9/11 is a Weird Day

September 11th is a weird day for me. For some reason, I don't like to think about it. I'm sick of the hype, the spin, the ranting and the conning of the masses. Watching twisted documentaries and drumming up hate toward Arabs is not the way I like to spend my day. I'm tired of even calling it "Nine-Eleven". It sounds stupid because it's overplayed. Give it a rest, and give it a little respect.

On 9/11/2001, I had nine months in as a probationary firefighter. I was working at St. 8 that day, at 51st and Telegraph, on the "C" shift. I was woken around 6:30, earlier than my normal waking time, by an excited co-worker calling me. "Somebody just flew a plane into the World Trade Center!" he exclaimed. "Really?" I replied, thinking to myself, "You woke me up for a plane crash? In New York? I know you're a wanna-be FDNY, but come on, did you really have to call me so early?" I got up, got in the car, and made my way to work. At some point that's fuzzy to me now, I must have heard on the radio or something, that the other tower was hit, and that it was deliberate. And the rest of the day continues to be vague and cloudy in my memory. I think that was the morning that we relieved the "B" shift from an early morning fire they had -went to the house to continue overhaul- but I can't be sure. All I remember, and this is crystal clear, is standing around nearly all day, gathered around the TV. I don't even remember the things that I was seeing on the screen. I was a new kid, but I certainly didn't do housework that morning. Everyone was huddled in the kitchen, silently watching. At some point in the afternoon, the CISM team came through. That's the Critical Incident Stress Management team. They came to debrief us, because clearly this was a disturbing, stressing incident for all of us, even though we were 3000 miles away. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to begin to place yourself in the same situation: what would I do if the Twin Towers were in my city, and I was the one called in to walk up those stairs, knowing that the building was on fire? Or maybe not knowing. Maybe only knowing that there was a lot of smoke and dust and something terrible had just happened. Would I chicken out? Would I quit? What would I do if I ran away out of fear? How could I live with myself then? What if I knew the risks? Would I have a gut feeling that I would never see my family again? Would I rescue someone? Would I die in there? Would I be alone, or would I be at least with a co-worker? The Golden Gate Bridge was said to be a potential target, so couldn't I actually be in this hypothetical situation if they really did attack it?

The CISM team helped, but I don't know how much. We all did end up talking. I recall looking at my co-workers who were stereotyped as male firefighters to be the silent suffering type, listening to more and more comments and thoughts coming out as each successive person talked. I don't remember the night time. I don't remember much past the afternoon. One event in the afternoon did strike me though, and that was that a woman drove up in her Volvo and stopped in front of the fire station. She pulled her bagpipes out of her car and began playing. Tears were streaming down her face. I stood and listened, and soon my co-workers heard it and came out to stand and listen also. We stood in a large, somber group. I always thought that bagpipes sounded cool, but this time they were gut-wrenching and haunting. I will always get goosebumps when I hear the sound of bagpipes now. The reedy sound touches something deep inside me and I really can't explain it any better than that. It's like a straight shock of a little bit of electricity to someplace in my gut.

Probation is stressful enough, and I don't know if it was just the fact that I was on probation ---or if it was the extraordinarily crappy relationship I was in, if it was being new at work, if it was the 23-year old hanging victim I responded to a few shifts later, the media telling us that the GG Bridge was next to be hit, being on High Alert but not really knowing what that meant in terms of my new job as a firefighter, going to so many "white powder" calls in the middle of the night, thinking about death, and my own death in particular, or if it really was all of those things combined--- but in hindsight, I realized that I started having nightmares not long after 9/11/01. For about three years, I had dreams where I was killing somebody, being killed by somebody else, my family was dying, some other person was dying, or many people were dying. There was a hanta virus dream in there, an atomic bomb dream, a dream where I hit someone with my car and was desperately running from the cops, a dream where my brother got hit by a train, a dream that I was a small child and I was running around at the bottom of an empty pool with other small children, and men with guns were standing on the edge, shooting and killing us like fish in a barrel. It's been five years and I still remember my dreams. They continued for three years, and I often woke up scared. Miraculously enough, they abruptly stopped within a few days of taking my leave of absence to take pre-med classes, and they never came back, not even when I returned to work the following year.

So I will "never forget 9/11." But probably not in the way that the angry Midwestern corn farmers who voted for Bush again and want to deny women abortion rights will "never forget." It's a day of sadness and wishing things were better, not a day to vow to kill more people. It seems like such a fad to "remember 9/11" that I must have subconsciously rebelled against it yesterday. What should we be remembering? We should be remembering that on that day, 343 firefighters (and many other emergency response workers) walked into those buildings because they had the duty and the desire to help people that they didn't know. And we should remember them so that we can be inspired to live our own lives as better people.