Dying of boredom for a firefighter means that no disaster occurs to which they must quickly respond for rescue.
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That was the feeling they had in one of the stations in lower Manhattan in the summer of 2001, very close to the World Trade Center (WTC) crowned by the iconic Twin Towers.
“All of us at the Duane Street firehouse had been waiting for a real fire,” explained Joseph Pfeifer in the recent reissue of his book Ordinary heroes ( Héroes corrientes ). At the time, he was the battalion chief of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) and the top operational officer for the southern Manhattan area, including the WTC.
After weeks without “anything exciting” – smoke detectors triggered in office buildings, one or two car fires, or a phone book burning in a trash can – that morning on September 11 they received a call about a “possible gas smell” a few blocks from the station. Although it was a routine matter, anything but exciting, they went there, including Pfeifer.
Once on site, the chief was surprised by the roar of a plane flying very low. He even read American on the fuselage, the name of the airline.
The aircraft disappeared from view among the skyscrapers until it reappeared heading straight for the north twin tower, where it struck at 8:46 a.m. A huge fireball emerged. That began 102 minutes – from the crashes into the two skyscrapers and their collapses – that changed the history of New York, the United States, and the world, a date marking its 25th anniversary next Friday.
Not counting the almost simultaneous attacks on the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, supposedly headed for the White House or Congress, more than 2,770 people died in New York. The FDNY paid a high price with 343 casualties. Additionally, 37 Port Authority officers and 23 local police officers lost their lives.
But as many who still suffer the consequences say, 9/11 is the longest day in history. About 10,000 people have died since then from illnesses related to toxicity contracted during tasks performed at Ground Zero.
Pfeifer, the first chief to arrive at the scene and give the initial orders when it was not yet known that another plane would become a missile aimed at the second tower, understood in an instant how another boring day turned into the worst of his life.
One of his confessions. The first firefighter victim was not inside the buildings. It occurred outside when struck by the body of someone who jumped to their death.
Trump, who used the “endless wars” after 9/11 to win, succumbs to his own criticisms in Iran
He recounted that the noise of those impacts filled him with horror. “I can only imagine how intensely the fire burned up there if people had to make the terrible decision between dying burned or taking that leap,” he wrote. Some jumped in pairs, holding hands.
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That image expresses the magnitude of the tragedy. “It was a great shock and the architects of the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq took advantage of that shock,” emphasized Nathan Citino, a history professor at Rice University in Houston and author of several books. He has just published a reflection on 9/11 and its lasting legacy.
“People were shocked by the attack, and there was a loss of the sense of security. That is the most important thing,” he reflected.
“I wouldn’t use the expression ‘loss of innocence,’ because people recognize that, whatever they say about American exceptionalism, the United States has been a global superpower, an imperial power. It was born as a kind of colonial settler project in North America. So, in reality, true innocence never really existed, at least not in a moral, political, or historical sense,” he stated.
“But it is true that there was a great shock and a loss of the sense of security, especially because it happened after a period when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Cold War had ended. There was a feeling of triumphalism, of victory, and that event on September 11 abruptly ended that feeling,” Citino emphasized over the phone.
“There is a certain irony. After that period when there was a feeling of victory in the Cold War, the feeling of being the last superpower standing after the collapse of the USSR, sarcastically, the U.S. response to 9/11, in a way, accelerated – I don’t want to say exactly the decline of U.S. authority, power, or hegemony – but it did somehow accelerate the decline of U.S. power in various ways. And that might be the most lasting consequence we attribute to 9/11 in 100 years,” he pondered.
Citino and other historians agreed that Washington’s disproportionate military response with the war on terror encouraged Islamophobia, eliminated the distinction between domestic and foreign security, which led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, with customs agents or ICE still pursuing immigrants today, mass surveillance of Americans, loss of rights, and growing distrust of citizens toward rulers and politicians who supported the so-called “endless wars.”
Donald Trump successfully played the card of opposing those military conflicts, a strategy that was key in his two electoral victories. But with the war in Iran, “he is experiencing the kind of backlash he previously benefited from against the U.S. elites,” according to Citino.
9/11 and all its circumstances have increased internal division based on the “you’re either with me or you’re a traitor” stance.
It has also led to a magnification of conspiracy theories from the truthers, those who spread, thanks to the expansion of the internet, their denial of the official version and claimed that the collapse of the towers was an inside job by the government, not Islamist terrorists, partly supported by the lie of weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq in 2003. This is seen as a precedent to allege false electoral manipulations and try to silence voices.
“There was a great shock and a loss of the sense of security,” says Citino
The 25th anniversary tribute to the attack on New York comes as Zohran Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim mayor and as in other parts of the country the echo of 9/11 Islamophobia is again invoked to defame candidates and stigmatize citizens.
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