Reflections From Five
Years Ago

The summer after I graduated from Watauga High School, my girlfriend and I visited her grandparents in New York City. As a form of celebration, they took the two of to the restaurant on top of one of the World Trade Towers for a drink and a toast. I remember little about the event except for the view from what was then one of the tallest three or four buildings in the world.

From the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, the earth looked like a sea of endless lights as Manhattan and New Jersey stretched out below us like a mirror of the starry sky.

Five years ago this week, The Mountain Times ran this exclusive photo of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on the cover. It was sent to us by former Boone resident Anthony Coffey. Photo by Anthony Coffey.

I don’t remember if it was the North or South Tower that we visited. I do remember that it had a distinctly international feel with people speaking different languages over drinks and food on the 110th floor.

As I write this on Monday, it is exactly five years since the destruction of those two buildings. That day Fred Germann, our advertising sales guru at The Mountain Times, announced to the Writers’ Room, “I just heard on the radio that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center building in New York.”

Like many who heard that news, I assumed it was a small single-engine aircraft with a pilot who had gotten lost in the fog and forgotten that there were skyscrapers around. Shortly afterward, when Fred told us that another plane had crashed into the other tower, the gravity of the situation became apparent to us.

Despite the fact that it was a Tuesday—deadline day around The Mountain Times—we stopped everything and went into the one room of our office that had a television. For the next two or three hours we joined the rest of the nation and stared at images we could not comprehend. We watched the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center collapse into mountains of rubble and white ash—not daring to wonder how many people were trapped inside at the time.

It was one of those events where everybody knows exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. The big events like that seem to happen every twenty years or so with this one joining the attack of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Challenger space shuttle explosion as the major blows to our national psyche.

This week we’ve heard a lot in the media about the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington. It seems like a good time to reflect on the events of that time, even if I am the kind of person who finds anniversaries to be rather arbitrary reasons for celebrating a person or event.

For the first few days after 9/11 it was nearly impossible to think of or talk about anything else. We were starved for details about the perpetrators of the deed and word on any possible survivors amid the destruction. So many people were killed or otherwise affected by the attacks that it had a certain “six degrees of separation” quality. Nearly everybody knew somebody, or knew somebody who knew somebody, with a first-hand account of the event.

At The Mountain Times we were fortunate enough to be contacted by a former resident of Boone who was living in Manhattan. Anthony Coffey took photographs of the Twin Towers from an across-town building before the South Tower collapsed. He sent us photos through an email and we were able to use them in our Thursday edition. Less than two days after the attack we had exclusive photographs in our paper. We were proud of that fact but otherwise saddened that we had to report it at all.

Another local connection to the event was both tragic and heroic. High Country native Phil Bradshaw was then a pilot for U.S. Airways living with his wife Sandra in Greensboro. She worked part-time as a flight attendant for United Airlines. Her last flight was on United 93, the airplane that hijackers had turned around in an attempt to attack Washington, D.C. Sandra was part of a group of crew and passengers who fought against the terrorists, forcing them to crash the plane in a field in Pennsylvania, far from any populated area.

In a phone call to her husband telling him of the plan to thwart the terrorists, Sandra’s last words were, “We’re all running to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, I remember having the feeling that my country had never been quite so much “of one mind” as it was at that moment. We were ready to defend our country against people who were determined to do us harm, even if we were a little hazy on who those people were and where they were coming from. We even had support from some previously unconcerned corners of the world.

That unity didn’t last too long. This country probably hasn’t been quite this divided on issues of importance since the 1860s. I thought it was very telling that in a recent poll, 50% of Americans polled thought our president was a “uniter” while 50% found him to be a “divider.”

This equal division of philosophy is one reason that political races this autumn are probably going to be as heated as any off-year (non-presidential election year) elections seen in our nation’s history.

It is my hope that the candidates in these races can refrain from using events and images from 9/11 as a rallying cry for themselves and their supporters. Even phrases such as “everything changed on 9/11” used in political ads smack of exploitation and besmirch the memory of our fallen countrymen. It is my hope that 9/11 will not be used for political gain. But I’m not counting on it.