BRATTLEBORO-Driving to work on the bluebird morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I turned on the car radio to hear that hijacked planes had struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, set the Pentagon afire outside Washington, D.C., and slammed into a seemingly random field in rural Pennsylvania.
My first response: What kind of shock jock is trying to re-create the 1938 Martian-invasion broadcast drama “The War of the Worlds”?
A quarter-century later, I’m one of many Vermonters who can recall the rest of the story. Then again, about 100 million Americans — nearly one-third of today’s population, the U.S. census reports — weren’t born yet in 2001 or were too young to remember.
“The current generation lives in a world that was created by 9/11,” Burlington historian Garrett Graff says in the new Netflix documentary Turning Point: Generation 9/11. “If you start to scratch at almost any aspect of our daily lives in the United States today, I can show you how 9/11 changed that part of our country.”
Scholars point to the combined attacks’ death toll of nearly 3,000 people — at least 15 with ties to the Green Mountain State, according to online records — and the resulting birth of the “war on terror,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and increased surveillance, partisanship, and polarization.
Vermonters, for their part, talk of things more personal.
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On Sept. 11, 2001, Vermonters woke to headlines reporting the aftershocks of then-Gov. Howard Dean’s announcement that he wouldn’t seek a sixth term the next year.
“Many were still reeling from the news,” noted one of three front-page Rutland Herald stories on the subject.
On television, morning shows were minutes from signing off when American Airlines Flight 11, traveling from Boston to Los Angeles, flew into the World Trade Center’s north tower at 8:46 a.m.
“We just got a report in that there’s been some sort of explosion,” said Good Morning America co-anchor Diane Sawyer amid footage of the 110-floor skyscraper belching smoke.
A block and a half away from the crash, Michael Rosen — a 1974 Rutland High School graduate turned financial software developer — had seen the fluorescent lights flicker, heard a sharp scratch in his phone line, felt the floor shake. He was still speculating on the cause when United Airlines Flight 175, on its way from Boston to Los Angeles, smashed into the south tower at 9:03 a.m.
“The people in our corner office shrieked and groaned,” Rosen went on to write in What Else But Home, a 2009 memoir I reported on for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in 2011.
Rosen had phoned his family and was preparing to flee when the south tower fell at 9:59 a.m., followed by the north tower at 10:28 a.m.
“The sky was gray cloud rushing toward us,” Rosen wrote of the first collapse. “Palms flat against the glass, I waited as the plume came but realized the windows might burst and I shouldn’t be there. I stepped halfway back. The room went dark.”
Across the East River in Brooklyn, Norma Hardy — who retired this past March as Vermont’s first Black female police chief in Brattleboro — was home preparing for her afternoon shift as an officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owner of the World Trade Center.
Hardy had yet to see or hear the news when her mother called. Did she know about the twin towers? The American Flight 77 from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles that had crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.? The United Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco that had plowed into a Pennsylvania field at 10:02 a.m.?
Skip work and stay home, Hardy’s mother said. But the officer wasn’t deterred. She had received a medal of valor for helping commuters and children trapped after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Driving through a dark highway tunnel to Manhattan on 9/11, she emerged to an instantly changed world.
“It was just complete chaos — people running, people bleeding, people trying to wash their eyes out, people hurt and looking for help,” Hardy told me for a 20th anniversary story. “We didn’t know if other planes were coming, if someone was going to start shooting at us, if things would start to explode. It was like a scene from The Twilight Zone, I usually tell people, because I can’t think of what else would describe it.”
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As a Rutland Herald reporter on 9/11, I arrived at the newsroom to see colleagues watching it all live on television.
“It is completely impossible to understand why this is happening,” Today show co-anchor Katie Couric told viewers before the steely twin towers, each a quarter-mile high, crumbled into clouds of ash.
Professionally, we raced to print an early afternoon “extra” edition — the first for the morning publication since Vermont Gov. Richard Snelling died of cardiac arrest in 1991 and the second since President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
“This is the most devastating attack on the United States of America since Pearl Harbor,” Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s congressman, told the paper. “We have to acknowledge that this is an unprecedented day.”
Everyone reeled with questions. Had our co-workers heard from their grown children living in New York and the nation’s capital or leaving on morning flights? Or the family and friends unaccounted for coast-to-coast amid groundings of all aircraft and evacuations of everything from the Statue of Liberty to Seattle’s Space Needle?
All struggled to make landline calls, as the iPhone wasn’t introduced until 2007.
“Within minutes of the terrorist attacks [...], telephone lines, wireless relays, and internet news sites were jammed by users trying to find out what was going on,” a colleague wrote in a story. “Communication company officials said their networks couldn’t handle the overload of calls and computer inquiries.”
Our family and friends were accounted for by the time the “extra” edition rolled off the presses at 1:23 p.m. Not that anyone could exhale. The Herald’s regular deadline just hours away, we turned our attention to the ripple effects.
The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, then operating in Vernon, went to its highest state of alert.
“Yankee stands in super-high profile,” a Nuclear Regulatory Commission reactor safety panel member told the paper. “There’s nothing else in Vermont that would do that damage.”
Vermont Catholic Bishop Kenneth Angell led a special Mass in Burlington, not knowing that his younger brother, David, an Emmy Award-winning writer and producer of such television comedies as Cheers and Frasier, had been killed on the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.
ABC News anchor Barbara Walters and CNN host Larry King doggedly sought an interview once news of the death was reported later that day. The bishop declined.
But as Christmas approached, he agreed to speak with a state-based reporter. I arrived at the church’s Chittenden County office that December to find Angell surrounded by more than 1,000 cards and letters.
“I’m sorry your brother went to heaven,” one child wrote in a crayoned condolence.
That sparked a bittersweet smile in a man who believed in eternal salvation.
“Personally, it’s a day that will affect me very deeply,” said Angell, who died in 2016. “But we’ve got to go on. We have to forgive, as difficult as it might be.”
Television networks aired round-the-clock 9/11 coverage for five days, surpassing the record of more than 70 consecutive hours after Kennedy’s assassination. The Herald printed special front pages and stories for a week, offering such headlines as “Officials watch, wait in Vermont” and “Local crews standing ready to help.”
For the first anniversary in 2002, I wrote about dozens of state observances, including outgoing Gov. Dean sharing a moment of silence at Windsor High School and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel speaking at Middlebury College.
“The question everyone is asking is how does one remember Sept. 11?” Wiesel told a crowd that filled all 1,000 seats in the campus chapel. “I wish I knew the answer. One thing is clear. If I’m here it’s because I believe in your right to have a better future.”
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For the 10th anniversary in 2011, I wrote about Rosen’s view from his office window.
“I watched so many people die, but I wasn’t dead,” Rosen told me. “When you look at how delicate things really are ... If you’re lucky enough to live, respect those who died — but keep living.”
For the 20th anniversary in 2021, I wrote about Hardy seeing clouds of smoke dissipate into a silver lining.
“The biggest thing for me was how much America came together and showed resilience,” she told me. “That stays in my mind, especially now when everybody seemingly hates everybody. Then, there wasn’t the nonsense that’s in the news now. Everyone remembered they were all Americans, even if it was only for a little bit of time.”
Today, much has changed. Take Rosen, whom I email annually this time of year. He’s now living and working in Vietnam as founder of that country’s first independent whisky distillery.
“I feel mostly betrayed by Sept. 11,” Rosen most recently messaged, speaking not only of that day’s losses but also its lingering health effects on survivors. “Aside from that, life is magic. Truly.”
Hardy, now traveling in her retirement, will mark the anniversary with an annual video call with others who were present at what history calls ground zero.
“My thoughts, as usual, are on those that were lost on that day and the many people affected by illness,” she most recently emailed. “It is important that we never forget.”
But how does one remember if they weren’t alive or old enough to comprehend back then?
Perhaps by learning now.
A quarter-century ago, I thought my grandparents’ stories of Pearl Harbor were irrelevant tales of a time gone by.
Today, recalling images of a fall day morphing into something that looked like a nuclear winter, I see things differently.
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This story was republished with permission from VTDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To support this work, please visit vtdigger.org/donate. Disclosure: Garrett Graff is a member of the board of trustees for the Vermont Journalism Trust, which owns VTDigger.
Kevin O’Connor is a reporter for VTDigger based in Brattleboro. His work often appears in these pages.
This News column was submitted to The Commons.