Like most kids of my generation, I’ll never forget where I was on 9/11.

I was in fifth grade, sitting in Mr. Mount’s classroom. Another teacher walked in and whispered something in his ear. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “What?” he asked. They both left the room. A murmur rippled through the class and everyone began to speculate about who was in trouble or who died — as fifth-graders are wont to do. 

Mr. Mount came back flustered. He told us that there had been a big accident in New York City, which immediately brought the room to attention. I lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and a lot of kids’ parents commuted into New York every day for work. He said some of us might get pulled out of class, and school would probably end early. One student asked what happened — and he replied, honestly, that a plane had flown into a big building. A lot of people were hurt, and to be safe, some adults were coming home from work, too.

By late morning the school was abuzz. Students, by then, had gathered that the “accident” was really an “attack.” One teacher had put on the radio in her classroom to listen to the news, which spread across the school like wildfire. I remember someone telling me that China was attacking us, and a new World War had just started. 

Fifth grade, for me, was a time when my personal world really started to change — when I started to have understanding and opinions, and started forming views that would shape my life. My mom had survived her first bout of breast cancer the year before, so I was newly aware that bad things happened to good people — sometimes for reasons adults couldn’t explain. Now, I was about to learn that safety is fragile, and that people here and abroad are capable of a great deal of horror.

I was a walker, so when school got let out early I rushed home on foot, taking a shortcut through our neighbor’s side yard. I’ll never forget running into my family room and finding both my parents and my neighbor, a former Green Beret, sitting in front of the TV. They were all crying. My neighbor said something to the effect of, “a bunch of Arabs are going to die for this” — not as a threat, or out of bigotry. He stated it as a fact, a certainty. And he said it with some regret and trepidation. Decades later, it’d remind me how I felt about Palestinians after October 7. 

War was coming, he was certain. Which meant horror and death were coming, too. He was right, of course. War was coming. And “a bunch of Arabs” would die for 9/11. 

By the time I was in high school and fully politically conscious, 9/11 had become America’s defining political issue. It had sent us into Afghanistan and Iraq, and my proximity to New York City meant its impact on my life was unavoidable. 

I’ll give you just one remarkable example: I dated a girl in ninth grade, Brielle, whose father was one of the pilots on the plane that hit the South Tower. That tower was the second hit — the one everyone watched on television as news crews filmed the North Tower burning. The one that made everyone realize this wasn’t an accident, but an attack. Not many people think about the pilots — or their families — but imagining what they lived through is enough to leave you breathless. 

I saw up close and in person how this attack permanently altered the lives of just one family. Brielle’s and my teenage relationship didn’t last, but we’ve been close friends ever since. Just before the 16th anniversary of September 11, Brielle married a man named Sean, an affable, charming guy who now runs a must-visit brewery in Philadelphia called Future Days (shameless promo for a good friend).

Like Brielle, Sean lost his father on 9/11. But he was inside the towers. The two met at Camp Better Days, a sleepaway summer camp for children who experienced loss on 9/11 (they met in seventh grade, before Brielle and I started dating, and I have a sneaking suspicion Sean stole her from 14-year-old me; Sean, I forgive you). 

My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I were lucky enough to be at Sean and Brielle’s wedding and witness the uniquely powerful ceremony. Both their fathers were honored with empty seats in the front row. Every speech was about the remarkable story of their love, and their vows spoke to the miracle of such beauty being born from such horrible tragedy. We talk about the wars and violence that came after 9/11, but you never hear about the love, the marriage, the joy. When people say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, it’s often an exaggeration; in this case, it’s actually true. 

There aren’t all that many true “before and after” events in modern American history — Pearl Harbor, the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, and the pandemic all come to mind — but I think it’s safe to say 9/11 is one of them. I still have memories of what it was like to fly before airport security, or what it felt like to be in public before you feared terrorist attacks or mass shootings. The impact on our collective psyche, alone, is hard to quantify — but it’s immense. 

So, on this 25th anniversary, I’m thinking of all the people impacted. I’m thinking of Brielle and Sean, and sending them love, and sending love to the millions of other Americans who lost someone on September 11. I’m thinking of the American service members who were deployed to fight in two wars that lasted far too long, and the thousands of soldiers who lost their lives, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghans and Iraqis who died in the carnage. And, naturally, I’m thinking about our world, our country, and all the ways they’ve changed since.

Ari, Kmele, and I spent a half hour discussing the anniversary on yesterday’s episode of Suspension of the Rules. And today, we’re focusing our reader mailbag on questions we got about 9/11. 

I hope you find some time to pause and reflect today, and I hope you appreciate this edition.

— Isaac

As someone who grew up on the West Coast, born in 2004, 9/11 has pretty much just been a meme for my entire life. I’m curious if you could try to explain what that day felt like to young people like me, who often have only seen the fallout from it without ever experiencing what that day must have felt like.

— Geoff from San Jose, CA

Editor Bailey Saul: September 11, 2001, was a startlingly beautiful day on the East Coast. The morning was crisp, perfectly clear, and sunny with a bright blue sky — what my mother used to call a Cape Cod Day, when the weather there was at its best. 

I was 46 years old. My three sons were at school, the dogs were walked and I was in my driveway a little before 9:00 AM, enjoying the post-school departure’s lull in dad duty, when my best friend and neighbor Bob came across the street with his two-year-old daughter and asked, “Are you watching the news?” I obviously was not, but seeing his agitation, I said simply, “No, why, what’s happening?”

“Somebody just flew a plane into the World Trade Center in New York!” 

“What, like a Cessna?” 

“No, a fuckin’ jet, a passenger jet!” as he headed into our living room through the back and turned on our TV. It came up right away.

Bob was an ex-Marine paratrooper who popped Tylenol like jelly beans for his chronically painful knees, and I was an old hippy anti-Vietnam War protester. We were also best friends, and we both had a clear-eyed view of the world, if by different paths. 

We stood, transfixed, as they replayed the first jet’s damage, smoke pouring from the North Tower — one of the two tallest buildings in the city, along with its twin — trying to comprehend what we were seeing.

“How is this possible? Was it an accident? How could that happen?” I asked out loud, as the video zoomed in just long enough to make out bodies falling from the upper floors above the fire.

As we watched, 9:00 came and went, and then the unimaginable happened — again! A second jet flew into the South Tower, and we just sat, Bob hugging his youngest, me holding my head, not believing what we were watching. Okay, so it’s an attack. Now, is there another? What the fuck, who did this? And Bob’s first reply was, “I don’t know, but a bunch of Arabs are gonna die for this.” 

Little did he know how prescient he was, on both counts. We both understood, instantly, that nothing would ever be the same. 

And it started right away. All U.S. flights were grounded, even those only halfway to their destinations. Military fighter jets scrambled over D.C. as reports started coming in about another hijacked plane headed in that direction. Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon a little after 9:30. Schools started sending kids home, and nobody could tell if it was over yet.

Bob had worked for a company with offices at the WTC, and we knew a lot of kids at local schools had parents who commuted to the City, some of whom worked in the towers. As we waited for news of any more planes, we learned about a small victory, albeit a pyrrhic one, in our own state. A plane had gone down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, evidently after passengers tried to retake it from the hijackers. We later found out these passengers learned about the other flights on phones, and they were determined not to let Flight 93 become the fourth to be used as a weapon.

In the days immediately following, we began to understand the breadth of the damage through reports about our kids’ classmates. One child’s dad was a pilot on the second plane in New York; another’s parents escaped lower Manhattan on foot. Meanwhile, a sweep of patriotic fervor galvanized the country. The battle cry of the passengers on Flight 93, “Let’s roll,” was taken up over the next several weeks as responders began to clean up the wreckage in Manhattan and search for survivors. 

Before the reactions rippled through Congress, across the globe and throughout history, both New York City and the country unified for a brief time in the common mission of recovery and support for the affected victims and their families, and later for the New York City Fire Department firefighters who lost their lives at the scene. They became the symbols of courage and hope we needed even as they made the ultimate sacrifice trying to save people in the burning buildings. 

Much more quietly, we also reflected on our hubris in thinking such an event was so unlikely as to be impossible — what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice famously called a “failure of imagination” — when in reality it was achieved by a band of loosely led and barely coordinated amateurs who were willing to die to make their point. 

On this 25th anniversary, my thoughts go to the people lost in the attacks and those who worked at the scene for so many weeks afterwards, inhaling toxic fumes that would eat away at their health for years to come. May such times be few and far between, and our leaders wise enough to navigate the world without the hubris and lack of vision that lead to such catastrophes.

To those of us who inquire deeper than bumper stickers, it is clear that 9/11 happened expressly and exclusively because of USA support for the genocide of Palestinians and other Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. My question is, why don’t people ask “why”?

— John in Atlanta, GA

Senior Editor Will Kaback: While U.S. policy toward Israel and its treatment of Palestinians were part of Osama bin Laden’s core grievances that credibly motivated the 9/11 attacks, calling them the express and exclusive reasons for those attacks is incorrect. Similarly, bin Laden was concerned with more than just protecting Sunni Muslims — his political and religious project was far broader than this specific concern. 

The al-Qaeda leader viewed America and Israel as his enemies; he said as much in his 1996 “Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites,” writing (translated from Arabic), “Your brothers in land of the two holiest sites and Palestine are calling upon you for help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy, your enemy; the Israelis and Americans. They are asking you to do whatever you can within one’s own means and ability, to expel [then] humiliate and defeat the enemy out of the sanctities of Islam.” 

But as the 9/11 Commission detailed in its report on the attacks, bin Laden wasn’t just concerned with U.S. support of Israel but also its broader presence and influence in the Middle East. Beyond Israel, he invoked the suffering of Iraqis from sanctions following the Gulf War and the activity of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia as justifying his cause against America. Yes, he viewed U.S. policy toward Palestinians as “despicable and disgraceful,” but those points were often couched in objections to U.S. foreign policy as a whole, not just toward Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. 

You’re also correct that bin Laden was concerned with how U.S. activity in the Middle East affected Sunni Muslims (you can read more about this in the 9/11 Commission report). But again, this concern was not a sole catalyst. Al-Qaeda wanted to mold the entire Muslim world to its vision, and that included overthrowing governments and committing indiscriminately murderous acts of terror in Muslim-majority countries like Iraq. Bin Laden’s fatwa on America is a smaller part of al-Qaeda’s broader fanaticism. 

I’ll leave you with one thought on the question of “why.” In his 9/11 retrospective in The Atlantic from this August, Graeme Wood highlights Army War College professor Nelly Lahoud’s scholarship on the U.S. killing of bin Laden in 2011. Lahoud’s book on the documents recovered at the Abbottabad compound contains some surprising revelations, most notably that bin Laden did not expect the U.S. to respond to 9/11 by increasing its military activity in the Middle East. Wood writes:

The documents reveal a man and an organization blindsided by the American reaction to the September 11 attacks. Bin Laden and his associates “didn’t think that the United States would respond by waging war,” Lahoud said. He did not contemplate or plan for the long-term occupation of Afghanistan, nor did he expect the methodical killing of his operatives in a campaign that lasted years.

In fact, bin Laden considered the United States already in a state of war in the Middle East, and he thought 9/11 would catalyze an anti-war movement in the vein of the Vietnam War — with everyday Americans rising up against their government to pressure it to withdraw from the region entirely. How wrong he was. 

I recently interviewed Wood about the piece, and if you’re interested in exploring these questions in more depth, you can check it out here.

Considering 9/11, how are we to trust Muslims to run our government, when traditionally they are antagonistic to capitalism and the American way of life? Honest question.

— Jeffro from Boise, ID

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: I appreciate the question, and there are a lot of different ways to answer it.