Sept. 11

So I'm sitting here, watching The Day the Towers Fell on the History Channel, and they're not revealing any new information at all, but you know what? Twice I gasped at what I saw. It's nothing I haven't seen countless times before but I gasped. Now, when most people say that, they just mean it as an expression, but I mean it literally: I was so overwhelmed with sudden emotion that I involuntarily gasped a huge breath of air. Nine years later, and images of September 11, no matter how much they've saturated our culture, can still affect us so.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have completely and permanently replaced the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the day that everyone asks each other "where were you when you it happened? What were you doing?" I'll tell you what I was doing.

We remember the fear we felt. The sorrow, the despair, the shock, the heroism. Here's what is largely forgotten: the confusion. I don't mean the chaos at the sites of the attacks. I mean the confusion across America. As the nation began to realize that we were under attack, the rumors started to fly fast and furious, borne of equal parts truth, fiction, and speculation. Some rumors were true, some were false, some were a mixture of both, and some were true but later turned out to have nothing to do with the attacks. Wikipedia mentions false reports of a car bomb at the State Department and a fire at the National Mall, for example, but the one I remember most clearly was actually a real incident, the theft of a state police helicopter in Pennsylvania. For some reason, it's the report of the stolen police helicopter that is the strongest memory for me that day. Considering all that happened that day, both from my perspective and to the country overall, that seems like a weird memory to latch on to, but I guess the mind is full of such mysteries.

At the time, I was working as the administrative assistant at the Department of Phrarmacoepidemiology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass. The news that the towers had been hit by airplanes was reported to me by my boss. I reacted with skepticism, only academically recognizing the event as a tragedy, but not yet fully understanding the scope of what was happening -- mostly because the towers hadn't yet fallen.

But as I said, the stronger memory for me was the report of the much more trivial helicopter theft, reported to me by a coworker, Sherry. Sherry was a mystery buff, and seemed to actually enjoy tabulating all of the stories, true and false -- in America's moment of vulnerability, all of the stories seemed true -- writing them out on her notepad, too afraid she'd miss the latest news item, so walking from office to office to catch snippets of different radio broadcasts rather than daring to switch any one station off. Don't be hard on poor Sherry when I say that she enjoyed this process; it wasn't out of coldness or sadism, it was more out of a futile hope that if she could collect and process all of the information, she could figure out what was going on, maybe gain some sort of key insight.

But all of this is one massive aside, because I vaguely recall telling you that this is supposed to be about what I was doing on that day. So let's get back to the topic of 9/11 rumors, because they turned out to play a vital role in my day.

People were saying that the attacks weren't over, that hospitals and major cities would be targets. In retrospect, it's clear that such reports were 100% speculation, based on absolutely nothing -- it's not like any of the people that were saying any of this had the inside scoop on the terrorists' plans. But people working at the Brigham -- a major hospital in a major city -- began to feel like they were doubly exposed as targets. By lunchtime, an "unofficial" evacuation of non-essential personnel had taken place. Oh, doctors and nurses stayed on duty, but research divisions like Pharmacoepidemiology emptied out of everybody except for security officers. And me.

Yes, I was just an admin. assistant, as far removed from "essential personnel" as you can imagine. But some random guy got a wrong number and accidentally called Pharmaco instead of the hospital's main number; he had heard the rumor about hospitals being a target, and was calling to see if a friend of his who was a patient at B.W.H. was alright. I explained to him that the Brigham hadn't been attacked, and then called down to the switchboard to figure out if it was really a wrong number, or if they had accidentally transferred him to the wrong department. The operator turned out to be at the end of his rope; apparently, hundreds of people had heard the "hospitals are a target" rumor, and every operator at the hospital was overwhelmed with dozens of calls at a time, from people checking up on their loved ones, or calling to reach friends and family on staff, unaware that most of them had already left for the day.

I said, "listen, my phone can take five or six calls at a time before people get automatically routed to voicemail, so start sending some of your calls to me. I'll let people know about the evacuation and that no one at BWH has been hurt."

Except for me, Dr. Avorn was the last staff from Pharmaco to leave that day.

"You can go home," he told me on his way out. "We're not going to get any work done here today."

"I have to take these calls," I said, indicating the phone, where three or four "on hold" lines were already starting to blink.

Amidst the dozens and dozens of calls I took that day, calming people down, allaying fears, reporting on the evacuation, explaining that the Brigham hadn't been attacked, that the callers' friends and families at the hospital were safe, some of those calls were from my own family members. Some of those family calls were to tell me to go home, because of the whole false "hospitals are a target!" rumor. Other calls involved my sister, whose airplane was missing; she'd been on a flight from Spain to JFK, and amidst all the air traffic confusion, Heather's flight just kinda disappeared. "Do you know where Heather is? Where's Heather?" people kept asking me, as if I might somehow be privy to secret information. Meanwhile, I was listening to so many callers declaring, "hospitals are a target, get my wife/ son/ friend out of there!" that I started to imagine every noise as an airplane descending toward BWH for a crash landing.

I'd like to say "it all worked out in the end," but we all know better. Still, amidst all the confusion and tragedy, this one story does have its own happy endings. In the end, hospitals were never an intended target in the 9/11 attacks, Heather was inconvenienced but safely housed in a school in Gander, Newfoundland, where her flight had been re-routed, and that mysteriously missing helicopter? Turns out out it had been stolen by a couple of college kids for a joy ride prank; they were, the police eventually learned, unaware of the events that were rocking the country at the time, and just chose the really, really, wrong day to play a prank on a police department -- not that there's ever a right day to steal a helicopter from the police. But I think you know what I mean.