My 9/11 memories

I woke up this morning (9/11/2011) and had the fine privilege of wrestling with my 3 and 5 year old boys on our family room carpet and thought I should write down my memories on the 10th year anniversary of 9/11 for my children. Feel free to comment if you wish.

To set the scene, I was attending graduate school in what would turn out to be my final year at ASU in Tempe, AZ. Joy and I were 25 and were dating. We were next door neighbors through the summer prior and before school started I moved to Ahwatukee and she moved to Gilbert when our landlord sold the two homes we lived in. I had not proposed to her yet. That would come on December 19 and we would be married March 9 during the next Spring Break. Joy's sister and brother in law Chris and Jenny lived in Brooklyn and Chris worked at NYPD headquarters in downtown Manhattan. Jenny, Joy and the rest of her siblings had flown to Utah for the funeral of their grandmother that day, and Chris took time off to stay home with my nephew Jack. The next door neighbor from our Tempe home was in New York on business.

The late 90's and early 2000's was an unprecedented time in our country. The economy was booming- housing in particular. It was impossible to hire engineers who were being employed with spectacular starting salaries before they graduated. People thought I was crazy to go to grad school. I accepted one of 7 PhD scholarships for US citizens. A Puerto Rican student was the only other interested student in the scholarship when I accepted mine.

I have always liked the news and followed www.stratfor.com, an open, non-political intelligence website. It was not common to know who Osama Bin Ladin even was at the time. Timothy McVeigh had bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City 6 years earlier injuring 851 people, 167 fatally. The World Trade Center had already been attacked with a truck bomb, Al Qaeda had bombed two of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole was attacked less than a year earlier. Bin Ladin had personally tried to assassinate President Clinton in Manilla but pulled out along with the WTC bomber who considered using nuclear weapons to do so. Terrorists were at war with the US and for whatever reason I kept up with the news and was aware. Like our isolationist pre-WWII feelings, events were mostly overseas and we were in the middle of a huge financial boom. I recall our then new President Bush running on a platform of isolationism.

Tuesday was a normal day of class for me. I was on my way to Prof. Sayfe Kiaei's engineering class. He is Zoroastrian, a dying world religion from Iran (he immigrated from Iran, perhaps in duress like other refugees of his faith). It's funny what you remember from that day. I was driving in a white Honda Accord up the road to class when I first heard. I was listening to Bob Edward's Morning Edition on NPR. Of all of my memories, listening to his voice is probably my strongest memory. I don't recall exactly what was happening at the time in New York but I remember very strongly the voices on the radio. They were wavering, almost crying as they were describing the events (probably towers falling that time in the morning). I never saw images that morning until quite a while later, only the voices of the news anchors. I went to class and could not concentrate at all. I sat next to my friend Jason Yaenig and asked him if he had heard the news- he hadn't. It seemed like most of the students hadn't. I fidgeted through the whole class- when I left the TVs began to be set up, the shocked faces began to emerge, and my experience from that point paralleled that of most other Americans glued to TVs amid canceled classes for the remainder of the day.

In graduate school there were few US citizens. You needed to join study groups and had a few choices. The Chinese kids were all super nice but it was more convenient for them to speak Chinese while they studied. This left the Indian kids. I learned a lot and heard family stories about the bloody partition of India in the 1940s and 50s where 12.5 million people were displaced- Muslims into what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindus and Sikhs into modern day India. They all studied in English but I usually gravitated to the Hindu kids and they were some of my best friends. I studied with Sasbanna, a cynical Pakistani girl as well. I usually studied with girls from these groups - it seems like the guys in their cultures were generally uncomfortable with them, so that is how it usually boiled down. Most of these girls came to our wedding reception and some of them danced with me - their first time to dance (Rashmi).

We had a janitor that worked on the floor of our graduate student offices in Tempe. He always seemed unstable and was continually yelling at us in the middle of the night while we were working. I nicknamed him Bin Ladin McVeigh- people never understood the joke.

The Muslim guys on campus were generally separated into two groups- the pious guys who wore traditional clothes and kept to themselves and the not so pious, not so smart rick oil guys who were famous for their exploits and not at all liked among anyone, especially the Muslim girls I studied with. I studied with a guy name Kuaja (sp?) from Bangladesh who was very kind and a serious student. He was by far the most pious of the pious. His pregnant wife stayed home with their children while he attended graduate school. She delivered and sent him a photo of their new baby which he threw away (Islamists like Kuaja feel no paintings or photos of livings things are permitted under Islam). He liked me and thought I would make a great Muslim- my only vice was wearing shorts he said.

The foreign students were terrified after 9/11 as were their poor parents. They thought everyone around them would seek revenge and they were all very scared for their physical safety. They all took off their traditional clothes and wore western clothes for many months after 9/11. Kuaja was the exception. He was a big fan of the Taliban and liked what they were doing and thought highly of Bin Ladin and believed he would never do such a thing as fly planes into buildings. When the US began sending cruise missiles into Afghanistan, he was confused and considered dropping out of school to go fight and defend the Taliban.

I was impressed with the reaction of everyone around me. Everyone I knew was easily able to separate radical Islamists from normal Muslims. We all figured the attitude of the 9/11 perpetrators and those that sympathized with them were a vanishingly small percentage of the Muslim community. This turned out not to be the case but I believe this will be true in another few decades.

Our brother in law-Chris' NYPD building in Manhattan was damaged in the attack. We all hate to think what he what he would have been motivated to do had he been in Manhattan that morning. Our next door neighbor in Tempe lost his life that day in the World Trade Center. As all flights were canceled, I met Joy half-way in Las Vegas at Maria's home and drove Joy, Wendy and Sam home to Arizona.

I'm glad as a country we have prevented any significant follow-on attacks within the borders of our country. I'm saddened that our world never stands still and that peace will be an elusive goal for the foreseeable future. I'm excited to be alive, to be a father, to be a husband, to worship freely, to teach my children that there are challenges and opportunities in all generations and that the future is as bright as they wish to make it.

My four children want to go on our normal Sunday walk now. I think I'll take them.

-Dad