A Letter to Myself on 9/11
The Bulwark · C · trust 34/100
No man—and no country—can live life in reverse.
Mark Hertling September 8 Upgrade to listen 17 minutes 6 4 (Photo Illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock) THE ADVANTAGE—AND PERHAPS THE BURDEN—of looking back across a quarter century is knowing how little we understood then about how profoundly those few hours would change the country, the military, my family, and millions of other Americans. I wish I could tell that version of myself what I know now.
I was one of a very few Americans whose 9/11 story began before September 11, 2001. In the late summer, I was among a group of newly selected generals and admirals at a classified lunch with CIA Director George Tenet. Asked about threats to the country, he described several but emphasized a terrorist organization called al Qaeda. I had little idea what al Qaeda was, but he made sure we remembered the name.
That was around the same time I reported to the Pentagon for my first Washington assignment, as vice director for force development (J7) on the Joint Staff. Our section handled contingency war plans, exercises, and force transformation. Someone had described it as a relatively sleepy assignment. My boss, a Marine lieutenant general, knew that after several years training soldiers in the California desert, I had seen little of my extended family on the East Coast. He encouraged me to take a long weekend before jumping into the job. My wife and I left Washington on September 8, planning to return four days later.
And then the phone rang while we were having a leisurely breakfast with my in-laws on eastern Long Island. My brother-in-law called to say that it appeared an airplane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. The United States was under attack. Soon, we would be at war.
Twenty-five years later, I know things now that I could not possibly have known as I turned on the television just in time to see the second plane hit. This is the letter I would send to myself if I could, warning about what was to come.
You don’t have much time to read this. You’re going to be busy for the next several years.
You’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty right now. Some of it will be resolved; some of it never will be. You’ll know soon enough who attacked America and why—but questions about how many other attacks there could have been will linger for decades .
You’ve just watched the attack on the World Trade Center on TV, and the situation will become immediately disorienting. Keep your wits about you.
You’re going to call the staff section’s executive officer to ask what the Pentagon knew. The Navy officer you reach will speak to you only briefly before he stops and says he needs to call you back because something just happened in the building.
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You’ll get into the car and start heading for Washington. The Long Island Expressway will be choked, bridges and tunnels will be closing. At the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, a police officer will stop you and say the bridge is closed. You’ll explain that you’re an Army officer and need to return to the Pentagon. He’ll escort you across.
You’ll be the only car on that enormous bridge. Near its highest point, you’ll get a look toward Manhattan. The two towers that had dominated the skyline when the day began will be gone, and smoke will be rising from where they had stood. That image is going to stay with you.
During your drive, you’ll learn from the radio that the Pentagon has also been hit. You’ll feel the rush to get back there, as you don’t know what that means for those in the J7 you’ve just recently met.
You’ll drive silently through the night and reach the Pentagon at about five tomorrow morning. Smoke and the smell of aircraft fuel and fire will surround the building as you show your badge and enter.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will ask the Joint Staff what other sites inside the United States might require protection. The list of sensitive sites will quickly become enormous: the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, and other high-rises are possibilities, but so are dams, electrical grids, nuclear facilities, transportation hubs, military installations, ports, and bridges like the Golden Gate. America is littered with thousands of potential targets. One of the first things you will learn: Even the most powerful country in the world cannot defend everything. There will always be risk.
Yesterday, you and the whole country had a feeling of perpetual security. Today you’re feeling a sense of unalterable vulnerability. Learn to manage risk, prioritize, and be comfortable with tradeoffs.
Because you’re one of the newest general officers on the Joint Staff, you will volunteer as the night-shift general officer in the National Military Command Center. You’ll spend nights overseeing the flow of information and actions from around the world. You and your NMCC team will update the chairman and secretary of defense every morning.
From there, you’re going to get wrapped up in the planning for how America will strike back, even before you know whether September 11th was a single operation or the beginning of a series of attacks, whether other terrorist organizations or governments might be involved, or where the next threat might emerge. Get used to making decisions under uncertainty; that’s what leaders do, and there’s no other option.
You’re going to spend many, many hours with parts of the government neither you nor any of your colleagues have worked with closely: the State Department, CIA, FBI, Treasury, and others. Eventually, the relationships among these various parts of the government will be formalized for the specific purpose of fighting terrorism. But for now, you’re going to have to learn to work together at the same time as you learn where the bathrooms are in each other’s buildings. Learn to improvise.
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