On this day in history, ten years ago.
I guess 9/11 is my generation's Kennedy assassination. We all knew where we were and what we did when we heard about the attacks. This is the story of where I was and what I did.
When 9/11 happened, I was still serving in the German Army, as an officer's candidate. I remember that September 11 2001 was a Tuesday. It was the day I was returning to the barracks from sick leave, to leave for the military hospital in Koblenz the next day to have my psychological fitness for duty checked. I went back from Berlin to Mayen by train, most of the distance by high speed train that has a built in media system. Usually, I listened to the radio on the drive, really every damn time I took it. The only day I didn't was September 11 2001.
I got off the train in Mayen in the afternoon and climbed into a taxi, telling the driver "To General-Delius-Kaserne, please." Before he even took off, he turned around and told me "Have you heard? Two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and another one into the Pentagon." I kept telling him not to screw around with my head, saying one of my sisters was currently in Washington, D.C. (which she wasn't but I didn't know that at the time) and he kept repeating this fantastical tale that I just couldn't believe.
A couple of minutes later, there were the news on the radio and the announcer read out the news again. I still couldn't believe it and I was sick with worry about my little sister. When I arrived at the barracks, everyone was in a goddamn frenzy because there were a couple of our American PSYOPS counterparts there and the entire battalion was supposed to take off to Baumholder for a week long battalion drill exercise a couple of days later.
Not really knowing what to do and not officially on duty again, I went over to the mess hall and the MannHeim (an entertainment facility that served mostly as a kind of pub for enlisted soldiers which I was at that time, even though I was wearing the "Discolitze" that marks an officer's candidate in the German Army and Air Force) and they had set up a screen and a projector there and the pictures of the airplanes hitting the towers were kind of running in endless loop. I just stared at them and didn't understand it. It looked like something out of the movie and it was fully incomprehensible what the hell was going on there. It took me until reading articles in Die Zeit about the incident and the victims in the following week to start understating what the hell happened.
It took a week to return to the barracks after the proclaimed me fit for duty but I didn't really understand what 9/11 meant for the world. I was only struggling against washing out (which I did, three months later) and deployment was still at least a year into the future for me and at that time, Kosovo was still the big deployment destination, not Afghanistan. Only when I went to New York and the Midwest with my dad in summer 2002, I finally started to realize how big that all was. And it took me until this year to realize how profoundly it shaped the world.
German Armed Forces have been at war for ten years now, the first German deployment since WWII that is more or less officially called a war (and they only started to do so in 2010) and it people don't even care about that here. German soldiers have died abroad in acts of war and people just shrug and say "It was their own fault for joining up." But German soldiers are also serving with international contingents, fully integrated and serving and fighting with allied with soldiers whose grandfathers fought and killed theirs and I wonder if that wasn't a consequence of 9/11, too.
9/11 also reshaped our perception of security and made us realize that there's nowhere we're really safe. Not in New York, not in Washington, not in London or Madrid. The West had to learn that just because we haven't been victim to multiscale attacks since the end of WWII, it didn't mean we'd never have to experience them again.
Also, since then, the world has become smaller and events happening hundreds or thousands of miles away affect us a lot more than they would have ten years ago. When former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said "We're all Americans" in the wake of 9/11, he probably was far closer to the truth than he thought himself. In that moment, we were closer to America than probably ever before, and no one, not even those anti-American, could tell themselves that the pictures didn't affect them in any way. It was the West turning to each other and closing ranks, more than ever before and to this day, I can't help feeling terrified by the pictures that have ingrained themselves into the collective memory of the West and feeling saddened by all the victim's stories.
I try to always remember that New York and Washington and London and Madrid weren't the only victims to terrorism and that people are victims to terrorism every day in Afghanistan, Irak, Yemen, Pakistan and countless other coutries and that this kind of terrorism was allowed to rise by the West but quite honestly, 9/11 will always be a special day of sadness and horror for me.
But there's one thing... that keeps impressing me, to this day. The selfless courage of the first responders and of people turning to each other and helping each other in the face of catastrophe. All the firefighters and cops and paramedics that risked and often enough also lost their lives to rescue as many people as they could and kept risking it with recovering bodies in the weeks and months after 9/11 are heroes, and I really don't use that word lightly. It's somehow comforting to know that in times of catastrophe, people don't turn against each other but to each other and that will never stop to impress me.
I just wish we could end the Afghanistan war with life for the Afghans being so much better than under the Taliban because nothing breeds terrorism like poverty and ignorance. If we can manage that, if we can push Al Qaida out of the lives of the Afghans, not all the counterterrorism efforts after 9/11 won't have been in vain. And God knows this world needs to become a better place, if we want to survive in it.
When 9/11 happened, I was still serving in the German Army, as an officer's candidate. I remember that September 11 2001 was a Tuesday. It was the day I was returning to the barracks from sick leave, to leave for the military hospital in Koblenz the next day to have my psychological fitness for duty checked. I went back from Berlin to Mayen by train, most of the distance by high speed train that has a built in media system. Usually, I listened to the radio on the drive, really every damn time I took it. The only day I didn't was September 11 2001.
I got off the train in Mayen in the afternoon and climbed into a taxi, telling the driver "To General-Delius-Kaserne, please." Before he even took off, he turned around and told me "Have you heard? Two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and another one into the Pentagon." I kept telling him not to screw around with my head, saying one of my sisters was currently in Washington, D.C. (which she wasn't but I didn't know that at the time) and he kept repeating this fantastical tale that I just couldn't believe.
A couple of minutes later, there were the news on the radio and the announcer read out the news again. I still couldn't believe it and I was sick with worry about my little sister. When I arrived at the barracks, everyone was in a goddamn frenzy because there were a couple of our American PSYOPS counterparts there and the entire battalion was supposed to take off to Baumholder for a week long battalion drill exercise a couple of days later.
Not really knowing what to do and not officially on duty again, I went over to the mess hall and the MannHeim (an entertainment facility that served mostly as a kind of pub for enlisted soldiers which I was at that time, even though I was wearing the "Discolitze" that marks an officer's candidate in the German Army and Air Force) and they had set up a screen and a projector there and the pictures of the airplanes hitting the towers were kind of running in endless loop. I just stared at them and didn't understand it. It looked like something out of the movie and it was fully incomprehensible what the hell was going on there. It took me until reading articles in Die Zeit about the incident and the victims in the following week to start understating what the hell happened.
It took a week to return to the barracks after the proclaimed me fit for duty but I didn't really understand what 9/11 meant for the world. I was only struggling against washing out (which I did, three months later) and deployment was still at least a year into the future for me and at that time, Kosovo was still the big deployment destination, not Afghanistan. Only when I went to New York and the Midwest with my dad in summer 2002, I finally started to realize how big that all was. And it took me until this year to realize how profoundly it shaped the world.
German Armed Forces have been at war for ten years now, the first German deployment since WWII that is more or less officially called a war (and they only started to do so in 2010) and it people don't even care about that here. German soldiers have died abroad in acts of war and people just shrug and say "It was their own fault for joining up." But German soldiers are also serving with international contingents, fully integrated and serving and fighting with allied with soldiers whose grandfathers fought and killed theirs and I wonder if that wasn't a consequence of 9/11, too.
9/11 also reshaped our perception of security and made us realize that there's nowhere we're really safe. Not in New York, not in Washington, not in London or Madrid. The West had to learn that just because we haven't been victim to multiscale attacks since the end of WWII, it didn't mean we'd never have to experience them again.
Also, since then, the world has become smaller and events happening hundreds or thousands of miles away affect us a lot more than they would have ten years ago. When former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said "We're all Americans" in the wake of 9/11, he probably was far closer to the truth than he thought himself. In that moment, we were closer to America than probably ever before, and no one, not even those anti-American, could tell themselves that the pictures didn't affect them in any way. It was the West turning to each other and closing ranks, more than ever before and to this day, I can't help feeling terrified by the pictures that have ingrained themselves into the collective memory of the West and feeling saddened by all the victim's stories.
I try to always remember that New York and Washington and London and Madrid weren't the only victims to terrorism and that people are victims to terrorism every day in Afghanistan, Irak, Yemen, Pakistan and countless other coutries and that this kind of terrorism was allowed to rise by the West but quite honestly, 9/11 will always be a special day of sadness and horror for me.
But there's one thing... that keeps impressing me, to this day. The selfless courage of the first responders and of people turning to each other and helping each other in the face of catastrophe. All the firefighters and cops and paramedics that risked and often enough also lost their lives to rescue as many people as they could and kept risking it with recovering bodies in the weeks and months after 9/11 are heroes, and I really don't use that word lightly. It's somehow comforting to know that in times of catastrophe, people don't turn against each other but to each other and that will never stop to impress me.
I just wish we could end the Afghanistan war with life for the Afghans being so much better than under the Taliban because nothing breeds terrorism like poverty and ignorance. If we can manage that, if we can push Al Qaida out of the lives of the Afghans, not all the counterterrorism efforts after 9/11 won't have been in vain. And God knows this world needs to become a better place, if we want to survive in it.