Twenty five years ago, on September 11, 2001, I walked into a Taco Bell in Farmville, Virginia, on a lunch break and heard one of the staff, a National Guard member, say, “We’re under attack. We’re under attack.” She was frantic, pacing back and forth under the menu behind the register.
While we were ordering our lunch, the young woman, maybe five years older than me, told her manager that if her phone rings she has to answer it. And it would ring, one call after the next, the entire time we were there. She’d answer it and say, “Have you heard anything yet? Do you know anything?” then a little while later, “No, mom. I don’t know anything yet. I don’t know if we’re going to be deployed” and “We’re on high alert for whenever they call us up. That’s all I know. We’ll have to go when we get the call” and “I don’t know anything else. I love you.” And “Yes, sir. Yes, I understand.”
I was working in construction at the time. I was nineteen years old. Earlier that morning, around 9:30 AM, we’d heard a little about the tragedy unfolding on the radio. We’d been listening to a classic rock station, but the deejays were, during song breaks, in a state of shock sharing the news reports coming in. Austin, my boss, then flipped it over to NPR for something more official. He turned up the volume. It wasn’t easy to hear but we caught glimpses in between the hammering and cutting and the moving of ladders. The magnitude of what was happening didn’t translate well on the radio.
It would be another five hours before I saw any images or news footage of the September 11 attacks on a television screen. And when I did, at an altogether different job site at the end of the day, it was peering through the window into the living room of a home in Drakes Branch, Virginia, where I stood on a 24 foot ladder holding up a gutter that was being installed.
There was a plane flying into one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. Then a cut to another plane flying into the other World Trade Center building. The Twin Towers began to fall. Then a cut to a crash at the Pentagon. Plumes of black smoke rolling upward into the sky. The flashing lights of emergency vehicles surrounding the scene. Scattered wreckage. Talking heads discussing what had transpired, what else could possibly occur. Was there more? Then, at the bottom of the TV screen, a ticker appeared saying something about Pennsylvania. What was happening in Pennsylvania? What had happened in Pennsylvania?
I felt my chest tighten and my breath go out of me. I just wanted to be home. I didn’t want to be working a long day that day. I’d been gone since 7 AM and I just wanted to be home now. I wanted to try and comprehend the incomprehensible. That the world around me was crashing down and burning and people were holding hands and jumping to their deaths from hundreds of floors up as their final act and here I was, hundreds of miles away, in rural Virginia, cutting vinyl siding and bending aluminum trim in a metal break and holding up a gutter looking into the window of a customer’s home and none of it made any sense and I just wanted to be home and not cut off from what was going on.
Once I got home that evening, around 6:30 PM, I turned on the news. Then I logged into AOL Instant Messenger on my computer. A friend of mine, the lead singer of a New Jersey punk band known as Stick Figure Suicide, was online. I messaged him.
“My aunt works there,” he said. “No one’s heard from her.”
“I’m sorry, man.” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
I didn’t know anyone that lived in New York City. No family, no friends. None of my relatives extended that far up north. There was a tragedy unfolding and my only connection to it was a television screen and the lead singer of a Jersey-based punk band.
Every year, like most Americans who were of a certain age during the September 11 attacks, I know where I was when I first learned what was taking place. I could say I was on a construction site when I first heard, and I was to a degree. I caught pieces of it on NPR. Snippets of dialogue trying to explain that which can’t be explained. But it didn’t become real until I walked into Taco Bell.
“We’re under attack,” she’d said. “We’re under attack.”
Where was I when I first heard about the September 11 attacks? I was at Taco Bell of all places.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the various deployments that took place over the coming years, I’ve thought back to the National Guard member who doubled as a Taco Bell employee in civilian life.
Was she ever deployed? Did she see war? Did she ever come home? Did she get married, have kids, raise a family? She’d be about 50 years old now. Is she still out there? I think about her talking to her mom on the phone that day.
“I don’t know anything mom. I love you.”
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