25 Years Later

When I was but a wee lad, I remember the older members of my family reminiscing about the major events they’d witnessed. None of them could ever forget where they were when they heard President Kennedy was assassinated, for example.

My “never forget” moment occurred on the morning of September 11, 2001.

At the time, I was an undergraduate student at Western Michigan University. I served as the opinion editor of the Western Herald, the campus newspaper. In those days, before the hollowing-out of classified- and display-ad revenue for broadsheets, we operated independently of the university. No one from the administration could interfere with us, and faculty had no jurisdiction in our newsroom — much to the lament of the journalism professors. We answered only to ourselves and were financially and legally independent of the university.

Which meant we occasionally rode hobbyhorses well past the point of reasonableness. We were students, after all. Students who had grown up during the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years.

The Herald was a daily newspaper; we printed four broadsheet issues weekly, Monday through Thursday, with a tabloid arts-and-entertainment supplement on Thursdays. We released in the morning, so staff worked evenings.

Except me.

The Opinion desk was rarely deadline focused. My only time-sensitive deliverable was the staff editorial. Eight hundred words of persuasive commentary, delivered by 5 p.m., so the layout guys could at least put Page 4 to bed before waiting for news and sports to wrap up. I found it useful to be fist-in, first-out for the day’s production flow.

I usually arrived at the office sometime around 8:30 a.m. That semester, I took an upper-division Latin class that met most mornings at 10 a.m., so I had time to settle at my desk, stash my lunch in my microfridge, make sure my class assignments were ready to rock and/or roll, and check the letters to the editor that had arrived overnight.

The general manager, O’Ryan Ricard, ran the operations side of the paper. At 60-something, he was the only bona-fide adult in the room. O’Ryan in his soul was an old-school journalist; he cut his teeth as a state bureau chief in Indianapolis for the Associated Press, so serving as G.M. of the Herald was his glide path into retirement. Although he knew more about journalism than the rest of us combined, he contented himself to offering post-hoc observations about the day’s issue. He never interfered but he always mentored.

On the morning of 9/11, I had settled at my desk and was double-checking a translation of some Silver Age poem when O’Ryan burst from his office. He and I were the only humans inhabiting our sprawling office that morning. He bellowed: “Turn on the TV, something’s going on!”

So we flipped the old tube TV suspended from the newsroom ceiling to CNN. O’Ryan and I watched as one of the towers of the World Trade Center billowed smoke and fire. The talking heads shared that an airliner had struck the tower, for reasons unknown.

He and I stood a few minutes, speculating about what had happened. Did a pilot die? Was it an air traffic control glitch? Was there an equipment malfunction? Was it a hijacking? Was it accidentally hit by some other plane mid-air?

Then we saw the second plane fill the right side of the screen, followed by an explosion a moment later at the second tower.

O’Ryan and I stood there, silent. I don’t know for how long. Maybe 15 seconds? It felt like an eternity. Then we looked at each other for another eternity. Finally he whispered: “It’s time to get to work.”

I was the only person in the room from Editorial. I ran opinion, not news. But for the next four hours, until the news editors arrived and the editor-in-chief ambled in, I was in charge the newsroom.

In those days, we maintained a subscription to the Associated Press. Through a small satellite dish, we received the feed directly into an old Mac that connected to our NewsEditPro IQ server. The old-timey AP Wire included “bells” — as high-priority alerts would trickle in, we’d experience more bells. The highest AP status — a “flash” — generally occurs once or twice a year. That morning, we had several flashes, and every time that old Mac would chime 10 bells, our hearts filled with dread.

It didn’t take long for staff to filter in. I put people to work as best as I could. I tasked one reporter to sit in a chair and keep her eyes glued to CNN, keeping a precise time log of everything that happened and everything we knew. Two sports writers came in; one of them had family in Manhattan so I asked him to find out what he could from folks on the ground, and the other I sent to pester the university’s Athletic Department about whether the day’s game schedule would be affected. When some of the senior news reporters came in, I set them to research-and-collection activities. Our priority? Finding out who we knew in NYC and making sure they were OK.

A few members of my team walked in, too. They got the day’s column slots. By noon-ish, the office was filled with writers and photographers and columnists, and the other section editors began filtering in. The editor-in-chief, who was under the weather and dead to the world thanks to cough syrup, strolled in around 3 p.m., utterly oblivious that anything at all had happened.

That evening, I wrote the staff editorial. How the hell do you write 800 words about what had happened that day? But I did. I drafted something that was intended to be reassuring. I think I did well enough.

We put the paper to bed around 1 a.m., as I recall. I’m proud of what we did — we provided a chronology of what happened, some human-interest stories from friends and family in NYC, updates about local schedule changes, and commentary that was deliberately restrained.

When I walked into the office, just minutes before the first plane hit, I was a dilettante provocateur who happened to have an editor’s pen. When I walked out of the office nearly 16 hours later, I was a journalist.

For me, personally, 9/11 was a moment of transformation. It was a moment when a major world event forced me to grow up a bit. That day is indelibly marked upon me, but it was a day of growth, not of loss.

For the thousands who died in New York, at the Pentagon, and on a field in Pennsylvania that day, they didn’t get a happy ending. Nor did their families.

For the tens of thousands who would eventually serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for their families, the story wasn’t always a happy one, either.

I believe that the Third Millennium dawned that morning. The relatively carefree life we’d led, a period that started with the Reagan Revolution and continued through the confidence boost of Desert Storm and the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years, ended definitively in a cloud of ash and dust.

In the days that followed that fateful morning, America rallied. Support for President Bush touched the 90s.

In the months that followed, that unity frayed. I saw it splashed across Page 4: debates about “not all Muslims” and weapons of mass destruction and the terror of Islamofascism. America saw it in the security theater that’s bedeviled us at airports ever since.

September 11, 2001, is a date when everything changed. America has had several such moments: The RFK, JFK, and MLK assassinations; Pearl Harbor; Fort Sumpter; Appomattox; the original Independence Day; the Great Crash; the moon landing; the fall of the Soviet Union.

Those of us fortunate enough to have survived 9/11 unscathed have an extra duty today to think of those whose lives were lost, that morning and during the Global War on Terror. To offer a prayer of thanks to them and to their loved ones.

Especially in this 250th anniversary of America, this day’s anniversary should remind is that freedom comes with a cost, and sometimes that steep cost isn’t fair to the people who paid it but didn’t necessarily owe it.

A quarter-century ago, I had to write 800 words to reassure a nervous, young audience that things would be OK. And you know what? For the most part, they were. We’ve made mistakes, many mistakes, but 9/11 hasn’t yet been repeated and our previous blinders have long since fallen away.

Today, I write 1550 words to reassure you that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Tomorrow will still arrive, exactly as the solar cycle predicts. Our social-media frenzy about “woke” and “MAGA” and “the DSA” will eventually pass. We will figure out AI. We’ll muddle through, as we always have.

The best we can do is be mindful of our responsibilities and remain grateful to the people who’ve born the cost of our freedom. So I invite you to pray for those who’ve suffered, and resolve to build a future where this suffering finds succor.