The apartment above mine is flying an American flag. I saw it last night when I looked up to scan the skies, squinting through the haze that has drifted into midtown Manhattan on the north wind. Days ago, I smelled this haze, the remains of burning buildings and papers and bodies, as a reporter working for Newsweek the night of Sept. 11. For blocks and blocks near the World Trade Center, it hung in the air, a stench that could only bring to mind concentration camps and war.
It didn't hit me, not until this haze descended on my neighborhood, my apartment, that this is where we are--at war. It wasn't real when I heard it on the news, crackling through my radio in alternate bursts of fact and speculation. It wasn't real when I sat in a makeshift morgue and triage center, waiting and waiting for patients--survivors--who never came. It wasn't real when I climbed the rubble outside the remains of the World Trade Center the night after the attack. I saw fire trucks crushed under a bridge and papers drifting in the air and men crying--and still, the scene was not real.
God knows that we've never seen anything like this before. There is no explanation, no analogue, no frame of reference. New Yorkers, and the rest of America, are suddenly, simultaneously brave and terrified. We will keep working. We will keep living. We will get up in the morning and get dressed. But now, after jeans and T-shirts, we are donning gas masks and goggles. We are scared to walk under bridges. Every boom, every flash of light could be another attack. Even if they say the next attack will be biological, seeping out from the city center, creeping and deadlier than the first.
Is this what war is like? My generation is too young to remember bomb drills. What little we know of battle comes from CNN. And that, too was never real. In seventh grade, with the beginning of the Gulf War, I wrote in my diary, "My friend's brother is going to Iraq. I'm scared. I hate Saddam Hussein." These days, I can barely find the time or the words to keep a diary. These days are not something I want to remember. And yet we must not forget them.
This is what I will never forget:
A woman sobbing on a crosstown bus. She had just gotten off the subway when the plane hit. She worked on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center. Her friend was supposed to report for her first day of work at the Center at 3 p.m.
A huge black room, a film-studio-turned-treatment-center, with rows and rows of blanketed tables, IVs and crash carts. Empty. All of them.
A list of names of Duke alums who were safe, and the stark realization that some names were missing.
A three-year-old girl placing daisies at a deserted fire station, and then smiling, not understanding why the flowers were there.
A tattered blue notebook was lying on top of the rubble outside of the WTC, as its pages were flapping in the wind, with tiny, crunched handwriting, dates and stock quotes and names scribbled in the margins.
As I bent to pick up the notebook that night--less than 24 hours after the deadly attack--I heard a scream. And then there was a chorus of screams. "It's coming down! Move! Move!" There was no time to look up. I wrapped my arms around my head and crouched on the ground. A sharp sheet of metal screeched down from the sky and landed five feet from me. And I ran, knowing that I could never be far enough away, knowing that none of us will ever be far enough from horror again.
I am back at Newsweek's offices now. I just got an assignment. I will not be at the grave of the twin towers tonight. Instead, I am going out to find the victims' families. I am tracking down the mourners, conveying the grief of New York to the people of America. I am spending the rest of my evening, and probably the rest of this week, at vigils for the dead.
In some ways, we all are.
Mary Carmichael, Trinity '01, is a former executive editor of The Chronicle and a reporter for Newsweek.
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