September 11: The Day That Changed the World

A man is singing. He's standing on the forty-fourth floor of a skyscraper, holding a bullhorn, singing an old Welsh battle hymn, while smoke rises from the tower next door and the building's own loudspeakers keep repeating, over and over, that everyone should stay at their desks. The man's name is Rick Rescorla, he's the head of security for a bank, and he has already decided to ignore the order. "Men of Cornwall, stop your dreaming," he sings, and the employees, floor by floor, start filing down the stairs.

Rescorla is no ordinary man. A Vietnam War veteran, he had warned his company's leadership, years earlier, that the twin towers were a target — and had insisted, against real pushback, on regular evacuation drills for every employee. That morning, the only thing standing between life and death for roughly two thousand seven hundred people is how well they had rehearsed exactly this.

His concern was never abstract. Eight years earlier, on February the twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-three, a truck bomb had already gone off in the underground parking garage of the very same complex, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. The men behind that attack had actually intended to topple one tower into the other — they failed, but the intention was never hidden. To most people, that bombing settled into memory as an isolated incident, already closed. To Rescorla, it was proof that someone had clearly tried once, and would try again.

Twenty minutes before he starts singing, at eight forty-six in the morning, an American Airlines plane has already crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. The first reports call it an accident — a small plane, maybe, lost in the morning haze. News cameras swing toward the smoking tower, and millions of people around the world are watching live, unsuspecting, when at nine-oh-three a second plane, a United Airlines jet, appears on screen and slams directly into the South Tower. There's no more room for the word "accident." One plane can go missing. Two, seventeen minutes apart, hitting the exact same complex, is an attack.

Rescorla is in the South Tower — the one that has just been hit. He could run for the exit first himself. Instead, he picks up the bullhorn, and for the next hour brings his company's employees down, floor after floor, calm, singing, as if nothing unusual were happening at all. His colleagues will remember, years later, that his voice was the one thing that kept them from panicking on those dark, smoke-filled stairwells.

At nine thirty-seven, a third plane, also American Airlines, hits the Pentagon in Washington. The country now understands this isn't one attack, but a coordinated series of them — and has no idea yet how many more are coming.

There is a fourth plane, and its own passengers don't yet know it. United Flight 93 took off late from New York, and at nine twenty-eight is seized by four hijackers. The pilots never manage to send a proper distress call — only sounds of struggle, picked up by air traffic control. But the passengers have something the passengers on the first three flights never had: cell phones, and time. Through calls to spouses, parents, and phone operators, they learn what has already happened in New York and Washington, and they realize their own flight isn't headed for a landing — it's headed for a third, unknown target, most likely the Capitol, the seat of the United States Congress.

And then they make a decision. Right there, between the rows of seats, they vote to fight back against the hijackers themselves. One passenger, Todd Beamer, spends thirteen minutes on the phone with an operator named Lisa Jefferson, asks her to call his family if he doesn't make it, and together they recite the Lord's Prayer, word for word. Then he says the phrase that will forever be tied to that flight: "Okay. Let's roll." It's nine fifty-seven. The passengers storm the cockpit. They never manage to fully retake the plane — at ten-oh-three, it goes down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, with no survivors. But the target in Washington is never hit. No one will ever know for certain what would have happened that morning if those forty people hadn't decided, in a matter of minutes, to risk lives that were already lost.

In New York, time runs out first for the South Tower. At nine fifty-nine, fifty-six minutes after impact, it collapses — in ten seconds, live on cameras broadcasting to the entire planet. The North Tower holds out a little longer, but at ten twenty-eight it comes down too. By then, Rescorla has already brought nearly everyone in his company down to safety — but he has gone back up, for one last sweep, to make sure no one was left behind. He never comes out. He saves, by most estimates, around two thousand seven hundred people. He loses his own life for a few more.

The total death toll for that day reaches two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven — not counting the nineteen hijackers themselves. At the World Trade Center, two thousand seven hundred fifty-three people die, three hundred forty-three of them firefighters who had gone into the towers to save others. At the Pentagon, a hundred eighty-four die. Near Shanksville, forty. To this day, it remains the deadliest attack ever carried out on American soil.

Behind the four flights are nineteen men, members of al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden — a former fighter in the war against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, who had since turned his rage against the very West that had once helped arm him, indirectly. The planning had begun years before, with pilots who trained legally at American flight schools, specifically to learn how to steer, not land, the planes they intended to use as weapons.

That morning ends with an image no one alive at the time forgets: American airspace, for the first time in history, empties completely, every plane ordered to land wherever it happens to be. Embassies close, borders tighten, and in dozens of cities around the world, people with no connection at all to New York or Washington understand, watching their televisions, that something has changed for them too, not just for Americans.

And it isn't just a feeling. Among the World Trade Center's victims are citizens of roughly ninety different countries — bank clerks, waiters, cleaners, visitors, people who simply happened to be working that morning in a building that happened to be the tallest in the city. The next day, the French newspaper Le Monde runs a headline that will become famous, "We Are All Americans," and in city squares from Paris to Berlin, strangers hold candles for a country most of them had never even visited. It's the high point of global sympathy for the United States in modern history — a sympathy that, as the following years will show, won't stay intact to the end.

The first response is military. On October the seventh, two thousand one, less than a month later, American and British forces invade Afghanistan, aiming to topple the Taliban regime that had sheltered bin Laden and to dismantle al-Qaeda. That war, which begins as a lightning campaign, will go on to last twenty full years — the longest war in American history — without ever reaching a clean, final victory.

That circle closes with an image few would have predicted back in two thousand one: on August the fifteenth, two thousand twenty-one, just days before the scheduled final withdrawal of American forces, the Taliban walk back into Kabul with almost no resistance, and retake the country they had been driven from twenty years earlier. The war that began to overthrow them ends with them back in power — one of the bitterest ironies in the whole story.

Back in two thousand one, the change inside the United States itself runs just as deep. On October the twenty-sixth of that year, President George W. Bush signs the Patriot Act into law, granting security agencies unprecedented surveillance powers over citizens, in the name of preventing another attack. A brand-new agency is created, dedicated solely to airport security, and passing through the checkpoint at any airport in the world — the shoes coming off, the limits on liquids, the detailed pat-downs — becomes a daily ritual that billions of travelers will live through, year after year, without ever wondering anymore where it started. The same logic reaches straight into the cockpit itself: by April two thousand three, every American aircraft is required to have a reinforced cockpit door, impenetrable to gunfire, while the number of plainclothes officers riding among passengers multiplies within months from the roughly three dozen who existed before.

That same preventive logic leads down darker paths too. On January the eleventh, two thousand two, the United States opens a detention facility at its naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, built specifically for terrorism suspects, outside the ordinary American court system. Hundreds of people will be held there, many without trial, for years — and the camp's very existence becomes, for the next two decades, a symbol of a country that, in trying to protect itself, agrees to bend even its own principles of justice.

Bin Laden, the man behind it all, vanishes. He hides for nearly a decade, while an entire generation of American intelligence analysts devotes their careers solely to finding him. The trail that finally gives him away isn't electronic, but human — a courier they track for months, who eventually leads them to a guarded compound in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan, just a few miles from the country's own military academy. On May the second, two thousand eleven, U.S. Navy special forces raid the compound at night and kill him. The operation takes less than forty minutes.

His identity is confirmed almost immediately through a DNA match against a sister of his who had died years earlier in Boston; his body is washed and wrapped in a shroud according to Muslim tradition, and within twenty-four hours is lowered into the waters of the Arabian Sea from the deck of an American aircraft carrier — so that he would never have a grave that could become a shrine. Ten years, month by month, to find the man who had once left New York holding its breath.

It wasn't, however, the only consequence, nor the most contested one. In two thousand three, invoking the same climate of fear and the threat of weapons of mass destruction that later turned out not to exist, the United States also invaded Iraq — a country with no proven connection to the attacks of September the eleventh. That war will divide the international community, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and fuel, years later, the rise of new extremist groups in the region. Today, with decades of distance, many historians consider Iraq the most costly, and the most contested, piece of the response to September the eleventh — the one place where the fear of that day led to a decision the attack itself never justified.

And yet, beyond armies and laws, what changed most permanently was something harder to name: the way the world treats an unfamiliar space. Before September the eleventh, you could walk a friend all the way to the gate. Today, a bag left unattended in a subway station is enough to empty an entire platform. An entire generation grew up inside this new normal, without ever knowing it had once been any different.

Every year, on September the eleventh, at the site where the twin towers once stood, the names are read aloud, one by one — the two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven people who never made it home that day. Among them, every year, is the name of Rick Rescorla — the man who sang while a tower burned around him, because he knew his own calm voice was the one thing he could give, in that moment, to people who had no other reason to believe they'd make it out. He didn't save himself. He saved everyone else. And more than twenty years on, that remains the simplest, and the most powerful, image left over from a day that changed, in one way or another, nearly every life on the planet.