Everyone has their own very personal memories of 9/11. Here are some of mine . . .
On September 11, 2001, I was living a mile and a half from the Pentagon, teaching English as a Second Language to immigrants at a school in Arlington, VA where 1/3 of the students were young people from countries which have predominantly Moslem populations. I had taught at the school for a year --r one four-hour class in the morning, five days a week; and one four-hour class in the evening, five days a week. I became especially the kids in the evening class because they were advanced and could express themselves very well in English. But the whole summer of 2001, I had taught an intermediate class in the morning and got very close to some of those students as well.
I rarely ever have the television on first thing in the morning, but for some reason I had it on for about twenty minutes before I left for the school. The last thing I remember seeing was a weather portion of one of the network "good morning" shows. There were views of New York City from cameras on the top of the Twin Towers of the Trade Center. The weather guy even said what a beautiful morning it was for flying and how beautiful it was right then.
I left for work about 8:40 am and the wall behind my back in the classroom I taught in was a wall in common with the morning advanced English class taught by the academic director of the school. They always started the day watching the morning t.v. news programs, which were also on in the school office on a television in there. Therefore, advanced students and the administrators saw the reports of what was happening from almost immediately after the first plane crashed into the first Twin Tower.
By the time the plane hit the Pentagon, the staff, teachers and students were trying to figure out what to do. The owners of the school told the administrators not to stop classes, but because most of the students took buses and/or the Metro to get back and forth to the school, I told the academic director that I was letting my students go home.
In shock I drove home and like most of us, watched the rest of what happened that day on t.v. as long as I could stand it. Because my apartment was near Washington National Airport, I was used to the sound of airplanes all day from about 7 am until 11pm. Instead of that, of course, all commercial planes stopped flying.
But all night long, I heard the sounds of F-15s patrolling over Washington, DC. And that triggered some of my own nightmares that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.
I was very familiar with the sounds of the F-100 engines of F-15s in flight, because of working with F-15 pilots in Alaska for three years when I was on active duty with the Air Force. One time when we were deployed to South Korea, I had even flown for many hours along the Aleutians, to Japan, and then on to Korea with a spare F-100 engine almost in my lap, sitting in a crew seat along the wall of a C-140.
My nightmares were from memories of my time working with the fighter pilots in Alaska. We lost six aircraft in eighteen months -- five pilots and one passenger were killed . . . . two pilots punched out and were OK. One of the planes was a T-33 trainer with a student pilot and an instructor pilot. One of the pilots who died was our Wing Commander who was flying with us in an exercise in Korea. Also one of our pilot friends died climbing Mount McKinley.
When we finally returned to school after a few days, there was a lot of tension, especially in terms of dealing with the students from Moslem countries.
I had had friends who were Moslem from the time I had been a young mother living in Married Student Housing at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Students from all over the world brought their families with them and lived with the mostly graduate-level American students with their babies and toddlers. The international students seemed to out-number us, and usually their governments had sent them to the U.S. and paid their way. Therefore they always seemed to have more money than most of us struggling American students with families. But we had a wonderful time living in community with such a diverse population.
Young mothers from the Sudan, Libya, Kenya, South Africa, Kuwait, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, India, Kashmir, and many other countries interacted with us in the laundromats and on the playgrounds. Our little children played together and we all enjoyed getting to know one another.
During the Moslem observance of Ramadan every year, we saw the Moslem men from all over the world gather in one apartment or another for prayers every evening. Then during Eid, the celebration at the end of Ramadan, we saw all the families feasting together. My earliest understanding of Islam comes from that time.
We often had group picnics in various apartment sections bounded by parking lots for each area, and we learned a lot about the food and cultural customs of our neighbors. We had a wonderful time living in community with people from all over the world. My daughter's first babysitter was our neighbor from Indonesia, and at the same time she also was watching babies from Korea and from Kenya.
Since leaving Married Student Housing, I didn't have many opportunities to know people from pre-dominantly Moslem countries until I taught English as a Second Language beginning in September of 2000.
After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Most of the students in the school expressed kind words of condolence to the American teachers. However, interactions sometimes became strained with the students I was very close to from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand. In the time I had taught them and come to know them, I had learned a lot about how Islam was practiced in different countries and by various individuals.
Many of the pre-conceived notions I had about the practice of Islam from the families we knew while living in Married Student Housing in the early 70s had changed through knowing the ESL students during the first year of this new millennium. Every Ramadan it became obvious which students were observant and which ones were not, because hunger from fasting lowered the attention levels of the students who were observant.
One of my favorite students was a young man from Tunisia. A week or so after 9/11, he told me that even though he didn't agree with the terrorists, he understood why they had done what they had done.
I was speechless.
There were several other uncomfortable conversations with a few other students from North Africa or the Middle East as well. But the students from Turkey, Indonesia and Thailand seemed more sympathetic to the plight of the U.S.
That was interesting.
Not every student was an immigrant. Some were from wealthy families and had been sent to the U.S. to fine-tune their English language skills. Often the students in the advanced class were ready to move on to study at community colleges or universities in the area. But there were other students who intended to be immigrants and were using the student deferment visas to stay in the U.S.
This was much easier for them to do before 9/11, of course.
Anyway . . . by November 11, 2001, I was no longer working at the ESL school, but was back in ministry at a local United Methodist Church in Arlington. I no longer had to have uncomfortable conversations or worry about why some of the students might have been in the U.S.
But it turned out that I could no longer live in the Washington D.C. area. I went out of my way not to see the damage to the Pentagon, but even seeing the Capitol, the White House, the our beautiful and beloved monuments as I drove around was painful. Thinking of the plane that might have been intended to crash into the Capitol and the many friends I have who worked there or lived on Capitol Hill was heart-wrenching.
Only years later did I realize that my needing to leave Washington had to do with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The stress of living through the trauma of 9/11 triggered previously scary times in the same way the sounds of the F-15s flying over the Capital triggered nightmares of the time we lived through when friends were dying in fighter aircraft crashes. And sadly the anniversaries of all the scary or difficult and sorrowful times continue to trigger the PTSD symptoms.
But the symptoms flee when the memories are shared instead of being locked up inside.
So, thanks for listening . . . and because we have all been through so many traumas in the lifetime of us baby boomers . . . and because we are the children and grandchildren of people who lived through all the traumas of the middle of the last century . . . and because our children and grandchildren have experienced and or have inherited the traumas of the beginning of this millennium, we live in a world where everyone experiences some amount of collective PTSD, I fear.
Each one of us has her or his own way of dealing with all of it. And we have a way of helping each other through it all.
So as others have mentioned, in the midst of the trauma that has become the way we live through the year or more before a presidential election, let's draw closer together. Let's find ways to be at peace with one another and to help one another instead of allowing so much nastiness and strife to be the way politics works in our country.
It's the least we can do, especially in light of all that happened on September 11, 2001, all that has happened since then, and all that continues to go on in reaction to it from North Africa to the Middle East, to Afghanistan and even beyond its the borders.
"Peace," we can cry. "Peace." And we can continue to work for it beyond the use of violence and the threat of violence . . . and even beyond non-violence. I hope we will.
Kathleen Ware Harris © 2013
kwharris777@gmail.com
