The full import of Sept. 11th's events didn't hit Dan Nied until two weeks after they occurred -- and then it knocked him flat.
Posted on June 11, 2003 09:10 PMThe late morning sunlight shone through my window and my alarm clock had been beeping for an hour, interrupted every once in awhile with my snooze alarm defense.
It was a Tuesday, around 11 a.m. I had class at noon, maybe one. I was debating whether to go.
All of a sudden, my girlfriend at the time crept into my room and broke the news in what I thought was an attempt to drag me out of bed at a semi-reasonable hour.
"Dan," she said, with a tone which I remember now as genuine fear stifled. "We’re being attacked. The World Trade Center is down and the Pentagon has been hit. They are working their way east."
I wasn’t phased.
"Shut up and get into bed," I said, pulling her down to the mattress. She said she wasn’t joking and that I needed to get downstairs.
As I stumbled out and pulled on some pants, I thought to myself, "She’d better be serious, if she is getting me out of bed. I’ll be pissed if she is joking."
Now I wish she had been.
I debated whether she could have been serious all the way to the middle of the stairs, where I heard the sounds of news radio in our college house that usually sounded like old sitcom reruns and dirty jokes. Anything but the news.
"Holy shit." I stopped in the middle of the stairs before I got to the clearing that would reveal my awakened state to my roommates. I tried to brace myself for the worst. While I was on those stairs, the world was ending and there was nothing I could do.
I finally got into the living room and, out of three roommates and a girlfriend, no one said anything.
I broke the silence.
"What happened?"
"Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center."
The rest is a blur.
Because of my ignorance with the situation and the fact that our cable was turned off that day because we didn’t pay the bill, I decided that I needed to get out of the house and get to class. My girlfriend drove me.
Along the way I listened news reports, trying to grasp the situation. To figure out how big this actually was, I eavesdropped on pedestrians at stop lights to see if they could be talking about anything but this.
They weren’t.
I went to class, Visual Communications Technology, where my teacher made a cameo and put this in perspective.
"There is no reason for you to be here today," he said. "This is your Pearl Harbor. You have to deal with it any way you can."
(Later in the day I dealt with it with jokes. I’m not proud of it now, but I did try to distance myself from the situation by cracking about New York and people being crushed. I didn’t know what else to do. Jokes were always my way out of uncomfortable situations. It wasn’t that I was insensitive, it was just that I could not handle the severity of this.)
After class I went to my girlfriend’s house, as she had paid her cable bill. It was there that I first saw the images of planes colliding with the Twin Towers. It was there that I saw people jumping from the top floors, determined to play a part in their own deaths. They were images that didn’t mean much then, the shock was too much. But as time went on, they began to shape the emotions of that day. Their effect on me has been much greater in the months and years since than they were that day.
My girlfriend had just spent the summer in New York as an intern for Tommy Hilfiger. She called everyone she knew. They were alright.
I called my mother first to make sure they evacuated the Detroit City County Building where she, and the mayor, worked. I called my friend Shelby in Colorado Springs, Colo., where I had done my internship a year earlier. She always said that Colorado Springs would be next on the attack list after New York and Washington if something like this were to happen. (Something to do with the US Olympic Training Facility and NORAD.) It wasn’t.
Around dark, after I stopped looking into the sky for death planes, the entertainment value of 9/11 was in full effect. Who did it? Was it Afghanistan? Pakistan? Any sort of ‘Stan? When were we going to retaliate, and would we find any survivors? My eyes were glued to the running news ticker on each channel. I watched Dan Rather go certifiably insane around his 154th straight hour of broadcasting.
But it really didn’t hit me.
That is until two weeks later when I hadn’t shed a tear and was more worried about what was coming next than about what had happened. That was when I watched David Letterman’s first show back and he put it into perspective like no one had. He pointed out that this was done in the name of religion and how that doesn’t make "one goddam bit of sense."
It hit me that this was pure evil at work. That my God was testing us behind the curtain of their falsified god. It hit me that everything that happened was the work of the sort of hate I never wanted to understand. It hit me that I was asleep when the country took one below the belt. That this was a once in a lifetime ordeal that 300 million people suffered through at once. 3,000 people were dead; burned alive in a 110-story building, or crushed by steel beams.
I was watching that Letterman show with my friend Erik Pepple and I noticed him crying through his glasses. I would have taken that opportunity to call him a prissy little girl if I hadn’t been tearing up myself.