I usually don’t write about 9/11. I try not to talk much about 9/11, as I can get super fired up. I often avoid people on the anniversary day. I usually stay away from social media on the anniversary day or I get super annoyed super fast. On 9/11s past, I’ve occasionally taken a day off work and found a sacred space to be in.
This 9/11 I’m mixing it up.
I’m writing this post right here about two guys I came across late one night in the early post-9/11 years.
I wrote a post called “9/11 Can Help Us Find Ways Through Terror & Fear” over on the nonprofit page.
I wrote a 9/11 post just now on Facebook and also on Substack about “Shining, on 9/11.” It’s about countering fear and why we need to be doing more of that because fear is at the core of the people who want to hold on to power now.
I’m hosting a zoom today through the nonprofit in which it will *definitely* help if I talk to people.
We’re doing everything differently right now in the US. I might as well too.
I don’t like writing or talking about 9/11 partly because I’m never sure if I can stop, or where I should stop, or how I can stop… or if I can talk about any of it without a million zillion other little stories and also big huge stories that all relate to each other for background. I’m not great at telling short, concise stories. It’s way, way, way worse when it’s something as inherently complicated as 9/11 or as another major catastrophe or set of disasters including the active incidents themselves but also all the critical parts of society that are related to that, and all the mechanisms of government that I may or may not have been involved with in various phases also related to the main incident (in this case, 9/11) that are also all somehow relevant to whatever story I’m trying to tell.
I finally realized that I can convey at least some of my emotion and perspective on the whole 9/11 thing though by sharing this story of a late night train ride in the DC metro area one night.
Doesn’t mean I won’t write parts of my own 9/11 and post-9/11 stories sometime. Every year I think I might. Some day it could happen.
For today, I’m sharing this short story about these two.
One day maybe 7 or 8 years after 9/11, I was riding on the subway (“the metro”) late at night. I was in the height of my own post-9/11 time in the Washington, DC area deep inside the federal government; working from inside to make change, to fix things, to build new systems, and to connect pieces and parts that might not otherwise get connected.
On this night, I was in one railcar of a 6-car train that came out of downtown DC, went over the river, passed through the Pentagon station, and headed south down into Virginia.
As we left the DC downtown, I noticed that I was in a car with just two intoxicated guys at one end of the car. It wasn’t an unusual situation that late at night, and I didn’t think much of it at first. They were loud, as intoxicated people often are. I could easily hear them talking; they weren’t trying to be private. They were in a space where they could vent freely. I was pretty far away and did not present a threat. I don’t think they imagined that I’d hear them, as people often have earphones in on the subway.
The two guys were big sad, hurt, and feeling very alone.
They were veterans. Fresh veterans. Like back to the US in the last year or so before that. Long enough to get a sense for the society they had plugged back in to. I don’t even remember which post-9/11 war they were in.
But they were basically like… here we are, we’ve been to war, we’re here in this city in the middle of the night… and does anyone here even know that that happened? Do they care? Has it affected their lives? They knew damn well they’d been to war because of 9/11. But they didn’t see much sign of that here around in how society looked today.
They went on about all of it for a while. It was deep emotion, and it was heart-wrenching. I wished I could broadcast it to Americans. I wished I could broadcast it to local DC area people who could help support these guys and share their own stories.
They kept talking about the same stuff.
Here we were, going right past the Pentagon which had gotten hit on 9/11 and which was a lot of why we’d gone to war. That piece of very real information was not lost on them as we passed the physical location of the place in reality.
They just did not even know how to process all of this.
I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to say thank you for what you’ve been through. For what you volunteered for.
I wanted to tell them how a dear friend of mine had been a key responder to the Pentagon incident, but that now I’ve gotten to know tons more people who had been involved. I wanted to tell them how many police and firefighters and EMS people I knew who had been involved with or touched by any of the three 9/11 incidents. I wanted to tell them how so many of us had been doing so many things since 9/11 to change how the US handles emergencies and incidents. I wanted to tell them how I had been in the fire community, and that so many firefighters were so deeply affected, and that I’d even left my fire career to work on helping this country be stronger and more resilient and better ready to deal with this kind of thing in the future. I wanted to tell them about how so many of us had made hard changes and had years of meetings and listened to each other and flown all over to learn more and that we missed our families too, but… well none of it compares to going to war. It’s just not the same.
I often found myself with similar sentiments as these two, but at a different level. Staying state-side and serving domestically in the federal government, as a contractor, or in local, state, or tribal government to serve in post-9/11 stuff was hard. But going to war yourself in response to 9/11 whether because you signed up to do that or because you were already signed up when it happens is absolutely a whole different league. They’re just not comparable. Both paths involve big service. The US needed people on all of those paths, in the years after 9/11 (whether or not all the country’s decisions were wise). But the paths were not the same. They just aren’t.
Still, I wanted to talk to the two guys.
I tried to figure out a way to do it… but angry, sad, intoxicated, younger men are not the ideal people to talk to in the middle of the night when you are a woman heading home late in the wee hours in your dressy work clothes, in heels, and hauling all your work stuff.
I’m sure that night I was headed home last as I’d stayed in the city late after work to meet friends, or at a conference, or in for one of my many post-9/11 world dinner meetings or similar… trying to build more resilience for this country; working on disaster information sharing; or trying to hold together a fledgling post-9/11 National Incident Management System (NIMS) that has still never been built properly.
I wanted to tell them how much they weren’t alone. That they weren’t the only people whose lives changed on that day.
They weren’t the only people who had made sacrifices and big pivots because of it.
But their heartbreak was very real. The impacts on their lives were hard. They were changed, and they would be forever.
Two people out of millions, really. Two people out of hundreds of thousands affected by 9/11-specific war. Two people out of hundreds thousands of civilian employees, first responders, and infrastructure owners and operators who made big changes after 9/11; in many ways.
The world changed.
Terrorists saw the power of fear pay off, big time.
Americans learned the power of fear, big time. Some Americans maybe learned it too well.
But in the midst of all that… here were two intoxicated guys in the middle of the night trying to make sense of it all. Trying to hold on to their own humanity, and to their own lives. Trying to find ways forward and through.
Aren’t we all?
Anyway, I think of those two guys. I think of how they still had their humanity. I think of how we can all hold on to all of ours, and do more with it. That’s what I was writing in the “Shining, on 9/11” post I just wrote.
We can do more to counter the fear that’s so pervasive right now here in this situation that’s going to be so much bigger than 9/11. So much more.
If you’re interested to join a conversation about all this, we’re doing a zoom tonight on countering fear as part of through-finding this chaos. Sign up here:
Our Fierce Community work is also launching a weekly series of zooms to have talks like this that goes through fall into January. Join one of those here:
Zooms To Get Thru Instability Series
Take care. Keep the faith — in humans and in our humanity. We do amazing things.
Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive. She has over 25 years experience in resilience-building, civic engagement, coalition-building, critical infrastructure, systems thinking, big disasters, catastrophes, wildland fire, emergency management, incident management, land management, park rangering, homeland security, continuity of operations (COOP), continuity of government (COG), technology innovation, public communication, and disaster information sharing.
Email people@fiercecommunity.com to set up a conversation. This Substack channel does not knowingly use AI.
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