue with LOVE painted all over it, much-publicized candles and peace paraphernalia, much milling. Been there, done that. At first it seems like deju vu all over again. It's not. I objected vigorously from early on to the U.S. putting American lives in harm's way in Vietnam: The Vietnamese had done nothing to the U.S. I managed to persuade a few people to reexamine their support. This situation is not parallel. New York City and D.C. are now Vietnam, the terrorists have assumed the role the U.S. played then. Please send "Give peace a chance" messages to terrorist training camps, not to me.

But I wish someone would explain the people who chant "U.S.A."--even at prayer services--as if this were a sports event. I can't. Behind the bar in that joint off Nassau Street hung a reprint of the NYPost "Wanted: Dead or Alive" front page. <pix, summer 2002> Well, Texas was where News Corp. first studied U.S. culture. What next, Al Qaeda-trained killer bees? So the NYPost continues to be a vanity publication, a freak gnat in a national fringe-right sideshow, and the Daily News and the Times are in the NYC circus's main ring--which might come as a surprise to anyone familiar with NYC only from tv or the Rupert-obsessed U.K. press.

Those chants and charges that any dissent represents a betrayal of "our boys" or even treason--I've already seen that happen--give me a very uncomfortable sense that I'm in a time warp. The central issue is different, the issue of free speech is not. I fear we're about to revisit the era when the maximum leader so eager to charge into a war he has no sons to fight was ducking a war he was himself eligible to join and in some parts of the country anyone who wasn't an Okie from Muskogee had to think twice about speaking up. I feel we have a duty as citizens to do so. Disney affiliates and advertisers who dumped ABC's stupid "Politically Incorrect" for the reasons they did are sunshine patriots. If a show where even twinkies can't express themselves freely is yanked, I hate to think what lies ahead. The White House press secretary has already cautioned watching what we say, then the press office excised that quote from the official transcript of that press conference and denied that the rewriting of the record was intentional.

Fighter jets get scrambled but can't take out even one of four toxic airliners? A bunch of thugs can think up this diabolical scheme and it's excusable that the experts we pay to keep us safe from monsters under the bed and overhead lack the imagination to anticipate them? From here, U.S. counterterrorism specialists look like a bunch of family-oriented suburban Virginia bureaucrats concerned primarily with their barbecuing skills and the quality of Junior's school; if paid less than they think they're worth they switch sides. The people left to do the dirty work are people like the rugby players and Lucian's brother-in-law's cousin, all now dead along with 40-some others on flight 93. Now the FBI is begging for people who know Mideastern languages?

The world is abstract, a topic for discussion on tv talk shows and amongst themselves in the oak-paneled meeting rooms of think tanks to the wonks who drive foreign policy in this administration whose (s)elected spokesman before 11 September could barely come up with the name of any country whose leader isn't also a ranch owner. Gullible voters were assured Colin Powell would make everything ok. Nobody mentioned that political animal Karl Rove and think tank star Condoleezza Rice would eclipse his influence.

My adviser on Three Mile Island options, now in D.C., says that security around government buildings is so tight that the hill where my father is buried, at his insistence, in Arlington Cemetery is where those in the know go to get the best view of the gouge terrorists hacked into the Pentagon. If my father, a World War II combat infantry officer in the South Pacific through Saipan, hadn't already been dead, seeing that wound would have killed him.

Till the administration can come up with an explanation of why we're hated that's more nuanced than those "America the Beautiful" cliches the administration's (s)elected spokesman suggested in his address to the joint session, I, and I think some others, wonder if Johnny and Janie will be marching off to war shoulder to shoulder with Nigel, Yankel, and lip service at most from all the other countries that initially rallied instinctively and strongly. Bomb the Al Qaeda network? Nineteen fanatics died. Osama bin Laden's camps are said to have trained 11,000 more who are all over the world and have made all too obvious that no matter how often chicken hawks call them cowards, death does not frighten them. Wild West slogans may play well in the red states, but presumably citizens there already are patriots. At a time when we need international support, a call for a crusade gives new meaning to the World War II admonition that loose lips sink ships.

Now we know what compassionate conservatism means. Soccer moms got an environmental bone or two, fat cats got tax cuts, U.S. scientific research and women's reproductive services worldwide got crippled by Catholic/Christian fundamentalist-tilted policy. That done, while we're at war how can anyone discuss domestic issues in good conscience? (But get those wells pumping. We're going to war.) World War II ended the Depression. Can a war on terrorism end the recession Wall Street confirmed when it reopened?

W.'s speechwriters are inspired and when well-rehearsed his delivery is improving. But in an unscripted televised conference call with Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani a day or two after the attack W.'s incoherence, far beyond being inarticulate, was a more terrifying reason for apprehension than seeing the tallest buildings east of the Sears Tower crumble before our disbelieving eyes.

The son of someone who was possibly once a Japanese soldier brings solace in 2001, and the bogeyman I fear is a Yalie challenged by the necessity to construct a simple sentence, who is surrounded by C.E.O.s who haven't had a novel idea in their long lives and foreign policy wonks who--Colin Powell excepted--learned what they know about the rest of the world from other wonks.

If you stand in Sixth Avenue at Prince Street, the Millennium Hotel (whoops--the owner spells it Millenium) and 1 Liberty Plaza--to my surprise--are prominent in the view south. Like the Cortlandt Street side of the Century 21 building and others nearby, their WTC sides are draped from roof to street in protective international orange mesh--presumably steel, presumably confines falling glass and debris. The smoke from the fires at their bases has subsided noticeably, the mob has been accused of looting WTC dump sites, and con artists have started trying to scam victims' families; somehow the Internet has been implicated. --> MORE

recommended reading

Eyewitnesses, in their own words; heroes; Afghanistan then and now; Israel and the Palestinians; intelligence gathering; on watching what we say; some other politics; periodicals; and archives.

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These pages have had a lot of help and encouragement from Rod Bicknell, Jean Crouse, Stephen Morse, Francis Fisher, Don Riemer, Mimi Gauthier LeBien, and William Allen. Thank you! Special thanks to Terry Schmidt for sharing photos freely, and thanks, Yahoo!, for listing this page prominently among terrorism full coverage "Eyewitness Accounts" links.