Firsthand memories of 9/11 from Ground Zero

Sermon delivered to the congregation of Main Street United Methodist Church in Columbia, S.C.

By W. Thomas Smith Jr.

EDITORIAL NOTE: TODAY marks the 25th anniversary the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. On the 10th anniversary – 2011 – writer and military analyst W. Thomas Smith Jr. was asked to deliver a sermon to the Main Street United Methodist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. Though not a member of that church, Smith was invited to speak and share his first-hand observations (from lower Manhattan) of that terrible day.

This is a special day in the history of our nation – the 10-year anniversary of what some have said was-and-is a seminal event in our history. I would argue that it was less a seminal event, and more an awakening as to the danger posed to the West since the 16th century when the Army of Suleiman the Magnificent was stopped by a Christian Army at the Gates of Vienna.

Jihad against the West has never ceased. But the enemy has been unable to effectively prosecute the war against us; that is until the 20th century – particularly in the 1970s and 1980s – when we began to see the rise of Jihadist terrorist attacks against Christians and Jews throughout the world. And then – though we were warned for decades, and were even attacked in 1993 in New York – the single worst series of terrorist attacks to date struck us in New York, Northern Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and frankly in the skies over a much wider range before the four planes actually crashed.

But we’ll leave the discussion of Jihadist history – and the “why” – to the sociologists and political scientists, perhaps even the theologians, whose views are framed a bit more ideologically than mine.

I’m a military analyst, and so I see things perhaps less in terms of ideology and politics, and more in terms of tactical or strategic application. Though I am not as black-and-white in my thinking as other military analysts, because I’m also a writer. And a truly good writer has to be a bit right-and-left brained.

What I want to talk about – and share with you – today is what I witnessed and experienced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I was there at Ground Zero. Not when Al Qaeda struck us. But within 48 hours after the attacks.

I was there at the primary Red Cross recovery station where Red Cross volunteers were taking DNA swabs from family members who were frantically searching for their missing loved ones. I was there as the trade center was burning, and shopkeepers near Ground Zero where staring at their damaged storefronts and the thick powdery gray ash and tiny strips of paper that covered everything several blocks away from the attacks. I watched as warplanes from the offshore carrier USS George Washington roared overhead, making wide sweeps over the city during their constant patrols, because – remember, at that time – we were anticipating equally devastating follow-up attacks. And I was physically at Ground Zero, standing between what was left of the two towers and the destroyed buildings adjacent to the towers.

In the weeks to follow, when I was asked by television and newspaper reporters to describe what I saw, the one thing that I could not get past was the fact thaton TV, in the newspapers, and – today on the Internet (Remember in 2001 the Internet was nothing like as mainstream as it is today) – the one-dimensional images we all saw (and continue to see), did not (and do not) began to illustrate how horrible it really was. It was really impossible to adequately describe. And I won’t attempt to describe it here either.

By 2001, I already had experienced terrible battlefields as a journalist overseas, and I was destined to witness terrible battlefields during the Iraq War. But never had I stood on such a terrible field as that which I stood on in lower Manhattan in the middle of Sept 2001.

The other thing – and perhaps the most important – is the question I’ve since been asked; “Where was God on 9/11”?

Fortunately for me, I’ve had a special (and I think somewhat unique) relationship with God since I was a little boy. So the question was something that was easy for me. It did not disturb me in the least, and it did not shake my faith at all. In fact, it enabled me to share God’s love with others and be open – in a non-intrusive way – about what I knew (and know) to be several eternal truths about God.

The answer is, God was there on 9/11, and His glory was manifested in myriad ways that stood in stark contrast to the earthly hell of lower Manhattan on that day, and in the days and weeks after the attacks. And I’ll get to that in a moment.

FIRST we have to understand something about good and evil.

God’s love and infinite power doesn’t mean that there is no darkness in the world. Darkness is simply the absence of light. Evil (which we equate with darkness) is the absence of good (which we equate with light). In fact, in a somewhat scientific sense – where fact is derived not from theory but is based on empirical data – we see it would be impossible to measure goodness in terms of something being good, better, and best, unless we could also go in reverse and get to the point where good is less-and-less good. And then we would get to a point where something is simply void of goodness.

If we go beyond that, we are moving toward something we would have to eventually say is evil.

So you might say, well, why doesn’t God make everything good? But if that was the case, and there was no benchmark or standard by which we could recognize goodness – because everything was good – then it would be impossible to achieve better and best.

Goodness would be utterly unrecognizable. There would be no goodness. There would be no love (true, there would be no hate). But there would also be no light (and there would be no darkness). There would be no free will to choose. We would all be robots.

But God didn’t make us just to be wind-up toys. He made us in His own image. We are able to reason and choose, and, yes, recognize goodness and the infinite levels of that which is good. And I believe, God wants us to choose to be good because “goodness” is what He is, and when we choose goodness we draw closer to the infinite power and greatness of God.

SECOND, we have to understand something about the nature of God before we are able to recognize His presence.

There are certain qualities or characteristics about human beings that we too-often take for granted as being conditioned into our personalities – things like courage, commitment, sacrifice, selflessness, love, compassion, and mercy – when they have in fact been imbedded into our DNA by God who created us.

This doesn’t mean that we are all courageous and merciful in our actions. But we do know that these things – conditioned or not – are found in every culture anywhere in the world at any time in history. And we – as human beings – seem to demonstrate them most in times of crisis.

Doesn’t mean evil – to include cowardice and laziness and selfishness (to include egocentrism) – isn’t also on the prowl. It is. But those things are not the manifestations of God. They are human degradations reflecting the rejection or absence of God.

We might think it is easier to be bad. And when there is no crisis, the cowardly devil will try to convince us that we don’t need God. The devil wants us to believe that the world revolves around us. That WE are the most important. That WE should take all we can.

But when a terrible event strikes, ever notice how most of us reject our own personal comforts and want to serve others? Take care of others? Protect others? In a crisis, it seems to be much easier to embrace God – and those qualities wired into us wherein we are created in the image of God – than it is to do otherwise.

Ever wonder why in the hell of battle, most men advance forward instead of running away? Yes, training and conditioning to be sure. But also because God’s qualities of courage and sacrifice and selflessness – which are hard-wired into us – come far more naturally to us than cowardice and selfishness. And it’s also why when we act against our nature, we feel a sense of guilt.

The devil doesn’t want us to know this. That’s why he is known as “the father of lies.”

We know right from wrong. And we sometimes go to great pains to convince ourselves that an evil action or bad behavior is not really bad. We try to justify our wrongs. But isn’t it interesting that we never have to convince ourselves about what is right? That’s an easy thing to come to grips with, even though doing right may not always seem to be the easy thing to do.

On 9/11, firefighters did what came natural to them. They raced into burning buildings to save others. Were they afraid? Of course, but that’s where courage and conditioning kicked in. But it wasn’t just firefighters. It was ordinary people who were trying to save others.

And for days afterwards, New Yorkers – known for their brashness – were as warm and friendly and giving as any people I had ever encountered. I could give you examples for days on this, from people opening up their homes to others
to restaurants giving free meals, to everyone sharing cabs and comforting one another’s children on the street.

In that hell of Sept. 11, 2001, it was far easier to embrace God because we were (and are) created in His image.

– W. Thomas Smith Jr. is a previously deployed U.S. Marine infantry leader, war correspondent, and a former SWAT team officer in the nuclear industry. He is a current special deputy with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, a New York Times bestselling editor, and a S.C. Military Hall of Fame inductee (Class of 2025). Visit Smith at http://uswriter.com.

 

September 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, New York City “Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division. Library of Congress.” For information see “Unattributed 9/11 Photographs,”(http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/res.297.unat)