Survivor syndrome. 25 years ago, the deadliest terrorist attacks in history took place in New York and Washington

We were living then in Crystal City — a neighborhood in Arlington near the Pentagon, about three miles from downtown Washington. Our daughter was in her second week of kindergarten, and that morning I put her on the school bus. Later I learned that the American Airlines plane rammed the North Tower at the very moment I was coming back home, taking the mail out of the mailbox, and riding the elevator up to my apartment. But I had not turned on the television and knew nothing about it. I had almost gotten ready for work at the Washington bureau of Radio Liberty when the chief editor of the Russian Service, Andrey Shary, called from Prague and asked me to hurry — a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York, and he did not yet know the details. “But I’m in Washington”, I objected. “You may still be needed”, he said.

After the Pentagon stop — the second one from my house — the subway train emerged from the tunnel onto the bridge over the Potomac, and there I saw an utterly unbelievable sight. The Pentagon looked like the crater of a volcano that had just begun to erupt. Clouds of black smoke rose vertically into the cloudless sky, and it immediately became clear that something terrible and irreversible had happened. I looked at my watch: 9:42. Later I learned that the U.S. Department of Defense building had been attacked at 9:40.

From the metro, there were still a couple of blocks to walk. The city was stunned, but quickly pulled itself together. Traffic officers were directing hopeless traffic jams. As they lined up at the traffic light, no one forgot to clear the emergency lane, along which police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances raced unhindered, filling the area with a piercing wail.

Once I got to the office, I got to work, but I was uneasy. I kept grabbing the phone and calling the school — it is even closer to the Pentagon than our house. All the school lines were busy, or maybe the connection had been disrupted. Finally my wife called: it was impossible to get to the school, traffic was jammed with fire trucks, but the local TV channel reported that the teachers would stay with the children until the last child was picked up. I felt a little better.

How sick we were of our fire brigade, racing its shining vehicles at breakneck speed with a wild roar for no reason at all, just for training! How the smoke detectors annoyed us, being, in our opinion, far too sensitive! And the fire-drill evacuations in the middle of the night — sleepy, in pajamas, with cats and dogs in carriers! But now these guys in helmets were truly saving lives and dying for real.

I recorded interviews with experts I could reach by phone, went on air several times that day, and in between watched television.

The RTR correspondent Zhenya Piskunov was, one might say, lucky. That morning he was working with a crew on the roof of the New York office of the Canadian broadcaster CBC News, preparing for a live broadcast. And suddenly he saw a flash. He turned the camera. He managed to film the collapse of the second tower. And he stayed on that roof for two days.

By the second half of the day, Washington had become the way it is on a Sunday — empty of people and cars. The president was flying from base to base, declaring at brief stops that the criminals would not escape punishment and that they were too weak to intimidate the freest people on earth. At the Red Cross’s call, people went to blood donation centers. In New York, those willing to donate blood stood in line for seven hours.

You had to see how, on the steps of the Capitol on the day of the catastrophe, all the available members of Congress gathered and, after impassioned speeches about how, in the face of a common threat, partisan quarrels must be forgotten, suddenly broke into a chorus of God Bless America following someone’s lone hoarse baritone.

I was already returning home by taxi in the morning. At a quarter to four we drove past the Pentagon. Almost all the windows of the squat coliseum were lit; the black plume had turned white and, obeying a light breeze, was drifting east, covering the area, including my house, with suffocating smoke.

A few days later I saw, for the first time in my life, a CNN correspondent crying live on air. Elizabeth Cohen, who in peaceful times covered medical issues, was reporting from a New York street where relatives of the missing stood in an endless line, hoping to inquire at some office. Each of these people had a small poster with a photo of the person missing under the ruins of the WTC, their name, identifying features, and a phone number to call if the missing person were suddenly found. Each was desperate to get on camera in the hope of showing their poster to all of America. Tears choked Judy Woodruff in the studio too, a seasoned fighter and veteran of information wars.

The grand dames of American television journalism were tormented not only by helplessness, but also by what can be called the curse of the profession. I know it myself: you have to say something, but in essence there is nothing to say, and every word you utter reeks of unbearable vulgarity and falsehood. Perhaps only Larry King found the right tone, inviting the U.S. Solicitor General and his friend Ted Olson onto his show, whose wife Barbara died in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, but managed after the hijacking to call her husband twice.

King asked questions in his usual aggressive manner, giving neither himself nor his guest any chance to get sentimental. He gutted Olson to the core like an investigator: what did Barbara say when she called the first time? the second? exactly how did the phrase about the plane hijacking sound? did she describe the hijackers? what other details did she manage to pass on? come on, strain yourself, remember something else! And Olson, who became world-famous as the lawyer who won the Bush v. Gore case in the U.S. Supreme Court, being, like King, a professional of the highest caliber, strained himself professionally and remembered, while that bespectacled cynic in suspenders ruthlessly interrupted him to force him to speak to the point, not around it. And only at the very end, when asked when he went to bed on Tuesday, Ted Olson said that when he finally got to the bedroom, he saw a note from the deceased on the pillow, King’s voice trembled, and he muttered gloomily, “thank you, Ted, your story breaks our hearts”, and, angry at himself and at his merciless trade, moved on to the next story.

In Washington, a series of funerals began, and there were more obituary notices in the newspapers than usual. Among my neighbors there were many military people. Some I never saw again after September 11. And about some I know for certain that they are no longer alive, because their relatives told me so.

They tried to remember the smallest details of their last conversations with the dead, as if hoping to discover in seemingly ordinary words a secret omen or a testament to the living — it seemed to them that surely a person could not be speaking nonsense just before their own death. One Pentagon budget office employee, Carolyn Hermon, was driven to work by her husband that morning. She jokingly asked, “You’re not going back to bed now, are you?” “Of course”, her husband replied. “All right, baby, sleep well, I’ll call you later”, Carolyn said and went to meet her death.

All these stories would be banal if not for the unquestionable authority of Death. A few days after the attack, the Pentagon lowered its estimate of the dead from 190 to 189: it turned out that 26-year-old cartographer Edward Thomas Earhart was not sitting in his office facing west at the time of the attack (the hijackers had rammed the western face of the pentagon-shaped building), but was a passenger on the fateful flight, fell from the sky onto his office, and was counted twice. Had he missed the plane and shown up for work as usual, the very same fate would have awaited him.

But the finger of fate sometimes points the other way as well. Among the Pentagon staff there is an officer who, upon hearing about the disaster in New York, ran to the nearest television. Nothing remained of his office but rubble. Kelly Rowland, who was heavily pregnant in the maternity ward, has a father and mother working at the Pentagon. On the morning of September 11, she went into labor earlier than expected. Kelly’s parents took time off work and rushed to the clinic. The baby girl, Melanie-Ann, was born eight minutes before the catastrophe, like a guardian angel to her grandparents.

In psychology there is a term called “survivor syndrome”. People who miraculously escaped Nazi death camps spend their whole lives tormented by guilt before those who died. War veterans punish themselves for the deaths of their comrades. People who had one foot in the next world and survived thanks to organ transplants are gnawed by conscience — they feel they have taken the life of their donor.

After September 11, all of America developed survivor syndrome. One campaign especially stuck in my memory. I do not know who came up with it, but credit and praise to them. Washington children were asked to donate their teddy bears to the Pentagon’s orphans. Not to buy one in a store, but to give away their own, beloved bear, the one they fall asleep hugging. Far more bears were sent than were needed, but it is not the quantity that matters.

In the years since September 11, many words have been spoken, threatening and admonishing, words of pride and bitterness, certainty and hope. Speakers of every stripe and political shade — well-fed cabinet members, sixties professors with an unquenched messiah complex, fashionable columnists with the tired gaze of all-knowing sibyls, television hosts with the toothy smile of professional optimists, preachers with triple chins in suits of Italian bespoke tailoring, hardened bitchy hosts of countless radio talk shows, duly funded international affairs experts, comedians with peacock tails behind their backs, and the best congressional windbags — have had a field day, pouring out deadly philippics against America’s enemies and paeans to American resilience and resolve. Explanations of what happened were as simple as two plus two and philosophically refined, but in the end they came down to the antithesis of “good and evil”. Most Americans accepted this formula.

Amid all this verbal sparring, the sober voices of those who had the courage to remain so in the midst of the general patriotic frenzy did not get lost. One of them is Georgetown University law professor David Cole. I called him when the Bush administration had effectively legalized torture. I was interested in the so-called “ticking bomb“ scenario (ticking time bomb scenario) — when the clockwork of an explosive device is already running, and there is no time for legal procedures. The professor answered:

First of all, this is a hypothetical situation. In real life I consider it unlikely — when it is known for certain that the bomb is already ticking, when we know that this prisoner has the necessary information, when we are sure that under torture he will give us truthful, not false, information. As we can see, if even one of these elements is missing, the whole hypothesis falls apart. In reality something quite different happens: if you weaken the ban on torture, a lazy investigator begins to use it in situations very far from the ticking bomb scenario. You inevitably end up with Abu Ghraib. Therefore the correct answer is the one the international community reached, and which the United States signed onto, namely that torture is not a lawful method of interrogation. There are situations when, in order to save people, it is necessary to break the law — such a possibility always exists and may be legally justified. But we cannot allow torture as a lawful means under any circumstances.

And he added: “If an investigator really managed to save lives, I myself will go to court and defend him”.

Once, the U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under whom torture was legalized, came to the university to give a lecture. Professor Cole presided over the meeting. His students staged a protest: they turned their backs to the minister, put black bags over their heads, and stood like that through the entire lecture. The professor, of course, was not the organizer of the action, but it seemed to me that the eyes behind his glasses were shining with pride for his students.