Seventeen years after 9/11, time has changed our view of the horror
There are those who remember vividly the horror of watching the towers fall on live TV. And there’s a new generation who see it differently.
New York firefighter Joe Pfeifer looked up on the morning of September 11, 2001, to see the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, fly over him and into the north tower of the World Trade Centre.
He was the first fire chief to enter the stricken building that day, setting up a command post on the ground floor of the burning tower. He was the one who ordered the first firemen on the scene, including his brother Kevin, to climb the stairs to rescue those trapped — a climb from which most never returned.
And now Pfeifer has become the last fire chief who was at the twin towers on 9/11 to retire, leaving his story to the pages of history.
“A new generation of young people were not even born when 9/11 happened and they are now trying to figure out what it was all about,” Pfeifer, 62, tells Inquirer. “They didn’t live through it, they only see it later on film. For them it is now a historical event.”
September 11 this year will mark the 17th anniversary of America’s worst terrorist attack. At New York’s so-called ground zero, the solemn ritual of the 102-minute anniversary ceremony will unfold in real time as it has for the past 16 years, with the reading of the names of the almost 3000 people who died, and silence at the precise moments when the four planes crashed and the towers fell.
But New York no longer comes to a virtual standstill for the anniversary as it did in the years immediately after the attacks. Across the US, the anniversary no longer dominates the national news as it once did, and people have long stopped avoiding plane travel on September 11.
Slowly but surely the passage of time is changing the way Americans view 9/11. With each year, as people such as Pfeifer move on, 9/11 is morphing from a lived experience to a piece of history.
For those who remember vividly the horror of watching the towers fall on live television, there is a new generation that never experienced that unforgettable moment. For those under the age of 21 — a quarter of the US population — the story of 9/11 is a piece of history, an event they did not witness or cannot remember. For them it is a historical event to be studied alongside the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Depression.
“As the number of young people who have no lived memory of the day increases, a continual effort to understand the ongoing impact of 9/11 (is) crucial,” 9/11 Memorial & Museum spokeswoman Olivia Egger tells Inquirer.
For those old enough to remember 9/11, the scars and the legacy of that day still resonate. It gave birth to the exhaustive security that still surrounds airline travel in the US and around the world. It tilted permanently the balance between civil liberties and security as Western nations strove to prevent another such attack. In Afghanistan, US troops are still there 16 years after they invaded the country to strike at al-Qa’ida barely a month after 9/11.
At an emotional level, in the US there is still a rawness about 9/11 that prevents it becoming a plaything of popular culture.
During the 1950s, Hollywood made numerous movies about World War II despite the fact it claimed the lives of 416,000 US soldiers. By contrast, Hollywood, television and literature remain unusually muted about 9/11.
There have been only two mainstream movies that have tackled it directly. In 2006, Oliver Stone directed World Trade Centre starring Nicolas Cage, about the miraculous escape of some police officers from the towers. Also in 2006 came Flight 93, a small-budget television film about the attempted passenger revolt against the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania en route to Washington, DC.
Stone’s movie deliberately avoided using news footage of the planes hitting the towers, but it still was criticised as being too much, too early by the widows of two of the policemen it portrayed who were killed on that day.
Since then, Hollywood has not made a definitive movie about 9/11.
“I have talked to film writers and producers right here in my office, but then the movie never gets made,” Pfeifer says during an interview at his former office in Queens, New York. “I think 9/11 was too painful because people experienced it in real time. For big movie producers who want to make films, I think they feel it is too painful for people to see.
“I suspect that somewhere around the 20 to 25-year anniversary we will see a full feature film. This is much later than we saw after World War II, for example.’
For Pfeifer, who retired from the New York City Fire Department as an assistant chief in July, 9/11 changed his life, his career and his legacy.
On that morning he was a 45-year-old chief of a fire battalion six blocks from the World Trade Centre. Pfeifer, who already had served 20 years as a firefighter, was on the street checking a routine gas leak when he heard the roar of a plane flying low.
“We saw the plane racing past at high speed and then we saw it crash into the north tower of the World Trade Centre,” he recalls. “We knew it was not an accident because we saw the plane actually turn and aim for the building. I said on the radio ‘this looks like a direct attack’ and we knew we were going to the largest fire of our lives.”
The world would later see exactly what Pfeifer saw because he was accompanied that morning by filmmaker Jules Naudet, who was making a documentary about firefighters and who filmed the only vision of the plane hitting the north tower. Pfeifer was the first fire chief to enter the World Trade Centre, where he set up a command post and radioed in hundreds of firefighters.
“The firefighters came in the building quietly,” he recalls. “They knew this was going be dangerous. They came up to me and asked me, ‘What do you want?’ And we told them we wanted them to evacuate the building and rescue those who can’t get out.”
Among those firefighters filing into the building was Pfeifer’s younger brother Kevin, who was 42. “My brother was in one of the early units on the scene and he came in very quietly and walked right up to me,” Pfeifer says. “He didn’t say a word and we looked at each other. It was a look of concern about each other and ‘Hey, are we going to be OK?’ He turned around as he took his firefighters upstairs and that’s the last time I ever saw my brother Kevin.”
From his post on the ground floor, Pfeifer did not know how bad the fire was 90 floors above him. After a while, he says, they heard a loud rumbling sound followed by complete darkness. It was the sound of the south tower falling after it was hit by the second plane. But Pfeifer did not know it.
“When the first tower collapsed — the south tower — we had no idea that a 110-storey building had just fallen to the ground,” he says. “Everyone else watching on TV knew more than we did. But suddenly the entire area went dark and you could not see a hand in front of your face.”
Without knowing what had happened, Preifer knew he had to abandon the command post.
“If we couldn’t command then we had to pull the firefighters out. So I called all units in the north tower to evacuate the building.”
They had 29 minutes to get out before the tower collapsed, and 343 firefighters from both towers did not make it out in time.
That evening an exhausted Pfeiffer drove himself back to his home in Queens, barely able to see the road because of the debris in his eyes. It would take three weeks for eye doctors to remove all the pieces of the World Trade Centre.
As the scale of the tragedy began to sink in, including the loss of his own brother, Pfeifer refused to stop working. For the next weeks and months he worked day and night, taking command of the daily action plans to help search the devastated site, first for survivors and then for bodies.
“All of us were victims of terrorism,” he says. “For me, I needed to jump back into (work). It was a way for me of regaining some control, of not being a victim any longer.”
In November, Pfeiffer and his family held a memorial service for Kevin, whose body had not been found. Then, in January — “on Super Bowl Sunday” — they found Kevin’s body and held a funeral. Pfeiffer later kept a bronze replica of his brother’s helmet in his office.
Rather than leave the force, Pfeiffer decided to dedicate his career to helping prevent a repeat of 9/11. Three years later, in 2004, he founded the fire department’s Centre for Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness, which he headed for the next 14 years.
The body brings the fire department together with other agencies to co-ordinate responses to mass disasters in a way that was not done on 9/11.
But the memories of that day still haunt Pfeifer. He recalls being “overwhelmed” in 2014 when he first visited the new 9/11 museum at ground zero and spotted one of the exhibits. It was a burned and battered fire truck. The museum was the last instalment of the 9/11 Memorial complex, which includes the moving empty sunken squares where the towers once stood and where water now pours into a seemingly bottomless pit. A gleaming new building, One World Trade Centre, now dominates the skyline, a single replacement for the twin towers.
The museum has had to navigate controversies in trying to tell the story of 9/11 without being too confronting to those visitors for whom the tragedy is still raw. The curators had to decide which of the thousands of hours of recordings of victims, witnesses and survivors — via final phone calls or 911 calls — to include. Some simply were too distressing to use.
Inside the museum, the more harrowing stories on each of the four planes are told in individual booths, off the museum’s main pathway, allowing visitors to avoid them if they wish. The most confronting exhibit — photos of the people who jumped off the towers to their certain death — is tucked away in a side booth.
But the 9/11 Museum & Memorial has become one of New York’s most visited sites, with the museum attracting 12.5 million visitors since it opened in 2014 and the memorial attracting an astonishing 40 million-plus since opening on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in September 2011.
“I was eight years old when I saw it happen on TV with people running and buildings falling,” 24-year-old Canadian Emily Ritchie says as she sits next to the 9/11 memorial with her boyfriend Joshua.
“I was at my grandma’s house in Edmonton and it was the first time in my life I felt really scared and sad. I felt that I had to come here one day and visit this place myself.”
Nearby, Texan mother Maribel has brought her 21-year-daughter Ryan to the memorial because she wants her to understand what happened here.
“I was taking her to preschool in Texas when the towers fell and she has never seen the finished memorial,” she says. “That’s why we are here.” They get a photograph taken together next to a white rose that has been placed alongside the name of a victim to mark their birthday.
The rose is for Suria Clarke, a 30-year-old who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the north tower. At 8.30am that morning she emailed a friend to arrange a lunch date. Sixteen minutes later Flight 11 crashed into the tower. She would have been celebrating her 46th birthday.
Pfeifer, now a grandfather, says he talks about that day to schoolchildren who were not born in 2001. “I tell them that 9/11 is also about hope,” he says.
“We saw the worst of humanity but we also saw the best of humanity. We saw people helping each other out and we saw the world community coming together and saying ‘no’.
“Every anniversary I go back and I listen to those names being read out,” he says. Above all, he listens for Kevin Pfeifer, his little brother who also would have been due for retirement now.
A new generation is learning about 9/11 for the first time, yet for Joe Pfeifer and others who lost loved ones on that day, it still burns a hole in their heart.
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.
Trump’s good news day
Those repeated claims of no collusion now have credence.
A searing indictment of FBI
Americans deserve a full accounting of the missteps of James Comey and the FBI.