Reflections on 9/11, six years later. [Archive] - Marine Corps

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09-11-07, 11:17 AM

Is 9/11 starting to become just another date on the calendar?
By Rick Hampson - USA TODAY

Even if you wanted to forget what day it was, you couldn’t. When you write a check or schedule a play date or plan a meeting or make a reservation, there it is - printed on the calendar, encoded in time.

You might forget the date when Hiroshima was bombed or Kennedy was shot. You might forget the date that FDR promised would “live in infamy.” You can’t forget Sept. 11, the date that shares its name with an epic catastrophe.

Is that beginning to change, even as the war the attacks helped to inspire drags on in Iraq?

Tuesday’s sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania is unlikely to pack the same emotional clout, generate the same media attention or command the same public focus as last year’s fifth anniversary.

Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan is now a construction site. For the first time, the memorial service for those who died there will be held in a park nearby. WABC-TV in New York initially did not plan to broadcast the reading of all the victims’ names, as it had in previous years, but reversed itself after protests from some victims’ relatives.

Morris County, N.J., which lost about 100 residents on 9/11, has had to postpone enhancing its memorial because fundraising has come up short - possibly a sign, editorialized the Daily Record of Morristown, that ”memories of 9/11 are slowly slipping away.”

They’re far from lost. In a USA TODAY/Gallup poll taken Friday and Saturday, 71 percent of Americans agreed that 9/11 was the most memorable news event of their lifetime. About half said they think Americans spend the right amount of time observing the anniversary.

Only 6 percent said they would observe Tuesday’s anniversary in a formal way, such as attending a memorial event or taking the day off; 71 percent said they would mark it informally - perhaps by praying, keeping a moment of silence or watching news coverage. Almost one-quarter said they didn’t plan to observe it at all.

Edward Linenthal, a University of Indiana scholar who has written about memorials in U.S. history, says a certain loss of focus is inevitable on “the in-between anniversaries” whose years don’t end in 5 or 0.

”Like any event, even Pearl Harbor, the more time goes by, the less central it becomes to our experience,” says Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor who studies U.S. popular culture. “That’s healthy. It becomes more a part of history, less a raw wound.”

Civil War veterans ”would be stunned that Memorial Day has become more of a holiday and less of a holy day,” Linenthal says. “After the World War I generation, Armistice Day faded. Most of my undergraduates wouldn’t know what it means.”

Even some relatives of 9/11 victims are resigned to the eventual decline of the anniversary’s profile.

”Naturally, there’s going to be a diminution of feeling this year compared to last year,” says Donn Marshall of Shepherdstown, W.Va., who lost his wife, Shelley, in the attack on the Pentagon.

“I’m not worried that the focus will shift. I expect it to,” says Louise Hughes of Sayreville, N.J., whose 24-year-old son Bobby was one of the 2,749 killed at the World Trade Center. ”You can’t understand something like this unless you’re truly involved in it.”

But some Americans fret that if the attack’s anniversary begins to decline, it’s a sign that the nation is sinking into what New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin calls “the business of forgetting” - that the event itself, and memory of its victims, eventually could be lost.

”I can understand people are getting tired, but this was such a significant atrocity,” says Betty Kemmerer, whose 79-year-old mother died aboard United Flight 93. “People shouldn’t forget.”

Marshall agrees: “I do not want evil to have the last word.”

But Frank Zortman of Mountain Home, Ark., who worked next to the Trade Center and ran for his life when the first tower collapsed, says the lessening interest in observing the anniversary doesn’t bother him: ”People just can’t continually live in the past. It’s a healing process. You have to move on.”

Fear of forgetting

Students of history say that fears of 9/11 fatigue or amnesia, while understandable, are probably exaggerated. They say the day will have a long run in American memory.

“It will take decades to process what happened,” says David Isay, a radio documentary maker who has gathered Americans’ stories about Sept. 11. ”I think 9/11 fatigue is a media construct. That day will be honored and remembered for hundreds of years.”

For many Americans who lived through 9/11, forgetting - about the attacks, the terrorists behind them and the victims - is the ultimate fear. They feel the one thing they can do for the lost is to remember them.

In 2004, Louise Hughes told USA TODAY of her prime goal after her son’s death: “We just wanted him to not be forgotten. ... Everyone you talk to who’s in the same predicament feels the same way. You can’t make anything good of it, but if you just try to make people remember him in some small way, it’s something.”

Even then, though, she was pessimistic: ”We’ll, of course, never forget. But other people will.”

Today, she believes her prediction is coming true.

“My own family’s moving on,” she says. One of her daughters got married last year, and another will wed in October. ”That’s good, they’re happy going on with their lives.” But she and her husband, she adds, “are still muddling through.”

”Unlike other families I’ve met, I need to talk about it. I’ll never shut that part of me down,” says Pat Whalen, 66, of Canton, Mich., whose 23-year-old daughter Meredith died at the World Trade Center.

The national family is caught in a similar bind over how, exactly, to handle the 9/11 anniversary. Is it OK to get married on 9/11? To throw a bachelor party? How long does a nation wear black?

In recent years, Joan Crooks of Westminster, S.C., would never have flown over an ocean on Sept. 11. But Tuesday she and two friends will fly to Germany.

As for the anniversary, she says, “I’m so excited about the trip I don’t think it will be on my mind.”

Analysts such as Indiana’s Linenthal say there are reasons why the anniversary already has faded a bit in the public’s mind and probably will continue to do so.

One is that the process of officially memorializing 9/11 has been marked by delay and discord. Exhibit A: redevelopment of the World Trade Center site.

”That situation has been so intense and so incredibly complex at so many levels for so long, it’s become like a marathon,” Linenthal says.

Progress on the memorial, which includes a museum and memorial plaza featuring two symbolic pools, once was projected to cost nearly $1 billion. It languished as fund raising lagged and its original leader resigned. Now the plaza is due to open in late 2009, the museum in 2010. This year, however, the anniversary in New York has been clouded by two controversies.

First, the city decided to break with tradition and hold the ceremony away from the Trade Center foundation hole. A counter-ceremony by some victims’ families was averted only after the city agreed to let relatives briefly walk down into the pit.

Second, some relatives bitterly criticized the decision to allow Rudolph Giuliani, New York’s mayor in 2001 but now a presidential candidate, permission to do a reading at ceremony.

“It’s disgraceful - a photo op,” says James Riches, a deputy New York City fire chief whose son, Jimmy, died at the site.

Sept. 11 has always been a political football. With everyone from the late evangelist Jerry Falwell to writer Susan Sontag pontificating on its meaning, 9/11 ”became political capital for people across the spectrum, splitting the collective memory,” Linenthal says. “Pearl Harbor never had that problem.”

Subsequent tragedies and events - the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech massacre - have distracted Americans from the memory of 9/11. ”To remember something, you have to forget something else,” Linenthal says. “If your husband or child is in Iraq, maybe remembering 9/11 this year is not at the top of your list.”

But there are reasons why the anniversary of Sept. 11 will not fade significantly anytime soon:

- The impact. For those alive that day, 9/11 will live on simply because it was so perversely spectacular. Not just one jetliner hijacked, but four; not just hijacked, but deliberately crashed into buildings; not just any buildings; but the nation’s two biggest skyscrapers and its military headquarters. Then the skyscrapers collapsed - in view of a worldwide television audience.

- The images. For those not alive that day, 9/11 will long endure as a series of uniquely shocking images: a jetliner hitting a skyscraper, office workers leaping to their deaths, pedestrians fleeing a huge black cloud.

- The legacy. Sept. 11’s importance has only grown over the past six years. ”The very structure of our daily life reminds us of 9/11,” Linenthal says. “Every time you take your shoes off in an airport. Every report you hear from Iraq.”

Glo Perrizo’s daughter Danelle, a sergeant in the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, is on her second tour of duty in Iraq.

Perrizo, who lives in Valley Springs, S.D., says that recognizing the 9/11 anniversary is a way to honor soldiers fighting in the U.S. response to the terror attacks: ”I think we should have an observance. What happened on 9/11 changed the United States forever.”

- The date. We refer to D-Day, not 6/6/44; to Pearl Harbor Day, not Dec. 7, 1941; to the Kennedy assassination, not Nov. 22, 1963. But the terrorist attacks of 2001 are known by a date that will recur as long as there’s a calendar.

Thompson, the Syracuse professor, says Sept. 11 is rivaled only by July Fourth as the best-remembered date in U.S. history: “It’s more effective than declaring it a holiday. You’ll never have to teach school kids that date.”

Even terrorist attacks in other nations have been called by the media ”Spain’s 9/11” or “London’s Sept. 11th.”

Keeping memories alive

Many Americans do what they can to keep the memory of 9/11 alive. Six years later, memorials are still being planned, updated or dedicated.

In Slidell, La., which suffered heavily from Hurricane Katrina, people are raising money for a proposed Memorial Plaza to honor those who died on 9/11.

In Somerset County, Pa., part of state Route 219 last month was named the ”Flight 93 Memorial Highway” to honor passengers and crew who died in the United airliner’s crash in a nearby field.

In Bayonne, N.J., which lost 13 people on 9/11, officials will dedicate the city’s memorial to them on Tuesday.

The National Sept. 11 Museum, whose building is taking shape at what used to be Ground Zero, is sending a traveling exhibition around the nation this month.

In Skaneateles, N.Y., the friends, relatives and admirers of Todd Pitman gathered Saturday for an annual golf tournament and dinner to raise money for the charitable foundation his sister started in his name after he was killed at the Trade Center.

Those are just the official events. Early September sees countless less formal gatherings in which the legacy of 9/11 is transmitted in stories - told and retold, rehearsed and subtly altered, passed from one generation to the next.

“The fifth anniversary was a milestone for us all,” says Mary Fetchet of New Canaan, Conn., whose 24-year-old son Brad died at the Trade Center. ”It’s critical now that we begin documenting and collecting. If we don’t, it’s going to be lost.”

She’s a founder of the 9/11 Living Memorial, a permanent online archive that will preserve the day’s stories and “reverse what terrorism is all about - a faceless evil.”

Linenthal says 9/11 probably isn’t going anywhere soon.

”There’s a desperate urge for people to pay attention,” he says. “This emphasis on faces, names and stories, and in the reading of their names each year, it’s a protest against the anonymity of mass death in our time.”

Contributing: Stu Whitney of the (Sioux Falls, S.D.) Argus Leader; Ben Schmitt of the Detroit Free Press; Ron Barnett of The Greenville (S.C.) News; Joanne Bratton of The (Mountain Home, Ark.) Baxter Bulletin; and Laura Bruno of the (Morris County, N.J.) Daily Record

Ellie