Dying of boredom for a firefighter means that no misfortune happens to which to respond quickly to rescue.
That is the feeling they had in one of the offices in lower Manhattan in the summer of 2001, very close to the World Trade Center (WTC) crowned by the iconic Twin Towers.
“All of us at the Duane Street firehouse had been waiting for a real fire,” Joseph Pfeifer explained in the recent reissue of his book Ordinary Heroes. At that time he was a battalion chief of the New York Fire Department (FDNY) and the top operational manager for the southern area of Manhattan, including the WCT.
After weeks without “anything exciting” – smoke detectors activated in office buildings, one or two car fires or a phone book burning in a trash can – that morning of September 11 they received a call about a “possible smell of gas” a few blocks from the barracks. Although it was a routine thing, anything but exciting, that's where they went, including Pfeifer.
Once there, the chief was surprised by the roar of a plane that was flying very low. He even read American, the name of the airline, on the fuselage.
The device was lost from sight among the skyscrapers until it reappeared directly towards the north twin tower, where it impacted at 8:46 a.m. A large fireball emerged. There began 102 minutes – from the crashes in the two skyscrapers and their collapses – that changed the history of New York, the United States and the world, a date that marks the 25th anniversary next Friday.
Not counting the almost simultaneous attacks on the Pentagon and the plane that fell in Pennsylvania, supposedly heading towards the White House or Congress, there were more than 2,770 deaths in New York. The FDNY paid a heavy price with 343 casualties. In addition, 37 Port Authority agents and 23 local police officers lost their lives.
But as many who still suffer the consequences say, 9/11 is the longest day in history. Some 10,000 people have died since then from diseases related to toxicity contracted in the tasks carried out at Ground Zero.
Pfeifer, the first chief to arrive on the scene and give the initial orders when it was not known that another plane would become a missile aimed at the second tower, understood in an instant how another boring day became the worst of his life.
One of his confessions. The first victim of the firefighters was not inside the buildings. He was registered outside after receiving the impact of the body of someone who jumped into the void.
He said that the noise of those impacts filled him with horror. “I can only imagine how intensely the fire burned up there if people had to make the terrible decision between burning to death or taking that leap,” he wrote. Some launched in pairs, holding hands.
That image expresses the magnitude of the tragedy. “It was a big shock and the architects of the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq took advantage of that shock,” said Nathan Citino, a history professor at Rice University in Houston and author of several books. You just published a reflection on 9/11 and its lasting legacy.
"People were shocked by the attack, and there was a loss of sense of security. That's the most important thing," he reflected.
"I wouldn't use the expression 'loss of innocence,' because people recognize that, whatever they say about American exceptionalism, the United States has been a world superpower, an imperial power. It was born as a kind of settler colonial project in North America. So, in reality, true innocence never existed, at least not in a moral, political or historical sense," he said.
"But it is true that there was a great shock and a loss of the feeling of security, especially because it occurred after a period in which the Soviet Union had collapsed and the Cold War had ended. There was a feeling of triumphalism, of victory, and that event of September 11 put an abrupt end to that feeling," Citino stressed by telephone.
"There is a certain irony. After that period in which there was a sense of victory in the Cold War, the sense of being the last superpower standing after the collapse of the USSR, sarcastically, the American response to 9/11, in some ways accelerated - I don't want to say exactly the decline of US authority, power or hegemony - but it did accelerate in some ways the decline of American power in different ways. And that could be the most lasting consequence, which let us attribute it to 9/11 in 100 years,” he weighed.
Citino and other historians agreed that Washington's disproportionate military response to the war on terror meant encouraging Islamophobia, eliminating the distinction between domestic and foreign security, which led to the creation of the Department of Security, with customs agents or ICE still pursuing immigrants today, massive surveillance of Americans, the loss of rights and the growing distrust of citizens towards the rulers and politicians who showed support for the so-called "forever wars."
Donald Trump successfully handled the trick of being against these military conflicts, a strategy that was basic in his two electoral victories. But with the Iran war “it is experiencing the kind of backlash it benefited from before against American elites,” according to Citino.
9/11 and all its circumstances have increased the internal division based on whether you are with me or you are a traitor.
It has also meant a magnification of conspiracy theories from the truthers, those who propagated, thanks to the expansion of the Internet, their denial of the official version and proclaimed that the fall of the towers was an internal work of the government, not of Islamist terrorists, in part supported by the lie of weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq in 2003. This is seen as a precedent for alleging false electoral manipulations and trying to silence voices.
The tribute for the 25th anniversary of the attack on New York occurs when Zohran Mamdani is the first Muslim mayor of the city and when in other parts of the country the echo of the Islamophobia of 9/11 is once again appealed to to defenestrate candidates and stigmatize citizens.
