September 9, 2026
It’s shaping up as a humdrum day in my job as Senate correspondent for the Voice of America. For lack of a better story I’ll probably cover a committee hearing on health care, a big issue in the USA, not so much for my audience overseas.
I turn the car radio to the all-news station and find it’s carrying nonstop coverage of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. It sounds bad, but doesn’t concern me. At the moment, I’m more worried about DC traffic. Then comes the second strike.
When I get to the Capitol, black smoke is rising from across the river where the third plane slammed into the Pentagon. I race to the Senate door and the guards let me in, just as a crowd stampedes down the hall to get out. Everybody stares up when we suddenly hear jet engines. This plane is high in the air, flying west, but a police radio squawks, “has changed course and is heading toward the Capitol!” That one might have been Flight 93.
I can’t reach the newsroom on my cell phone, so I hustle to VOA headquarters a few blocks away. Once there, I knock out a story in record time, sticking closely to facts we know, ignoring unconfirmed reports about a fire and a car bomb nearby. The tense, energized atmosphere reminds me of the day the Challenger exploded and the night the United States launched the first Gulf war. We’re all wondering if we’re next. Everyone goes about their jobs.
I use a landline to call my wife, who joins thousands of others fleeing the downtown. Later I co-host a worldwide call-in show where among other things, a young man who’s half Polish and half Irish tells us he doesn’t generally like President Bush but is now on our side. My last story of the day is about members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps.
The next day, following a plan I made long before the attack, I give notice at VOA to take a new job in a new city. While part of me regrets leaving, I’m proud that on one of the worst days in our nation’s history, we got this awful story out and got it right. I’m looking out from a high-rise into another bright blue sky when I take the oath of office for my government post in Atlanta: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Still, despite calls for unity and shared sacrifice, I’m not asked for anything concrete.
Unlike the troops who take the same oath, I’m not shipped off to fight the forever wars. Nobody I know dies in them. None of my relatives or friends come home with PTSD or tinnitus, the most common disability among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. I never breathe the poisonous dust that engulfed Lower Manhattan, slowly killing more people than died on the day itself. Except for taking off my shoes at airports and watching “Rescue Me,” my life doesn’t change much at all.
We’ve never suffered the dreaded follow-up attack. Yet the Constitution is under a vicious assault from within, our forces are risking their lives in another pointless war, and VOA is a shell of its 9/11 self. I’m all for remembering and paying tribute. I just wish that sometime in the last quarter of a century, we’d acquired some damn common sense.
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