Friday, 10 September 2021
I am terrified. Saying it out loud, writing it down makes it no less so. Neither is it an exaggeration. I am not merely nervous, anxious, frightened, scared. I am terrified. There was never going to be a good time for the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, but with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 just around the corner it couldn't have been worse. The anniversary is likely to act as an invitation for the Taliban and / or other terrorist groups or extremists to inflict another similar horrific attack upon some city or community they have grievances against. Who knows, this time the attack may even be on Britain. On the news today the Director General of MI5, Ken McCallum, said that his organisation had foiled thirty one late-stage terror attack plots in the last four years. It is a statistic which surely would have been kept out of the public domain were it not for the genuine fact that we could see a repeat of 9/11 in Britain, or elsewhere in the world, tomorrow or in the coming weeks or months.
I confess I have felt nervous on every single anniversary of 9/11. I am always grateful when the day passes without incident. This year, however, I am really concerned. In many ways I can't believe it's already twenty years ago. It somehow feels much more recent to me. A sign, no doubt, just how vivid that day is in my memory still, just as it will be for many people across the globe old enough to remember.
On 9/11 I had been working in my study upstairs and come downstairs to make myself some lunch before my afternoon shift as a tour guide at Highland Park Distillery. I remember turning on the TV for the lunchtime news and wondering why they were showing a disaster movie on day-time television. It took me a moment to comprehend that what I was watching was the news. It was actually happening. This was not a movie. As I stood there staring at the screen the second plane flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I spent the rest of the day in a kind of waking dream, imagining how people would have been going to work, getting their first coffee of the day, catching up with colleagues before settling down at their desk on whatever floor of the World Trade Centre they were on. I imagined the terror of people when they heard the first plane slam into the building. I imagined their panic as they scrambled down stairways and along dark corridors, desperate to find a way out of the building before it was too late. For many it was too late even before the second plane went in.
I imagined the catastrophic aftermath; the rescue operation by the emergency services, trying to find people buried in the rubble. I don't remember what my afternoon shift at the Distillery was like. I don't remember who else was on the same shift as me that day. I don't recall what we spoke about, but I expect the events of the morning on the other side of the Atlantic won;t have been far from anyone's mind.
I have written about my thoughts and memories of 9/11 before and am likely to do so again. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of that devastating day, I can only hope that nowhere in the world will ever have to suffer or witness such a terrible event again.
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Previous posts on 9/11
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