DW's Blog

The Direction of Travel September 11, 2011 Twenty-Five Years On

by DW Green — September 9, 2026

“The country is not the building. It is the direction people move when the building is on fire.”

1. THE STAIRWELL

Everyone in the towers was going down.

That is what a person does. The building is burning, the stairwell is the way out, and every instinct the body owns is pulling in one direction. Tens of thousands of people made that descent on the morning of September 11, 2001, and not one of them should be asked to explain why.

And in the same stairwells, moving against them, were men going up. Sixty pounds and more of gear on their backs, climbing into the thing everyone else was fleeing, stopping on the landings to let the crowd pass. Some of the people coming down remember being told to keep going, keep moving, you are almost out. Encouragement, offered upward from men with less time left than the people they were reassuring.

Three hundred and forty-three New York firefighters did not come back down. Dozens of police officers and Port Authority officers did not either. Nearly three thousand people died that day in three places.

I have thought about that stairwell for twenty-five years and I have never gotten to the bottom of it. Two columns of human beings passing within inches of one another on a concrete landing, and the only difference between them is which way they are facing.

2. BRAVE IS THE SECOND WORD

I wrote this summer about the last line of the anthem, and I have not been able to unhear it since.

The land of the free and the home of the brave. We sing it as a rhyme. It is not a rhyme. It is an argument, and the second half is the reason for the first. There is no land of the free unless somebody is willing to be the home of the brave. The freedom is the gift. The bravery is what it costs to keep the gift available to people who did not pay for it and will never know your name.

Most days that sentence is theory. It sits in a song we sing before a ballgame, and we get to the high note and stop thinking about it.

For a few hours on a Tuesday morning in 2001, it was not theory. It was a job description, and a few hundred people read it and went to work.

3. THE VOTE

The part I return to most is not in New York.

United Flight 93 left Newark late and was over Ohio when it was taken. The passengers and crew had something nobody else that morning had: time, and a telephone. They called home. And in calling home they learned what had already happened in Manhattan, which meant they understood, before anyone on the ground could tell them, exactly what the aircraft they were sitting in had been turned into.

Forty people. Ordinary Tuesday people — a rugby player, a software salesman, a flight attendant, a retired ironworker, a woman going home. No chain of command. No authority left anywhere to appeal to. Every institution that exists to protect Americans was, at that moment, thirty-five thousand feet below them and could not help.

And here is what they did, and I do not think we have ever properly marveled at it.

They conferred. And then they took a vote.

They did not seize command. Nobody appointed himself. With minutes to live and the whole architecture of government out of reach, a group of American citizens gathered in the back of an airplane, talked it over, and decided together.

Some twenty minutes’ flying time from Washington, and most likely from the Capitol dome, the plane went into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

The last act of that day, at the very edge of everything, was self-government.

I have written that liberty is not license, and that a free people must govern themselves from within because nobody can do it for them. I thought that was a civic principle. It turns out to be a description of what forty strangers actually did at five hundred miles an hour with no time left.

4. THE YES THAT CONTAINED A NO

I have a piece I have not written yet, because it is still curing, about the fact that the deepest yes always contains a no. You cannot say a whole-hearted yes to your neighbor’s freedom without saying a no to the boot on his neck. The no is not the opposite of the love. The no is the shape love takes when the beloved is threatened.

Flight 93 is that sentence with everything at stake.

Their yes was to people they had never met — clerks and pages and tourists in a building four hundred miles away, people whose names they would never learn and who would never learn theirs. To say that yes, they had to say a no to four men at the front of the airplane. And they knew, because they had just been told by their own families what happened to the other three flights, precisely what that no would cost them.

They said it anyway. Together. By vote.

That is not recklessness, and it is not even quite courage in the way we usually mean the word. It is love with the arithmetic done.

5. WHAT DID NOT HAPPEN

Here is the strange and difficult thing about what those forty people accomplished.

You cannot see it.

There is no photograph of it. There is no monument that shows it, because the thing they achieved is an absence. A building that was not hit. A morning that did not get worse. Some number of people — nobody knows how many, and nobody ever will — who went to work in Washington that day, went home that night, and have lived twenty-five more years without ever once knowing that a vote taken over Ohio is the reason.

I have been writing this year about missings, and about the fact that a missing is not simply an absence but an unnoticed absence. Most of what protects us is like this. The greatest deeds are frequently invisible by design, because their entire content is an event that did not occur.

The field in Pennsylvania is the only monument we have to a thing that did not happen. There are people alive today who owe those forty everything and will go to their graves without knowing it.

That is not a tragedy. That is the highest form of the gift: given completely, to strangers, anonymously, with no possibility of thanks, and no way for the recipients to even know they received.

6. EVERY CALL WAS THE SAME CALL

There is one more detail from that morning, and it is the one that undoes me.

We have a record of a great many of the last telephone calls made that day — from the towers, from the airplanes, from stairwells and offices and seat backs. People who knew, or strongly suspected, that they had minutes.

Not one of them used the time for anything but love.

No one settled a score. No one relitigated an old argument or made a point he had been saving. No one discussed money. Every single call, from every kind of person, was some version of the same four words, repeated until the line went dead.

I have written that no one weeps over what they did not love, and that the tears are the exact measure of it. The last phone calls of September 11 are the same instrument, and they took the measure of an entire population at once. Given a few minutes and total clarity, human beings do not turn out to be complicated. They turn out to be almost embarrassingly simple.

Everything we spend our ordinary days on fell away in about four seconds, and what was underneath it was love, in every case, with no exceptions.

7. A THIRD OF US WERE NOT THERE

Close to a third of the people in this country today had not been born in September of 2001. To them it is not a memory. It is a chapter, a documentary, a date their teachers observe.

My first instinct was to find that sad. I have thought better of it.

I was not at Omaha Beach. I was not in the Ardennes. But I held my father’s Bronze Star in my hands as a boy, a five-pointed star, heavier than a boy expects, and something crossed over that could not have crossed any other way. I carry the initials of a man from Texas who died in the Battle of the Bulge before I existed, and I have carried them for seventy-five years. I never met him. I received him anyway.

That is how it has always worked. Nobody alive remembers Gettysburg. Nobody alive remembers Valley Forge. And yet the country has not stopped being the thing those people paid for, because the thing itself was never stored in their memories. It was conducted forward.

I wrote a piece this summer about marrow, the soft tissue at the center of the bone where the blood is made — hidden inside the densest architecture the body builds, never once felt doing its work, and the entire difference between a skeleton and a body. What I found in it was that the marrow that matters is not always in the body it started in. Love conducts. It moves through people who were not there, into people who never met the ones who paid.

So a young person who was not born in 2001 has lost nothing that cannot be given. They only need somebody to hand it to them. Which is, I suppose, the whole reason to write anything down on an anniversary.

8. THE FOUNDATION

The bravery of one for the good of others is, in a way, the foundation of the country.

I think that is exactly right, and I think it is right in the specific way that marrow is right. It is not the visible structure. The visible structure is the documents and the buildings and the elections and the arguments, and all of that is real and necessary and none of it is the living part. The living part is hidden inside, never felt doing its work, and the entire difference between a nation and an arrangement.

A body’s marrow cannot be summoned back by wanting it. But the other kind can be invited. Not commanded, not manufactured — protected, the way bone protects marrow. Which means the work of an anniversary is not to feel something. It is to keep the bone open.

9. THE DIRECTION OF TRAVEL

We are all moving away from that morning at the same speed, one day at a time, and there is no stopping the drift. Twenty-five years is exactly how far we have gone.

The only thing that decides whether it survives the distance is whether anybody turns around and faces it on purpose. Accidental remembering happens every year when the date comes up on the calendar. Intentional remembering is something else, and it is the only kind that transmits.

So on Friday I will turn and face it. The men on the landings, telling people coming down that they were almost out. The forty who took a vote. The last calls that were all one call. And a field in Pennsylvania that commemorates a thing that never happened, which is the most American monument I know of.

Everyone was going down. They went up.