I lived. And I remember. 9/11 was a shared trauma, with no room for conspiracies

Horror. Outrage. Sadness. Confusion. Shock. Hate. Love. Pain. The trauma of Sept. 11, 2001, unified the country in a terrible collective truth.

There’s no arguing with bodies falling from the sky. Collapsing mountains of steel, glass and concrete don’t brook disagreement. Street sepulchers and sidewalk crematoriums are not talking points.

The truth of that day is my touchstone. We were attacked. We came together: to respond, mourn, rebuild, remember.

A utility worker standing near the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center just hours after the attack grappled for words. With tears cutting through the ash caked on his cheeks, he said: “This means war.”

Yes, I thought, you speak for me.

The power of his words still burns through me. Not because of some impotent promise of revenge. His words were a kind of rallying cry. Stripped of politics, religion, race and class. He repeated it. A pledge: We would recover. We wouldn’t forget.

But something happened in the 22 intervening years. Our shared experience has vaporized like the Twin Towers. What once seemed immutable is now a mirage, with no more substance than the twin pillars of light that shoot up over Manhattan.

Our post-truth era has made hazy memorials of lies. Sept. 11, 2023, is a time of conspiracies. Theories once written off as fringe are now mainstream, propagated by politicians and presidential hopefuls.

Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has questioned the U.S. government’s potential role in the attacks and said he does not believe the 9/11 Commission report. He told The Atlantic last month that he didn’t know “how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.”

Then there’s former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor,” who led the city out of the deadliest terror attack in recorded history. His actions, his words inspired. He shared a vision of unity, strength and reassurance.

He has traded those moments of greatness — and anybody who was there will tell you, they were great — to peddle lies about the 2020 election that could cost him his law license, his reputation and his freedom.

Rigged elections, COVID as population control, Holocaust denial, false flag school shootings, a Democratic-led pedophilia ring operating out of a Washington, D.C., pizza shop — 9/11 as an inside job?

It’s as if we’ve stumbled across Occam’s rusty razor and are using it to slit our wrists lengthwise. The wounds are deep, the damage from lies permanent.

That’s one reason why I refuse to remove myself from that day, why I share my experiences from Ground Zero on each anniversary. A generation of children now know 9/11 only in abstract. Events should not be relegated to books, museums, videos and internet conspiracies.

It’s also my penance.

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My wife and I were on vacation on Sept. 11, 2001, our first visit to New York City. Our plan that day was to wake up early, get half-price tickets to a Broadway show and have breakfast at Windows on the World, at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

We overslept, so we lived.

When the first plane hit, I was in my midtown hotel room. When the first tower fell at 9:58 a.m., I was tearing through lower Manhattan with a notebook, pen and disposable camera. When the second tower fell exactly 30 minutes later, I was only blocks away. I threw myself in the doorway of a shop as the vertical mushroom cloud chewed through city blocks.

I ran toward the burning towers because I needed to bear witness. I listened to people, their bloody, terrible stories of survival. I turned off my feelings, let their emotions pass through me onto the notebook. Thought how lucky I was to be there, doing my job, while the rest of America huddled around television screens.

Their faces, their words are easy to conjure, even today. The police officer screaming in shock and grief on a street corner; another officer slumped in the basement of 100 Center Street telling me how pieces of airplanes fell onto her partners.

Two maintenance workers in Tower One describing elevators, cables severed, dropping from upper floors and spilling out burning bodies. One of the men reached for a victim, and the skin of his arms sloughed off in the worker’s hands.

And the FedEx worker who stopped me on the street and begged me to help him find his wife. She worked on the 100th floor of Building One. I took his name and assured him she made it out. I remember how desperately he clung to my words, my lie. I learned a year later that she did not survive.

I still hate myself for leaving him there like that, trading his grief for my need to get closer, to see it, to tell it. You can go back a thousand times in your mind. But truth demands an honest recounting.

I spent a week writing firsthand accounts from Ground Zero. I remember the bodies tumbling through the sky; the concussive thumps that I told myself were gas explosions. I remember human limbs sticking up from the ground like some macabre art installation. Obscene shrubbery, I think I called it. I remember a firefighter’s face as he emerged from the debris pile with a decapitated head; cadaver dogs exhausted on the smell of death.

I remember thinking my shoes were filling with the ashes of thousands of people as I walked. I got rid of them before I left New York, but I will be wearing them for rest of my life.

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My wife and I went back to Ground Zero for the first time in 2021. We brought our kids, now teenagers, who grew up on our New York stories. Even before we arrived at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, I found myself walking through a split reality of past and present.

I broke out my camera to compare the places where I was standing to pictures of then. Among them was a mangled fire truck, two bone-weary firefighters slumped in front of it.

Inside the museum, I found myself standing in front of the same truck. It was from Ladder Company 3 in the East Village, now a memorial to the 11 firefighters who rode it to the Twin Towers. All of them died there.

The front of the truck was torn off when the building collapsed, its ladder bent and twisted into a claw where the cab used to be. I wonder what happened to the two firefighters in my photo, who they lost, who they saved.

Are they even still alive? What would they say? The photo captures them in a moment when most of America shared their shock and grief.

Before we chose to believe that it was OK not to believe.

Robert Anglen is an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic. He was working for the Cincinnati Enquirer on Sept. 11, 2001. Reach him at robert.anglen@arizonarepublic.com or on X, the site formally known as Twitter: @robertanglen.

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