In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev’ry glove that layed him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev’ry glove that layed him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains
More than just America still feels the pain.
I think that every American has their own series of mental flashes surrounding the moment when they first realized September 11th was life changing. We remember the images, sounds and smells of where we were; suddenly all of the otherwise irrelevant minutiae came into sharp focus as our minds struggled to digest what was happening to our country.
For me, I was down in an office space located in the bow of a destroyer, gearing up to do some War of the Sea type exercises with a foreign navy. A petty officer slid down the steep ladderwell and told us about an email he had just received about a plane crashing into a building in New York City.
That’s weird. Must have been a misdirected Cessna or something. Odd. Shrug. Get back to preparing for this exercise.
And then- the cold metal ladderwell, the ship pitching up and down, the heavy banging of a compartment being dogged open and shut as other people started talking about the exact same thing. Something is going on in America- but we’re not quite sure what. We were a crew of a (relatively) small Navy ship that did not get television broadcasting while out at sea, and web pages always took an eternity to load. What the Hell is going on at home?
Globally, the reminders are inescapable.
To this day, now ten years later, I still haven’t seen more than a few catches of the footage filmed on that day. It’s impossible to escape the video of the plane collapsing into a pile of dust, or the World Trade Center towers meeting their demise in similar fashion- but beyond that, I have been content to keep the same radio silence that I endured ten years ago. And I’m okay with that.
After we were told to stay out at sea and be on guard for hijacked planes coming across the Atlantic (we weren’t even a combat-certified ship yet), we finally pulled into a port. Arriving in Portsmouth, England, I did the typical sailor thing by heading to the pub in order to drink away some of the built up stress from everything going on. As I was drinking my Guinness, I looked up and saw a small television- this was my first look at what went on in New York in real time. Stupefied.
A bit later on, I watched the beginning of Saturday Night Live’s first post-9/11 episode. You probably remember it too: Paul Simon was alone with his guitar playing ‘The Boxer’ as a cadre of New York City firefighters and police stood silently at attention. It was a powerful moment that was burned into in my memory and still hits me with sadness whenever the song comes up on my iPod.
I’m not really sure what my intention is here in free-associating about 9/11. My line of work gives me more than my share of terrorism-related thinking, so I honestly try not to think too much about that day and everything that happened. But that doesn’t mean that I have forgotten- or that I would ever want to forget. I think it’s pretty safe to say that I will always tear up when I think about it for more than a handful of seconds. It was a powerful event in all of our lives.
I would like to add in here that among my four siblings, two of my sisters are first responders in the emergency medical business. One is a firefighter paramedic in the Boston area, while the other one is a burgeoning EMT in New York City. Their business is hard, selfless and dangerous. I feel so much pride for them- especially since they do something that I myself could never do. As two modest individuals in our great and vast country, I rest easy knowing that people like them are out there looking out for all of us- just like those who came before them and perished at Ground Zero, in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon.
Life will continue to go on, and it will come served up with a heavy dosage of love and violence. That’s okay though, because regardless of what comes next, our people will continue to step up and defend one another- no matter how scary or horrifying the conditions may actually be. That’s what makes us great, and that’s the reason why America will remain.