We watched the towers fall on television. Perhaps a billion people watched. We all saw the same thing at the same time and have the same twin scars burnt into our brains.
The burning and then another burning and then the incredible collapse and then another collapse and meanwhile people jumping out of windows and being crushed by concrete chunks the size of trucks and choked to death by ash so dense that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, and firemen sprinting up the stairs as people sprinted down, and the picture on the television cutting back and forth from New York City to the burning Pentagon.
And then there was the news of the plane that the passengers forced to crash in a field so it wouldn't kill their countrymen, the plane in which the passengers, led by dads and college kids and a rugby player, stormed the pilots' cabin where the murderers had slit the throat of a stewardess.
Right about then we turned the television's sound off and just sat there staring. All the rest of my life I will remember my children's faces staring and outside the sound of blue jays as the bright morning began in the West. It was the most brilliant crisp clear morning ever; I remember that.
For Americans there will always be the time before September 11 and the time after. The late assassin Osama bin Laden, son of Alia Ghanem and Muhammad bin Laden, got at least that, of all the things he wanted. He didn't get his holy war between East and West, he didn't get a world where women are enslaved and education is a crime, he didn't get a world where his idea of God was forced upon everyone, but at least he delivered a blow that will never be forgotten, not in America.
People from other countries have asked me quietly sometimes, in the ten years since that morning, if maybe Americans are a little self-absorbed about September 11, I mean in the end only 3000 people were killed, tsunamis and your bombs have killed many more than that, and they say this gently, not accusingly, just a little puzzled that it's such a ragged raw wound for Americans; but it is.
We were attacked, literally out of the blue, by a brilliant thug with squirming dreams of blood, and he caused children to roast, and moms and