thedrifter
09-11-06, 07:56 AM
Does 2001's shadow of fear still linger?
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
The girl's nightmare was always the same: Her airline pilot father is in the cockpit when terrorists break in and take over. The 757 begins to dive, down, down.
Five years later, Claire McGrath's mother can still hear her daughter's cries. "It was a terrible time," Lynette McGrath says. "It's a time I'd like to forget."
It's a time no one can forget — late summer and early fall, 2001. It was our season of fear, a season that never really ended. There were the 9/11 attacks; the anthrax scare; a jumbo jet crash in New York that killed all 260 on board, five on the ground, and for a few hours inspired fears of terrorism.
They combined with other events to make the last third of 2001 one of the most unnerving periods in American history. Never have so many of us been so angry, so frustrated, so scared. We were afraid to get on a plane, open the mail, eat Halloween candy. In Chicago, guacamole on the sidewalk prompted hysteria; in Boston, burning pizza evacuated a mall.
Today, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, that season of fear seems like more than just a bad dream and less than the advent of a "new normal." According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll last month, about half of Americans think people have permanently changed the way they live as a result of 9/11. But fewer than 1 in 4 say they themselves have changed the way they live.
In retrospect, the days and weeks after 9/11 were not as much a time when everythingchanged as wheneveryone changed. Kim Johnson, 41, of Lincoln, Neb., experienced the season's traumas mostly via television. Still, she said, "I feel like a memory was forced on me."
'We're different'
Roxane Cohen Silver is a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) who has studied the mental health of a national sample audience since shortly after the terror attacks. "We're not where we were on Sept. 12, 2001," Silver says, "but we're not back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001. We're different."
On Sept. 12, 2001, in suburban Buffalo, 12-year-old Claire McGrath felt what she later described as "an unbearable weight on my shoulders." Her father was a Delta pilot who flew Boeing 757s, a model the hijackers had seized. She didn't want him to go back to work.
To make matters worse, her yellow Labrador — who waited with her each day for the school bus and was sitting there when she got off — died three days after the attacks.
Her mother had to read her to sleep and often spend the night with her. The next morning she'd drop Claire off at school, only to be called later to pick her up because she was crying. Claire's grades suffered. She couldn't concentrate; she was withdrawn, anxious. Her father tried to reassure her, telling her how airline security had improved dramatically, what he'd do if anything happened. It didn't ease her fears.
A therapist helped. "But she didn't really know me," Claire recalls. "I didn't feel it was enough."
In October, Claire's Girl Scout troop decided to write letters to members of the U.S. military in the Middle East. Her letter, addressed to "Dear Friend," wound up in the mailbox of a Marine pilot, Capt. Brian Murphy, then 28. It was the first step in a recovery from fear that would mirror her nation's.
Five autumns ago, a generation of Americans found out what history really feels like — not an inevitable sequence of events marching across the page, but calamity and chaos, like Paris 1789, Sarajevo 1914, Honolulu 1941.
Terrorism seemed everywhere — even when it wasn't.
In one week in early October:
•Greyhound idled its national fleet of buses for eight hours after a passenger stabbed a bus driver on a highway in Tennessee.
•A Russian airliner exploded over the Black Sea (accidentally hit by a Ukrainian missile).
•A Washington, D.C., subway station was closed for six hours after a fare jumper squirted a liquid (that proved harmless) at other passengers.
On Nov. 12, when it seemed New York couldn't get any more tense, mental health workers gathered in a Manhattan hotel ballroom for Red Cross post-9/11 disaster-assistance training. They were watching a video about the 1988 terrorist bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, when suddenly the lights went up.
The session organizer, Paul Ofman, stepped to the podium. He said an airliner had just crashed in Queens. "This was too much, too scary," Ofman recalls today. "It felt like a siege in many different places, not just New York. ... Tragedies, horrors, threats — everywhere."
When mechanical failure was determined to have caused the Flight 587 crash, it passed for good news. As New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, "It could have been worse" — it could have been terrorism.
In those early weeks, Americans took more anti-depressants and placed more calls to mental health hotlines. Some psychologists prescribed media abstinence for patients overwrought by 24/7 terror news. Gas masks sold out after the revelation that the hijackers had investigated crop dusters.
Everyone seemed to be afraid of something: stock brokers of a market crash, retailers of a recession, Arab-Americans of misguided retaliation.
It wasn't just New York and Washington. Air Force fighters patrolled the skies over a dozen other big cities. After someone began sending anthrax-tainted letters to politicians and journalists the fear spread geographically.
Two weeks after the first anthrax report, postal authorities reported receiving reports of 4,600 incidents around the nation, most involving items such as talcum powder and jelly donuts. At the U.S. Capitol, even the police dogs got nasal swabs for anthrax.
On Halloween, fear wasn't as much fun. The mayor of Seat Pleasant, Md., told trick-or-treaters to stay home. In Madison, Wis., the zoo's Tunnel of Terror was renamed the Tunnel of Thrills and Chills.
A hazmat team responded after green goo was found on a Chicago sidewalk. It wasn't lethal. "Guacamole is not dangerous. It's good for you," Mayor Richard Daley said. "People have to start calming down."
Surfer and snowboarder
At his airbase in Pakistan, Brian Murphy got more than a dozen letters from strangers back home and replied to all. Only one person wrote back — Claire McGrath. They were an unlikely pair: he a 6-foot surfer and Harley rider from Southern California, she a 5-foot snowboarder from Upstate New York.
Over the next three years, through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they exchanged scores of letters and e-mails. He'd write of scorpions, of sandstorms, of digging a hole to sleep in at night — tales to fascinate and appall an adolescent girl. He'd kid her about being grounded — he sent her an MRE ("meals ready to eat") to eat in her room — and complain about the lack of surf on the Tigris River.
She sent him a Groucho-style nose, glasses and mustache disguise for use in Iraq, chewing tobacco (valuable currency in the war zone), and stuff to eat. He sent her a Republican Guard beret, a flag that had flown over the caskets of fallen Marines in his air transport cargo bay, and a discarded copy of a physics exam from Saddam University College of Science in Baghdad.
In January, a fellow Marine pilot whom Murphy had befriended in flight school was killed along with six others when their KC-130 cargo plane crashed in Pakistan.
"I was so relieved that your name wasn't on the list," Claire e-mailed him. "But I still feel so terrible that they were friends of yours. I can't imagine how you must feel."
She used her babysitting money to buy some outfits for the Marine's infant son and mailed them to Murphy. That was a watershed in their correspondence, Murphy says: "My writing about how that affected me helped Claire to open up."
She agrees. "Even though the times were really depressing, everything seemed to be getting better after I started writing to him." She felt she was contributing. "Even though it was just one Marine, I really felt like I was doing something."
Brian's nonchalant confidence — "I only honestly remember having been shot at twice, personally" he wrote while serving an infantry tour in Iraq — undercut her anxiety.
"He didn't talk about all the bad stuff that was going on," she says. "When he wrote, everything seemed OK. I felt more secure. I was reassured by that. ... I felt I could tell him anything and he would understand. It was like talking back and forth to a friend, not a counselor or anything."
In religion class at Claire's Catholic high school, students asked how God could have let the terrorists succeed. "It seemed so nonsensical," she thought. In the end, she did not blame God for terrorism; she thanked God for Brian — "a special gift," she called him.
Back from fear
Claire McGrath's recovery from the season of fear shared the same elements as the nation's.
There was faith — in God or America or ourselves. There was action — coping through doing, from writing to soldiers to enlisting to fight with them.
There was leadership — from officials such as Giuliani and President Bush, and from those in the field, like Murphy.
That confidence was bolstered as one milestone after another passed without incident: Halloween, New Year's Eve, the State of the Union address, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics. The anthrax scare ended after the fifth death in November 2001. But for some, the season of fear has never ended.
Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner says her research indicates that, as a result of that period, some Americans still have a "heightened response to fear"— not just of terrorism, but of garden-variety risks like getting the flu.
Some people around the nation continue to experience post-traumatic stress symptoms, according to research by Silver, the UCI psychologist.
Two years ago, the last time Silver's group was surveyed, 4.5% still reported such symptoms. People who merely watched the attacks on television or otherwise learned about them secondhand reported symptoms "at levels comparable" to those who were at or near the scene, Silver says.
Claire McGrath is now 17 and getting ready to apply to college. She keeps in touch with Murphy, who has visited the McGraths twice since becoming Claire's pen pal. He left the Marines last year and is getting his MBA at the University of Southern California.
Lynette McGrath says her daughter is "more mature at the same age than my other daughters were. It makes you grow up fast to have to deal with these things."
Claire agrees that she learned a few things:
•No matter the problem, it's OK to ask for help.
•If you love someone — like a dad you're worried about — then tell him so, every day, before he leaves for work.
•Sometimes when you try to help someone else — like a lonely soldier overseas — you end up helping yourself.
That's what one girl took away from her season of fear. In the weeks ahead, the nation faces a similar reckoning.
POST-9/11 FEARS STILL RESONATE
Many continue to worry about more terrorist activities in the USA, but few have changed the way they live or have planned for attacks in their communities.
Respondents think a majority of Americans have permanently changed the way they live as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks.1
Changed: 53%
Not changed: 46%
Yet fewer than one in four say they have changed themselves.1
Changed: 22%
Not changed: 78%
In most cases, people say they are less reluctant to participate in activities that might attract terrorists. Those less willing to:
Travel overseas
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 48%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 47%
Fly on airplanes
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 43%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 30%
Go into skyscrapers
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 35%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 22%
Attend events with thousands of people
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 30%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 23%
Few families in the past year have discussed plans for responding to a terrorist attack.
Yes, have discussed: 27%
No, have not: 73%
Source: USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,001 people nationwide Aug. 18-20. Margin of error: ±3 percentage points. The 2001 USA TODAY/Gallup Poll was asked of 1,032 adults.
1 Questions were asked of a half-sample and have a margin of error of ±5 percentage points.
Ellie
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
The girl's nightmare was always the same: Her airline pilot father is in the cockpit when terrorists break in and take over. The 757 begins to dive, down, down.
Five years later, Claire McGrath's mother can still hear her daughter's cries. "It was a terrible time," Lynette McGrath says. "It's a time I'd like to forget."
It's a time no one can forget — late summer and early fall, 2001. It was our season of fear, a season that never really ended. There were the 9/11 attacks; the anthrax scare; a jumbo jet crash in New York that killed all 260 on board, five on the ground, and for a few hours inspired fears of terrorism.
They combined with other events to make the last third of 2001 one of the most unnerving periods in American history. Never have so many of us been so angry, so frustrated, so scared. We were afraid to get on a plane, open the mail, eat Halloween candy. In Chicago, guacamole on the sidewalk prompted hysteria; in Boston, burning pizza evacuated a mall.
Today, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, that season of fear seems like more than just a bad dream and less than the advent of a "new normal." According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll last month, about half of Americans think people have permanently changed the way they live as a result of 9/11. But fewer than 1 in 4 say they themselves have changed the way they live.
In retrospect, the days and weeks after 9/11 were not as much a time when everythingchanged as wheneveryone changed. Kim Johnson, 41, of Lincoln, Neb., experienced the season's traumas mostly via television. Still, she said, "I feel like a memory was forced on me."
'We're different'
Roxane Cohen Silver is a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) who has studied the mental health of a national sample audience since shortly after the terror attacks. "We're not where we were on Sept. 12, 2001," Silver says, "but we're not back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001. We're different."
On Sept. 12, 2001, in suburban Buffalo, 12-year-old Claire McGrath felt what she later described as "an unbearable weight on my shoulders." Her father was a Delta pilot who flew Boeing 757s, a model the hijackers had seized. She didn't want him to go back to work.
To make matters worse, her yellow Labrador — who waited with her each day for the school bus and was sitting there when she got off — died three days after the attacks.
Her mother had to read her to sleep and often spend the night with her. The next morning she'd drop Claire off at school, only to be called later to pick her up because she was crying. Claire's grades suffered. She couldn't concentrate; she was withdrawn, anxious. Her father tried to reassure her, telling her how airline security had improved dramatically, what he'd do if anything happened. It didn't ease her fears.
A therapist helped. "But she didn't really know me," Claire recalls. "I didn't feel it was enough."
In October, Claire's Girl Scout troop decided to write letters to members of the U.S. military in the Middle East. Her letter, addressed to "Dear Friend," wound up in the mailbox of a Marine pilot, Capt. Brian Murphy, then 28. It was the first step in a recovery from fear that would mirror her nation's.
Five autumns ago, a generation of Americans found out what history really feels like — not an inevitable sequence of events marching across the page, but calamity and chaos, like Paris 1789, Sarajevo 1914, Honolulu 1941.
Terrorism seemed everywhere — even when it wasn't.
In one week in early October:
•Greyhound idled its national fleet of buses for eight hours after a passenger stabbed a bus driver on a highway in Tennessee.
•A Russian airliner exploded over the Black Sea (accidentally hit by a Ukrainian missile).
•A Washington, D.C., subway station was closed for six hours after a fare jumper squirted a liquid (that proved harmless) at other passengers.
On Nov. 12, when it seemed New York couldn't get any more tense, mental health workers gathered in a Manhattan hotel ballroom for Red Cross post-9/11 disaster-assistance training. They were watching a video about the 1988 terrorist bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, when suddenly the lights went up.
The session organizer, Paul Ofman, stepped to the podium. He said an airliner had just crashed in Queens. "This was too much, too scary," Ofman recalls today. "It felt like a siege in many different places, not just New York. ... Tragedies, horrors, threats — everywhere."
When mechanical failure was determined to have caused the Flight 587 crash, it passed for good news. As New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, "It could have been worse" — it could have been terrorism.
In those early weeks, Americans took more anti-depressants and placed more calls to mental health hotlines. Some psychologists prescribed media abstinence for patients overwrought by 24/7 terror news. Gas masks sold out after the revelation that the hijackers had investigated crop dusters.
Everyone seemed to be afraid of something: stock brokers of a market crash, retailers of a recession, Arab-Americans of misguided retaliation.
It wasn't just New York and Washington. Air Force fighters patrolled the skies over a dozen other big cities. After someone began sending anthrax-tainted letters to politicians and journalists the fear spread geographically.
Two weeks after the first anthrax report, postal authorities reported receiving reports of 4,600 incidents around the nation, most involving items such as talcum powder and jelly donuts. At the U.S. Capitol, even the police dogs got nasal swabs for anthrax.
On Halloween, fear wasn't as much fun. The mayor of Seat Pleasant, Md., told trick-or-treaters to stay home. In Madison, Wis., the zoo's Tunnel of Terror was renamed the Tunnel of Thrills and Chills.
A hazmat team responded after green goo was found on a Chicago sidewalk. It wasn't lethal. "Guacamole is not dangerous. It's good for you," Mayor Richard Daley said. "People have to start calming down."
Surfer and snowboarder
At his airbase in Pakistan, Brian Murphy got more than a dozen letters from strangers back home and replied to all. Only one person wrote back — Claire McGrath. They were an unlikely pair: he a 6-foot surfer and Harley rider from Southern California, she a 5-foot snowboarder from Upstate New York.
Over the next three years, through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they exchanged scores of letters and e-mails. He'd write of scorpions, of sandstorms, of digging a hole to sleep in at night — tales to fascinate and appall an adolescent girl. He'd kid her about being grounded — he sent her an MRE ("meals ready to eat") to eat in her room — and complain about the lack of surf on the Tigris River.
She sent him a Groucho-style nose, glasses and mustache disguise for use in Iraq, chewing tobacco (valuable currency in the war zone), and stuff to eat. He sent her a Republican Guard beret, a flag that had flown over the caskets of fallen Marines in his air transport cargo bay, and a discarded copy of a physics exam from Saddam University College of Science in Baghdad.
In January, a fellow Marine pilot whom Murphy had befriended in flight school was killed along with six others when their KC-130 cargo plane crashed in Pakistan.
"I was so relieved that your name wasn't on the list," Claire e-mailed him. "But I still feel so terrible that they were friends of yours. I can't imagine how you must feel."
She used her babysitting money to buy some outfits for the Marine's infant son and mailed them to Murphy. That was a watershed in their correspondence, Murphy says: "My writing about how that affected me helped Claire to open up."
She agrees. "Even though the times were really depressing, everything seemed to be getting better after I started writing to him." She felt she was contributing. "Even though it was just one Marine, I really felt like I was doing something."
Brian's nonchalant confidence — "I only honestly remember having been shot at twice, personally" he wrote while serving an infantry tour in Iraq — undercut her anxiety.
"He didn't talk about all the bad stuff that was going on," she says. "When he wrote, everything seemed OK. I felt more secure. I was reassured by that. ... I felt I could tell him anything and he would understand. It was like talking back and forth to a friend, not a counselor or anything."
In religion class at Claire's Catholic high school, students asked how God could have let the terrorists succeed. "It seemed so nonsensical," she thought. In the end, she did not blame God for terrorism; she thanked God for Brian — "a special gift," she called him.
Back from fear
Claire McGrath's recovery from the season of fear shared the same elements as the nation's.
There was faith — in God or America or ourselves. There was action — coping through doing, from writing to soldiers to enlisting to fight with them.
There was leadership — from officials such as Giuliani and President Bush, and from those in the field, like Murphy.
That confidence was bolstered as one milestone after another passed without incident: Halloween, New Year's Eve, the State of the Union address, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics. The anthrax scare ended after the fifth death in November 2001. But for some, the season of fear has never ended.
Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner says her research indicates that, as a result of that period, some Americans still have a "heightened response to fear"— not just of terrorism, but of garden-variety risks like getting the flu.
Some people around the nation continue to experience post-traumatic stress symptoms, according to research by Silver, the UCI psychologist.
Two years ago, the last time Silver's group was surveyed, 4.5% still reported such symptoms. People who merely watched the attacks on television or otherwise learned about them secondhand reported symptoms "at levels comparable" to those who were at or near the scene, Silver says.
Claire McGrath is now 17 and getting ready to apply to college. She keeps in touch with Murphy, who has visited the McGraths twice since becoming Claire's pen pal. He left the Marines last year and is getting his MBA at the University of Southern California.
Lynette McGrath says her daughter is "more mature at the same age than my other daughters were. It makes you grow up fast to have to deal with these things."
Claire agrees that she learned a few things:
•No matter the problem, it's OK to ask for help.
•If you love someone — like a dad you're worried about — then tell him so, every day, before he leaves for work.
•Sometimes when you try to help someone else — like a lonely soldier overseas — you end up helping yourself.
That's what one girl took away from her season of fear. In the weeks ahead, the nation faces a similar reckoning.
POST-9/11 FEARS STILL RESONATE
Many continue to worry about more terrorist activities in the USA, but few have changed the way they live or have planned for attacks in their communities.
Respondents think a majority of Americans have permanently changed the way they live as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks.1
Changed: 53%
Not changed: 46%
Yet fewer than one in four say they have changed themselves.1
Changed: 22%
Not changed: 78%
In most cases, people say they are less reluctant to participate in activities that might attract terrorists. Those less willing to:
Travel overseas
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 48%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 47%
Fly on airplanes
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 43%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 30%
Go into skyscrapers
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 35%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 22%
Attend events with thousands of people
Sept. 14-15, 2001: 30%
Aug. 18-20, 2006: 23%
Few families in the past year have discussed plans for responding to a terrorist attack.
Yes, have discussed: 27%
No, have not: 73%
Source: USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,001 people nationwide Aug. 18-20. Margin of error: ±3 percentage points. The 2001 USA TODAY/Gallup Poll was asked of 1,032 adults.
1 Questions were asked of a half-sample and have a margin of error of ±5 percentage points.
Ellie