My Twin Towers trip — just 72 hours before 9/11

THREE days before the Twin Towers came down I remember standing in the plaza at the bottom of the buildings with my old wind-up camera.

I pointed it to the top but decided not to take a picture as I’d only two shots left on the cheap disposable.

I could snap a picture another time I thought, it’s not as if these colossal towers are going anywhere.

Hindsight prompts you to reflect on your actions in the lead-up to pivotal moments in history.

Across the vast foyer, up three separate lifts, and soon we were wobbling dizzily onto the top, where we examined views of Manhattan through a thin haze, a vast distance below.

On the morning of 9/11, a Tuesday, our flatmate came screaming down the corridor of our Brooklyn apartment with the news that World War III had broken out.

She’d been due to cover the breakfast shift at Le Marais, a Jewish restaurant we both worked at on John Street in the Financial District, around the corner from the World Trade Center.

I was rubbing my eyes watching footage of the first plane slamming into the building, hoping it was an accident, when the second plane hit.

We remained glued to the news coverage that morning, a southerly wind blew a thick dust cloud from the collapsed towers right passed our window. Carrying bits of paper from workers’ desks, that cloud took days to subside.

Within hours, US news agencies were broadcasting pictures of Muslims celebrating in cities around the world.

President George W Bush addressed the nation and delivered a steely resolve to avenge this great act of violence on the American state. And the War on Terror was born.

By lunchtime, the shelves in the local shops were empty. The tension in the streets was profound. In the park, people stood staring at the point on the skyline where the towers should have been, their mouths hanging open.

Later that evening, as a momentous groundswell of patriotism took hold and US flags began to sell out, we tried to get on the subway to Manhattan.

No trains were entering or leaving the island. All stations were manned by State Troopers. It was a few days later, when my three flatmates had left, that I crossed back under the Hudson River to the Financial District.

Eerily, the C train passed beneath the World Trade Center site on its route uptown. It slowed to a crawl as we passed the stations that served the towers. Someone had taped a bunch of flowers to a pillar on the platform. A passenger let out a howl of anguish. I tried not to think what was buried in the rubble just above our heads, but I couldn’t figure out how the falling weight of those two gigantic skyscrapers hadn’t crushed the subway beneath. It had been built a hundred years earlier.

Blinking in the daylight as the subway stairs grew level with the street, I went off in search of Le Marais. The windows were boarded up. I’d worked another job at a hotel cafe a few streets closer to the towers. There, they told me people ran in and huddled underneath tables as the towers came down on the morning of 9/11.

Over every conceivable wall space, ‘Missing persons’ signs were posted, bearing photos and descriptions. A heavy dank, smell of death hung in the air. New York, the city I’d fallen in love with that summer on my J1 visa, where we worked hard and partied harder, had changed utterly. New Yorkers were stunned and hurt that anyone should want to carry out a terrorist attack of this scale on their doorstep.

In the years that followed, various conspiracy theories abounded. US activities training mujahideen warriors to fight the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s were examined. A whistleblower in the US consulate in Saudi Arabia claims he was ordered to issue visas to ‘unqualified applicants’ in the 80s.

It’s only after a pivotal incident in history that we can piece together events that lead up to it. Right now it seems as if an alleged chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus could be a catalyst for something much worse for Syria. The 100,000 deaths of the civil war to date are a mere back story.

Much as we like to think our sophisticated style of humanity is superior and improving all the time, there is always another agenda at work. And the cyclical patterns of power and greed fuelled by hate could be poised to erupt once again.