The Victims of 9/11 Deserved Better

The 25th anniversary of the massacres of September 11, 2001, brings with it a flood of memory, and regrets. The simple reality, visible at the time and brought into ever-sharper focus across each successive year, is that the enemy in al-Qaeda achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of America. Although the day itself saw the virtues of Americans in aggregate brought to the fore — most especially in the raw heroism of the Flight 93 passengers, but also in the selfless sacrifice of the FDNY, NYPD, and unnumbered Americans known and unknown who saw death for themselves and gave in the hope of life for others — it also illuminated with great rapidity the strategic incapacity of American political leadership. It is an incapacity yet to be fully repaired.

Although I am not a New Yorker, I was by circumstance present in New York City the day of the massacres. My then-fiancée, working on Water Street, saw it all up close and lived a harrowing morning: the second aircraft plunging into the World Trade Center tower, a descent in panic down her own skyscraper’s elevators to the ground floor, an emergence onto a street with flaming debris cascading downward, and in an episode we still invoke in wonder today, a 15-minute wait for a payphone so she could call me and ask what to do. My counsel was to get out of lower Manhattan, preferably by train. She caught the last train to Brooklyn, alone in a car with a man who had clearly also escaped the chaos. He said aloud that it was a shocking accident. She replied that it wasn’t an accident: she’d seen it, and it was an attack. The man buried his face in his hands and wept.

About the Author

Joshua S. Treviño

Joshua S. Treviño works in public policy in Austin, Texas, and in Washington, D.C.

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The 25th anniversary of the massacres of September 11, 2001, brings with it a flood of memory, and regrets. The simple reality, visible at the time and brought into ever-sharper focus across each successive year, is that the enemy in al-Qaeda achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of America. Although the day itself saw the virtues of Americans in aggregate brought to the fore — most especially in the raw heroism of the Flight 93 passengers, but also in the selfless sacrifice of the FDNY, NYPD, and unnumbered Americans known and unknown who saw death for themselves and gave in the hope of life for others — it also illuminated with great rapidity the strategic incapacity of American political leadership. It is an incapacity yet to be fully repaired.

Although I am not a New Yorker, I was by circumstance present in New York City the day of the massacres. My then-fiancée, working on Water Street, saw it all up close and lived a harrowing morning: the second aircraft plunging into the World Trade Center tower, a descent in panic down her own skyscraper’s elevators to the ground floor, an emergence onto a street with flaming debris cascading downward, and in an episode we still invoke in wonder today, a 15-minute wait for a payphone so she could call me and ask what to do. My counsel was to get out of lower Manhattan, preferably by train. She caught the last train to Brooklyn, alone in a car with a man who had clearly also escaped the chaos. He said aloud that it was a shocking accident. She replied that it wasn’t an accident: she’d seen it, and it was an attack. The man buried his face in his hands and wept.