On September 11, 2001, I was an eighth-grade English teacher in Tennessee. When news of the attacks in New York City hit our school community, we collected the students in the gym, wheeling in blurry TVs with bad reception as all of us—teachers and students—struggled to understand what was happening. No one had a smartphone. There was no Facebook, no Twitter. Instead we turned to one another with the questions we were asking: What was going on? Why would someone do this? Would there be more attacks? Were we now at war? And with whom? What would happen next?
There was only one thing we knew for certain: Nothing would ever be the same.
I tried to write about 9/11 in the years right after 2001, but it always felt too soon. Nearly twenty years later, when my editor and I were discussing what my next novel would be, I finally felt like I was emotionally ready to tell the story of that day—and how the world is different now because of it.
Brandon and Reshmina, along with all the people in their respective stories, are fictional characters. But everything they see and do is based on actual events. Reshmina’s village is fictional but is located in the real Kunar Province, a mountainous part of Afghanistan where the US and its allies have fought a bitter war with the Taliban since 2001. For the sake of story, I have combined a few events from different years in the War in Afghanistan into a single day. The US forward operating base that Pasoon targets with his rifle, for example, would have already been abandoned a few years before he was hired to shoot at it.
Similarly, in Brandon’s story, I took the liberty of incorporating a few incidents that took place in the South Tower into the North Tower.
A note on language: Pashto, the language of more than forty million people throughout the world, uses an alphabet based on Arabic script, and there are many different spelling options when transliterating Pashto words into written English. When choosing how to spell a Pashto word in the text, I used the spelling I found most commonly online and in my research.
Made up of seven buildings, the World Trade Center complex opened in 1973 in Lower Manhattan. Its two tallest structures, the 1,368-foot-tall 1 World Trade Center and the 1,362-foot-tall 2 World Trade Center—known as the North and South Towers—immediately became the tallest buildings in the world. By the time of the attacks in 2001, the complex was home to more than 430 businesses. An estimated 50,000 people worked there, with another 140,000 people passing through as visitors each day—more than the populations of 29 state capitals. The World Trade Center was so big it had its own zip code!
Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top two floors of the North Tower, was a popular dining destination. I went to Windows on the World in February 2001, just seven months before the attacks, when my wife and I were visiting New York City. The views were indeed spectacular. The kitchens in Windows on the World were, in reality, on the 106th floor. I took the liberty of putting them on the 107th floor in Brandon’s story.
The World Trade Center symbolized the height of American business and achievement. Perhaps that’s what made it such an appealing target for terrorist attacks. In 1993, terrorists detonated 1,500 pounds of explosives in the parking garage underneath the North Tower, with the intention of bringing down both towers. The buildings survived, but the blast destroyed five underground levels of the North Tower, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists again tried to bring down the towers, and this time they succeeded. Nineteen terrorists armed with box cutters hijacked four passenger planes and deliberately flew two of the planes into the World Trade Center.
The first of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11, slammed into the 96th floor of the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., traveling close to 450 miles per hour and carrying 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, which ignited on impact. The crash instantly killed the 92 people on board the plane and every person on floors 94 to 99 of the tower. Many people on floors right above and below the crash found themselves trapped. None of the 1,402 people stuck on floors 92 through 107 would survive.
Like Brandon, thousands more people below the impact zone were stunned and shaken but alive. No one yet understood just how dangerous the situation was. Emergency operators answering 911 calls that day gave people the same instructions they would give in a regular emergency: Stay where you are and wait for the fire department. In the South Tower, employees who had begun to evacuate when they saw and heard the explosion in the North Tower were told that everything was all right and that they could return to their offices.
Most people thought the crash of Flight 11 was an accident until seventeen minutes later, when United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The plane came in at an angle, destroying most of floors 77 to 85. Hundreds of people were killed instantly, including all sixty-five people on board the airplane. Incredibly, one of the South Tower’s three stairwells survived the impact, and eighteen people from above the 77th floor were able to make their way down and around the impact zone to safety. Another 614 people who never found the open staircase were not as fortunate.
The Twin Towers had been built to withstand hurricane-force winds, and they had sprinklers and fire hydrants on each floor. But no one could have anticipated what thousands of gallons of burning jet fuel would do to the towers’ internal steel structures. City officials were convinced the buildings wouldn’t fall—right up until the moment that they did. Despite being hit second, the South Tower was the first to collapse at 9:59 a.m. The North Tower followed at 10:28 a.m., just 102 minutes—less than two hours—from the moment the first plane had struck. Both towers came almost straight down, their debris damaging buildings for blocks. Later that day, the forty-seven-story 7 World Trade Center collapsed due to damage it sustained when the North Tower came down.
An estimated 14,000 to 17,500 people were in the World Trade Center complex at the time of the attacks—far fewer than would have been in the buildings if the planes had hit later in the day. Miraculously, most people below the impact zones survived.
The number of dead and wounded is still horrifying: 2,977 victims died in the attacks, and an estimated 25,000 more people were injured. The number of dead includes 343 New York City firefighters who were working to rescue people in and around the towers when they came down. Sixty officers from the New York City Police Department and the Port Authority Police Department died in the collapse, as did eight emergency medical technicians and paramedics. Hundreds more rescue workers who worked at Ground Zero that day and in the months that followed have since died, many of them from exposure to toxins at the site. The September 11 attacks remain the deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement officials in the history of the United States, and the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history.
Like Brandon, there were children in the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks. All those children survived. Eight of the passengers on the planes were children, however, and they all died in the crashes. They ranged in age from two to eleven years old.
Twenty minutes before the South Tower came down, a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington, Virginia, right outside Washington, DC. The impact killed all 64 people on board, including the five hijackers, and another 125 victims in the building.
The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was hijacked just after the second plane hit the South Tower. When the passengers on Flight 93 used phones on the planes to call their families, they learned about the attacks on the Twin Towers and on the Pentagon, and they knew their plane would be next. Monitoring the situation from the safety of Air Force One, the special plane that carries the president of the United States, President George W. Bush made the difficult decision to order F-16 fighter jets to shoot down Flight 93 if it got close to a major city.
Before the fighter pilots had to carry out that unimaginably terrible task, a group of brave passengers on board Flight 93 stormed the cockpit to try to wrestle control of the airplane away from the terrorists. During the struggle—right around the time the South Tower was collapsing—Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. To this day, no one knows the exact target of Flight 93. The plane was headed toward Washington, DC, and the White House and the Capitol were likely possibilities. Whatever the terrorists’ target was, the forty passengers and crew of Flight 93 stopped another deadly attack and may have saved many more lives by sacrificing their own.
All nineteen of the terrorists were men. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, and all were from middle- and upper-class families in the Middle East. Most of their mothers and fathers had no idea their sons had become terrorists. The young men had been recruited, radicalized, and trained by al Qaeda, a militant Islamic extremist group founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden and a number of other men who had fought together in the Soviet-Afghan War.
Born into a wealthy Saudi Arabian family, Osama bin Laden received an elite education before moving to Pakistan. There, with support from the American Central Intelligence Agency, bin Laden funded and trained mujahideen fighting in the Soviet-Afghan War. When that war ended, bin Laden founded al Qaeda to drive other “infidels” from Muslim lands, overthrow Arab governments supported by Western countries, and institute an extremist version of Islam as the law of the land. To achieve those goals, al Qaeda began a campaign of bombings and suicide attacks against military and civilian targets that continues to this day.
Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership chose the hijackers from the ranks of their organization and gave them their targets. Five of the hijackers moved to the United States over a year before the attacks, taking piloting classes and practicing on flight simulators. The other hijackers, the ones who would provide the “muscle” in subduing the crew and passengers, arrived in the US in early 2001. Bin Laden paid for all their housing and training, but it was the hijackers themselves who chose the day and the flights.
In the days after 9/11, when the United States was determined to find out who had planned the attacks, attention focused on Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were headquartered.
Afghanistan is roughly the size of Texas, and sits in a strategically important location between Europe and Asia. As Reshmina notes, the country has been invaded over the centuries by everyone from Alexander the Great to the United Kingdom.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1978 and finally withdrew in 1989. Then came a deadly civil war, after which the Taliban came to power. Despite Afghanistan’s desperate need for help after so many years of war, the Taliban refused any international assistance. They created what they called a “pure Islamic society,” which in reality was an authoritarian culture based on an extremist interpretation of Islamic law. They instituted restrictions on women and girls, made prayer required, and punished thieves by cutting off their hands or feet. Music and television were outlawed, and movie theaters were closed and turned into mosques. The Taliban held no elections either, claiming to rule by divine right.
The Taliban’s strict religious laws and hatred of outsiders were a perfect fit for al Qaeda, and in 1996 Osama bin Laden moved his headquarters and training camps there. When evidence pointed to al Qaeda as the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, the United States demanded that Afghanistan’s Taliban government close every terrorist camp in the country and hand over bin Laden. When the Taliban refused, the United States invaded Afghanistan, joined by a coalition of countries that included the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Germany. Relying heavily on anti-Taliban Afghan rebels on the ground and superior international air power, the United States and its allies swept to a quick and easy victory by December 2001, defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda without the loss of a single American life.
But Osama bin Laden remained elusive, slipping away across the border into Pakistan before he could be captured. It took another ten years, but bin Laden was eventually found in a compound in Pakistan in 2011 by a team of Navy SEALs. They shot and killed bin Laden, then dumped his body at sea.
In 2004, Afghanistan formed a new, democratically elected government supported by the US and its allies. The change in leadership has brought more freedom for women and girls, better health care, and better education. But life in Afghanistan is still difficult. Almost half the population lives below the poverty line, making it the second poorest country in the world. Less than 15 percent of Afghanistan’s land can support farming, and roughly 35 percent of the population does not have access to clean drinking water. There are very few hospitals in Afghanistan, and Afghan doctors often lack proper training and equipment. Life expectancy at birth is among the lowest of any country.
The Taliban, defeated but not eliminated, has continued its fight against the new Afghan government and its Western allies. Since the beginning of the war, almost 2,500 American soldiers have died, and more than 22,000 more have been wounded. By contrast, more than 65,000 members of the Afghan National Army (the US’s allies in Afghanistan) have died, and an estimated 70,000 Taliban insurgents have been killed. Even more striking, more than 40,000 Afghan civilians have died—that we know of. According to the United Nations, 2018 was the single deadliest year for civilians in Afghanistan in a decade. And not all civilian deaths are caused by the Taliban. In 2019, the United States and their Afghan allies accounted for 29 percent of all civilian casualties, 30 percent of which were children.
To escape the fighting, many Afghans choose to flee over the border into neighboring countries, like Pakistan and Iran. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, 2.7 million of the world’s 25.9 million refugees in 2019 came from Afghanistan, ranking second only to Syria. Half a million Afghans qualify as internally displaced persons—people who were forced by war to abandon their homes and now live in makeshift refugee camps in their own country.
Though US combat operations in Afghanistan officially ended in 2014, thousands of American soldiers remain in the country to train, advise, and assist the Afghan military. On-again, off-again negotiations between the US and the Taliban have promised an end to the fighting, but no end has come. The War in Afghanistan is now officially the longest war in US history.
Life in America has also changed a great deal since 9/11. Shortly after the attacks, police and rescue workers from all across the country went to New York City to help search for survivors at Ground Zero, and blood donations increased. Unfortunately, hate crimes also rose sharply. Many Muslims and South Asians reported harassment, and mosques and Muslim businesses were vandalized and set on fire.
In the months and years that followed 9/11, a number of American rights and privacies were curtailed or lost in the name of safety. The Patriot Act, enacted in October 2001, gave law enforcement agencies the freedom to search homes and businesses, read private emails, and listen in on phone calls, all without having to get permission from a judge. Airline travel has changed too; thanks to the newly created Transportation Security Administration (TSA), passengers traveling by plane now face carry-on restrictions, complicated screenings, and invasive pat-downs.
Nearly twenty years after 9/11, the United States remains in a national state of emergency. The World Trade Center was rebuilt, with the new One World Trade Center building officially replacing the Twin Towers in 2014. The building’s height—1,776 feet—commemorates the year the United States Declaration of Independence was signed. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, opened in 2011, is nearby. Two square reflecting pools sunk into the ground mark the outlines of where the Twin Towers once stood, and museum buildings house artifacts recovered from the wreckage, including twisted steel beams, damaged stairs, and parts of the hijacked airplanes. Today the memorial and museum receive nearly ten million visitors a year.
Though I thought I was ready to confront my own memories and emotions from 9/11, Ground Zero proved to be one of the most emotionally difficult books I’ve written. 2021 will mark the twenty-year anniversary of 9/11. Will it also mark the twenty-year anniversary of the War in Afghanistan? Time will tell.
One way or another, we still live in a world reshaped and redefined by what happened in those 102 frightful minutes on a bright blue September morning in 2001. And I believe it’s more important than ever for new generations to understand how we got from there to where we are today.
Alan Gratz
May 2020