Tuesday, September 12

5th Anniversary (Part Two)

So it's the cognitive dissonance that really gets to you, shakes you, and gets your juices going. Going in an effort to relieve yourself of that very dissonance. It's a natural impulse to an unnatural event.

"They're evacuating the White House"

Under what conditions would such an event take place? What are the boundaries that have been established that would trigger the evacuation of the single most important symbol of American executive power? Knowing full well that there is a bunker under the building to protect the President and others it seems strange that people would be running out. Knowing full well that this building houses the epicenter of critical information flow in and out of the executive branch of our government it would seem only a regional evecatastrophictropic proportions would force an evacuation - and that's an unsettling thought. They knew something, or thought they knew something, that the rest of us did not yet know. These are the thoughts that raced through my mind within seconds of Andrew telling me the news.

"They're evacuating the White House"

Those are immortal words to me now. Not unlike the words of the young Jason Hitt telling me "the President has been shot". And still I have to marvel that they were more compelling to me than the first words out of his mouth "the World Trade Center is blowing up". What makes the difference - is it linguistics, or semantics, or did I just need a few seconds to wake up? Either way, they weren't the last words to be immortalized that morning.


I don't remember the rest of the call with Andrew but it was short. I told him that I was going to boot-up my computer and that we should be in touch again soon.

Before I hung up the phone I was already pushing the button and starting to get antsy about how long it takes to boot-up a fucking PC. This computer was several years old at the time, a dinosaur by tech standards. I didn't have DSL, and I didn't leave my computer on at night - too noisy. But I have suspicions that the terminology of "booting-up" will soon be archaic. It will be the part of the story where my children might say "huh? you did what? booted what?". Like cranking the engine of an old car. Or using an abacus.

And still it was not ready. ("The towers are blowing up")

There's the lovely blue cloudy Windows logo. ("the Pentagon's in flames")

Oh here come some icons. ("they're evacuating the goddamn White House!!)

Holy Christ hurry the hell up!!

My country's under attack and me without my CNN. And more specifically - am I in danger? Are we all in danger? No time to think - the phone is ringing again:

My mother in New Jersey. It's now about 7:00am PST - 10am EST.

She said something similar. NYC... Twin Towers... Explosions... Hijackings.

I told her I heard the news, buthadn't no TV plugged-in and the dial-up hadnÂ’t yet connected.

In her voice I could very clearly hear the tears. I could hear the fear. I could hear the deep, painful compassion and humanity. I was feeling my Space Shuttle Challenger right through her voice three time zones away.

It unnerved me in the truest sense of the word.

I started to lose my composure a bit. I was couldn't around in my room, angry that I couldnÂ’t fully understand what was happening, frightened that scores of people were already in extreme peril and who knows what might be next.

She called me, but was clearly still very much captivated by the images on her screen. Just holding the phone to her head she kept saying things, very somberly, very shakily, like:

"oh my god"

"all those people... oh all those people"

Finally I cut her off and demanded that she "tell me exactly what you are looking at on your TV".


"The whole top the both buildings are on fire", she said.

I tried to picture this. I knew these buildings. I walked on the rooftop observation deck of one of them. Standing at the base of one tower I put my hand on the steel and looked straight up and got dizzy in the process. I was awed. IÂ’m still awed just thinking about them - they are MASSIVE structures. On a cloudy day you canÂ’t see the top of the buildings. And now the top of them, BOTH of them, was on fire?

What could that really mean? Was it a small crop-duster that crashed into the side of the building? Was it a couple offices that were on fire? Did she see actual flames? Or just smoke? My mind was racing and I needed clarification. I still wasnÂ’t logged onto to internet. I still hadnÂ’t my first image of anything real yet.


It was now 10:05am in NYC.

My mind was trying to get around the whole thing when she said the next words to be immortalized forever in my mind:

"oh my god"

"What! what?!"

"The top of the building is sliding off", she said.

"what, what the fuck are you talking about?!?"

Tops of buildings don't "slide off". It was a truly unique statement to make and not one that was easily comprehended. I knew she wasn't lying to me, but surely she wasn't understanding something. Surely the top of the building wasn't sliding off. But those words are haunting to me even five years later - because now I understand that that's exactly how it appeared to her in those very first moments. The image was smoke filled and, to be honest, the way in which the building actually did collapse was also surreal - the idea of one of the Twin Towers of New York City actually collapsing in on itself is no more or less unreal than the idea of the top of it sliding off during a raging fire. Either way my brain just couldnÂ’t compute this. Everything I knew about the Twin Towers, about fires, about architecture, about steel and concrete, about planes, about physics and life and the universe, and above all what I knew about my mother, all combined to tell me that certainly something about this information had to be wrong.

I'm sure I was making panicky statements on my end. But on her end she was ignoring me and just saying over and over:

"all those people... oh dear god.. all those people"


She could barely talk. And I could barely listen.

And so how could I argue with that? The words made no sense but I could hear the truth in her voice. I told her I needed to go and hung up the phone. I abandoned the internet. I needed a television. The single most powerful communications tool known to man and usually woefully underutilized - but not this time. Not this day.

Our TV, sans cable, wasn't really accessible. Everything in our living-room, dining-room, and master-bedroom had all be tossed into the center of the room in a clusterfuck jumble as our apartment was in the final stages of renovation after a flood destroyed the upper rooms of the building. The walls were being painted and tarps covered the piles of furniture. This was the reason I didn't bother to come up here in the first place - but after those two chilling calls...

I ripped back the tarps in a frenzy and dug around for the TV. I surprised myself when I managed to pull it up and over the heap with adrenaline powered strength ("evacuating the White House", "tops of towers sliding off..."). Plopping it down on the one small open space by the front door, plugging it in and then messing with the antennae until I got reception from a major network and..

sweet mother of god.

"Dumbstruck" is a good word. An appropriate word. Although it sounds both dated and, in this case, just not quite as impactful as I'd like. "Struck dumb" sounds a little better.

I swear to god there used to be TWO towers, but here I was looking at my TV and plain as day there was one solitary "twin" tower - and it was in blazes.

"Mindboggling" is another good one. My mind was boggled. But even that doesn't do it as it sounds amost playful.

Then the network started to replay the collapse of the first tower and I could see for the first time what my mother saw just moments before. In the very first second of the collapse it does kind of appear to be sliding a bit. But one nanosecond later you see the full horror of one of the worlds most massive office towers just crumbling down. You fear for all the people in the tower - they are surely all dead within seconds. But then all the people on the ground - holy shit. There would be no way to out-run something like this. I think about myself, standing maybe one block away looking up - would you have enough time to run behind another building. Maybe so. Maybe cognitive dissonance would freeze you place like a deer in headlights. Your brain not being able to fully understand what you were witnessing.

I remember when Challenger exploded someone called out that they thought it was coming back down - a radio announcer, or a person in the seating area, or maybe a NASA person, I'm not sure - but they couldn't, at that very moment, get their brain around the idea that it had exploded. To them it first appeared to be turning around - maybe a more hopeful, but still scary idea.

I watched a bit more video - glued to the screen like every other person in view of a TV. I saw clips of the second plane crashing, then the Pentagon and then the tower collapsing over and over again. I saw clips of Bush speaking in Florida. Then the towers again.

Then I heard my neighbor leaving her apartment and walking down the sidewalk that passed by my house. There was something almost cheerful in her step - I swear I could hear it - that told me she hadn't turned on her TV or radio that morning. I leaned my head out my front door, having to move my TV out of the way first, and called out to her. She ran back inside to wake her husband and turn on her TV. I was tempted to join her knowing they have a big beautiful TV and cable connection, then I thought better of it knowing that he would be in bed. But damn... I needed to not be alone right now. And I remembered my other roommate Shawn, downstairs asleep in his room.

"Shawn!... Shawn wake up!"

(huh.. wha?...)

"The country is being attacked... New York is being attacked... Washington DC is being attacked... the Twin Towers are collasping..."

I listened to myself and immediately questioned my own ability to deliver the news. Why was I speaking in such a panicky voice (for damn good reasons I think!). Knowing what state of mind he was in (far, far away) I was trying to shock him out of his stupor. And it's not like I was exaggerating, right? I mean... how can you exaggerate 9/11/2001. The nerve center of our military was in flames. The White House was evacuated. It was Pearl Harbor in real time. In MY time. And Shawn, despite his stupor, was able to piece it all together in the span of about 30 seconds. He gave me pause when he asked, quite simply:

"so is this the start of WWIII?"

Struck dumb once again. I must have looked like I'd just been smacked upside the head and then someone pushed the pause button. Not that Shawn would have known since his eyes never opened and his head never left the pillow.

I told him that it likely wasn't WWIII (who was I to say), but that it was certainly the start of something.

Certainly something... big.

That was enough to allow him to roll back to sleep. I wonder had I said "YES!! WWIII is starting right fucking now!!" if he would still have rolled back to sleep. Makes no difference I suppose.

I was alone with the TV again. Flight 93 had crashed in the Pennsylvannia field but had not yet been reported. I started making phone calls and was surprised I was able to get through to the east coast.

I called my parents house. Dad answered but I presume Mom went to work? We chatted briefly but I forget the details. I remember him disagreeing with me that it was maybe bigger than Pearl Harbor in terms of deaths.

I called Melanie Long - a lifelong best friend. Can't remember any of the details of this call either but it wasn't a long talk.

I called Fred Shiffman - a close friend in the DC area. Freds wife, Joellen (sp?), at the time worked near the Pentagon. Fred and I talked about whether or not we were safe. He told me they could see the Pentagon from the highway and there was a truly ominous and frightened feeling in the air. They weren't feeling very secure and I could imagine. Our chat was very cursory as he was needing to make calls to other friends and family letting them know DC was still on the map.

I called my boss, David Nahill, at home. We were due to open the small retail store he owned in a couple hours and we talked about whether or not it was a good idea. The word "appropriate" was used often, but at the that point our thoughts weren't anywhere near clearminded. We would later decide to open the store at 10am as usual, but shortly after opening we both felt so uncomfortable that we just closed up again and that's when I took off to my friends Tim and David.

I forget who else I called before leaving the house - maybe I called back Andrew?? (Andrew... I was afraid I may have misquoted you earlier, but I didn't have time to email you for any clarification - please send me your memories of that morning).

When I got to Tim & Davids house it was just TV TV TV until we couldn't take it anymore. We waited for Bush's oval office speech and then, reluctantly, decided we needed to give our souls a break. We needed to get away from the TV. We needed to break away from the mind-numbing imagery. We needed to just be with ourselves for a few moments. Needed to let our nerves calm a bit.

We headed out to the nearest bar for a drink... where they had a TV in every corner playing the news. ugh.

This is the end of my "Where were you on 9/11" tale. I would like to hear your stories as well. Do not post in the comments - much better to email it bserwalt@gmail.com

Some other 9/11 thoughts:

Flight 93 - Two weeks ago I watched a Chinese bootleg copy of this Fox production feature length movie. Not sure if it was in theatres or not? I expected cheesy crap, but it was actually well done, well acted - more of a tribute to the families of the Flight 93 victims. It follows the story of the 5 or 6 passengers who were able to phone family on the ground. It begins from the moment of boarding and ends with the crash.

Watching videos with Ni-Vans is a strange thing. They often laugh at all the wrong moments. My village actually has one DVD player and they watch bootleg movies once or twice a month, or whenever a tourist hooks them up. They laugh at black people in movies especially. And if people are getting shot or blown up or otherwise showing intense emotion - they just laugh or make little comments. And since they don't always understand whats happening, and certainly don't understand most of the language, they have to talk to each other about the images which is very distracting. If the movie is something like Van Damn or Vin Diesel (this is the kind of crap they usually get) then I don't care. But for something related to 9/11 I decided that I needed to watch this one with just Jeff - no Ni-Vans. It's too difficult to explain that this is something real and that it's not appropriate to laugh this time. More on this later.

Newsweek International Edition - I'm pissed that I opened my mail on the 5th anniversary of 9/11 only to look at a front cover promotion for a Oliver Stone movie called "World Trade Center" featuring a large photo of stupid Nicolaus Cages horsehead face in a firemans hat with the burning towers in the background. I was anticipating an anniversary story of 9/11 but this is not what I expected by a long shot. Nothing against making movies, but maybe that should have been a sidebar or something.

Yesterday Is Today - for me 9/11 was yesterday which I'm almost ashamed to say was a very good say for me mostly because I got a ton of mail. Robert I got your two small packs that included the iPod charger and the magazines. You mailed them both on Aug24th and I got them on Sept.11th. But the first box is still M.I.A. On this day we also had a farewell for Steven Lenfant, a frenchman working for POPACA (which helped on the coffee project). This farewell inlcuded putting him on an airplane. When I watched his flight take off I got chills, even though it was a little puddle jumping 20-seater. But now it's 9/12 which is really 9/11 in America.

"Where Were You in Vanuatu?" - the Ni-Vans don't play this game here, or anything like it. They have almost no media (outside Vila) and therefore no connection to each other or the outside world. Annie, a friend and employee at the bungalows, saw me writing in my notebook and so I explained to her about "where were you?" and asked if she had anything in her life that was similar. She just kind of looked at me blankly. Then it occurred to me that lack of media is a key part of understanding this culture. This is a good thing and a bad thing - and it's worth exploring more at a later time. Now... I'm tired.

Next week I hope to make some posts, including pictures, about:

Toka - the single largest custom festival in Vanuatu. Legendary in it's proportions, mythical in it's history. It happens once every 4-5 years and I was there.

Mt.Yasur - They call it the worlds most accessible volcano for a reason. Mother of god! We looked into the mouth of hell and lived to tell about it.

Ham - as in Ham Lini - the Prime Minister of Vanuatu. He and I were tearing it up on the dance floor at a private party. Yeah, that's right - just one day after being exhilerated by the bursting rocks of molten lava flying in our faces, we got down and dirty with the Head Of State (and his stoic wife) - at my house, no less!! And after all the drinks he bought me I think the Minister of Health needs to change his name to the Minister of Decadance.

All true stories.

Posts with photos coming soon!

Thursday, September 7

5th ANNIVERSARY (Part One)

"Where were you when..."

People have been using this conversation starter for generations. It's a way of experiencing our shared history-marking/sociological-events. Each generation has a least a few worthwhile entries with the most famous of all, the day JFK was assassinated, attributed to the previous generation. Maybe Peal Harbor or V-J day for the generation before that (although I've not once had the thrill of hearing a first person account of either event from someone I knew).

In my own 35 years I've had a few of these moments and as time moves forward my memory combined with newer events push old events downward in importance. Sometimes pushing them right off the chart. But some events, even really old ones, can get sealed in your mind if for no other reason then the uniqueness of the information or maybe even more importantly for the way in which the information comes to you.

I don't remember John Lennon's death in 1980, but I do remember President Reagan being shot in 1981 because I had just arrived at my friends house to watch TV and they told me the news. I was only 10, Jon and Jason Hitt were only 8, and 7 respectively. I remember walking up the front yard only to see them come bounding out of the house and Jason, with only slight dramatics, telling me that while they were watching Tom&Jerry cartoons the screed was interrupted by a diagonal series of scrolling text which read "The President Has Been Shot... The President Has Been Shot...". A delay tactics while the news anchors got prepped to go on the air. Before that happened my friends had simply switched off the set.

At a later date I would be fascinated with the details of the event: watching the video clip over and over; reading books and article about every tiny moment; learning how the White House had a mini-coup (moronic Haig going live on TV telling people he was in charge); how the stock market was closed (at the time I learned this I was awed by the idea that just shooting this one person could shake our financial foundation); how Jodie Foster was involved; how Carter had previously been Hinkley's target; how the Secret Service agent that pushed Reagan into the car, falling on top of him in the process, had originally thought that when Reagan coughed up blood it was a result of a broken rib from the leap into the car (only discovering at the hospital that he was actually shot). All these things are in my memory now, but my only true "live" memory of the event was just one small snippet in time. I have no further memory of what happened next, or later that evening, or the next day - it was just Jason Hitt's somewhat bemused and slightly excited exclamations that are forever embedded in my brain.

It's not surprising that I would later become a news junkie. I spent years as a paperboy, long before 24-hour news networks or the instantaneous world of the internet, taking joy in always reading the front page before anyone else. Sometimes even delaying my delivery as I took my own sweet time. The peak of this was during the Iran-Contra scandal which I didn't fully understand except as my first experience with government overtly lying to the people. I took solace and pleasure in the satire of Berkely Breathed's "Bloom County" comic which lampooned the Reagan administration, and the current events both subtly and not so subtly. I was both young enough and old enough to enjoy and understand the quarks of our system through the comics page.

I remember in my late twenties I started asking people of a similar age what some of their key moments of national or world events might be - fully expecting them to overlap with my own. For many people my age (35) we remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of the first Gulf War. Certainly I had been following the events leading up the war, but at that moment I hadn't been paying super close attention to the news as I was preparing for a new semester of college. I was organizing all my new text books when the DJ of a radio station, not usually one for providing any news, broke into a song and very somberly informed his listeners that the United States had just started bombing Iraq. It caught me by surprise, a key element for these defining moments, and shocked me out of my self-absorbed moment and thrust my mind on to the world stage. I remember running downstairs to tell my father, sitting on the couch reading the paper, and being confused by his nonchalance. I ran back up to my TV, turned on CNN in time to see the video-game-like footage of our bombs falling on Baghdad ad their anti-aircraft missiles lit up the sky giving us a murky-green image on our screen. That was a pretty big moment, but it wasn't a singular event - just the start of an event that lasted 100 days.

The first time for me, the first time a news event shook me and captured my full attention, was Wednesday, January 28th, 1986. I was 14 and sitting at the top of the Shawnee High School gymnasium bleachers killing the time in between my mid-term exams. Another student sitting next to me asked if I had heard about the teacher who exploded in space. He seemed serious, but I didn't have any idea what he was talking about and thought he was setting up some sort of lame joke. I'm not sure if there was a school announcement - some of the students were in the middle of tests and they probably wouldn't want to distract them with such news. I had a half day and was able to leave at lunch time.

At home I turned on my TV and was floored by the repeated looping video footage, every 73 seconds, of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding; watching the booster engines spiraling off in opposite directions; seeing the confused or horrified looks on the faces of the crowd at Cape Canaveral. I remember feeling very upset and crying a little. I knew, even then, that I wasn't crying just for the seven dead astronauts (including school teacher Christa McCauliffe, the would-be first civilian in space, part of a school tie-in program I knew nothing about. In just 5 short years the shuttle program had somehow become commonplace) but for national pride, and even more than that, as hokey as it may sound, for my first sense of humanity and it's frailties. I was acutely upset that humanity, as expressed in our efforts of technological feats and desires to explore, explore, explore, had suffered a serious and humanising setback. We were humbled. I remember running to the door as my mother came home from work, the first person I would get to share the experience with. I remember later learning that some TV viewers had complained that their soap operas had been interrupted by the constant news coverage and I remember feeling outraged at this insensitivity. I remember snippets of Reagan's speech, a sincere and heartfelt tribute to the astronauts and to man's need to explore - an oratory skill yet unmatched by any of his successors and at least the three previous predecessors. I remember saving all the newspapers. I was still a delivery boy then and I became obsessed in learning every detail, every day, of every story, covering every angle. When I learned that the Courier-Post had printed a morning edition with a different front page I called my boss and begged him to get me a copy, which he did, and which I carefully sealed up in a plastic bad along with copies of other papers I was saving which then went into our attic and which, a decade later, got accidentally thrown away.

So the first was the Challenger in 1986.

These events effect or don't effect each of us differently depending on a short list of factors not the least of which is your maturity, your frame of mind, at the time of the event. Another is the way in which you learn about the event. And of course the proximity to you personally. The assassination of Anwar Sadat is in my peripheral, but is probably quite vivid to a 35 y/0 Egyptian. The Space Shuttle Columbia was saddening for me, but not at all like the emotional effects of the Challenger - although maybe so for a younger person, especially one with an interest in science and technology.

So the game of "Where were you..." (not really a game, I know) is entirely subjective. We like to play it because we learn about individual stories of a shared experience - something we can all talk about from our own point of view. We like to play it because we can define our personal, national, and sometimes international timelines to these events.

V-J Day signaled to the world the end of a long and deadly war and also signaled the beginnings of a hopeful new world order.

JFK signaled the opposite on a national level. The end of Camelot and the beginning of a period of social tumult that would bring, among other tragedies, two more "Where were you..." assassinations (RFK & MLK)

The Challenger, on a personal level, galvanized something in me that combined elements of national pride and loss, my first sense of humanity at large, and the media machine that burned it all into my mind. And that was just newspapers and the 6 o'clock news.

15 years later (not quite a full generation) an event would happen, brought to us live, in Real Time and in media epic proportions that would pique the personal, national, and international community in such an indelible way that it damn near re-defines the "Where were you..." game in the sense that more people than ever before could share in the unfolding horror. High speed internet users could get live video feeds, even dial-up users could get up to the minute information and constantly re-freshed images. News stations had a dozen live helicopter video cameras to choose from. Hundreds if not thousands of amateur and professional video/photographers could transmit their imagery via the internet to the big media for near instantaneous mass audience consumption. Cellphone networks, combined with landlines, allowed us to reach out and communicate with each other in mass quantities (and in the future camera cellphones would make images of the London subway bombing event even more instantaneous). In fact, for this singular event, cellphones users played a critical role in actually shaping the event as it unfolded - actually altering the events in ways contrary to the forces that had created the events. In real time. Live on TV. A result of the combination of the speed of modern reporting mated with cellphone technology - a scourge to some, but on this day a hero-making combination.

For me it started with a simple land line phone call from a friend in New York. I was in California, 3 times zones away, sleeping peacefully in my large rented 3-bedroom townhouse situated amongst the palm trees in the best part of my favorite neighborhood. I was, for all purposes, alone. One roommate on the road, the other in a drug-induced sleep (a friend from whom I had become increasingly alienated to the point I forgot he was even home at the time).

At about 7:30 PST my phone woke me up.

Me: "Hello?"

Andrew Haver: "Brett, it's Andrew Haver. Are you awake?"

"No."

"New York is being attacked! The Twin Towers are blowing up! The Pentagon has been bombed..."

"Eh? Wha..?"

"Brett... They're evacuating the White House!"

For some reason the first couple things seemed silly. Like he was joking or confused. But strangely it was the line about the White House that really got my attention. Something about that didn't seem funny. It didn't seem made up. Like... it didn't seem the kind of thing you could be confused about.

That was how the morning of September 11th, 2001, began for me.