AT GROUND ZERO:FOR THE families of the 2,983 victims of September 11th, 2001, and the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, it was a chance to bring their loved ones back to life, the seconds that it took to read a name, the hours that one wore a T-shirt with a photograph, or held aloft a placard.
They started the pilgrimage through the streets of lower Manhattan before dawn yesterday, past innumerable police checkpoints, the sniffer dogs and X-ray machines. A grey warship loomed in the east river. Helicopters patrolled from far enough away not to drown out readings by President Barack Obama and former president George Bush, the six moments of silence marking 10 years to the instant when the planes crashed into the towers, the Pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania, the exact time when the towers crumbled to the ground.
They were a melting pot, a cross section of mankind. Each family’s story its own American dream culminating in one big American tragedy. The rest of the world did not exist for them.
Some 20 members of the Juarbe family stood on the crowded plaza. “The only ones not here are those in heaven,” said Susan Juarbe (47). All wore a T-shirt with a photograph of New York fireman Angel Juarbe jnr, known as Lou. Over an image of the present-day World Trade Center construction site, they’d superimposed a photograph of Lou grinning, movie star handsome, holding up 10 fingers, to mark the 10th anniversary.
LOU JUARBE HAD won a reality show contest on Fox television, and spent his spare time in auditions. "He loved being a fireman, but he wanted to do everything, be everything – an actor, a veterinarian, a city councilman. He wanted to change the world. He was single and gorgeous," said his sister Susan, a retired court officer. The three other Juarbe siblings are policemen, "like the Irish", says Susan. Their father Angel was a porter for New York City Transit, then a building supervisor. "Lou used to tell him, 'As soon as I get ahead, you're gonna retire'." Lou would have turned 45 on May 1st, the day Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals in Abbottabad, Pakistan. "I cried. I laughed. I did a dance and I said 'Happy birthday Lou'," Susan recalls. "I called my brother Ed and I said, 'They killed that SOB'. It brought a little bit of satisfaction, because it's like the guy who pulled the trigger was killed by an American."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg infuriated the fire and police departments by excluding those not related to victims from yesterday’s ceremony. “It’s a slap in the face of the first responders,” said Susan Juarbe. “When they were needed, they were here and on the 10th anniversary they say, ‘We don’t need you anymore’.”
Daniel Halloran III, a New York city councilman from Queens, whose family left Galway during the Great Famine, was there for his firefighter cousin, Lt Vincent Halloran. Vinnie’s widow and six children – Vincent jnr was born after his death – did not attend. “For many people, being here is more painful than not being here,” Halloran explained.
Like Susan Juarbe, Halloran was angered by the exclusion of first responders. “I come from a family of cops and firemen,” he said. “My brother Patrick was at the pile. If we hadn’t lost Vinnie, we couldn’t be here today.”
Halloran was also dissatisfied with the amount of time it’s taken to build the memorial. “We built the Empire State Building in one year!” he says. “Everyone wants closure.” He recalls the long battle over whether first responders should be listed separately on the memorial. “Four hundred and eleven of these [dead] people didn’t work in the World Trade Center,” he says. “They ran here when everyone else was running out. They deserve to be treated in a different way.”
IN THE RUN-UP to 9/11, pundits from across the political spectrum have begun crowing that the US won the war against al-Qaeda. The White House is more cautious, talking of significant advances. But relatives of victims are sceptical.
“You can’t win a war like this,” says Daniel Halloran. “Every day that something doesn’t happen is a victory. We didn’t fold. We didn’t give in.” Halloran calls himself a libertarian Republican. Ten years after 9/11, after a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, isolationist attitudes like his are spreading. “I’m not a nation builder,” he said. “I think we should try to stick to domestic issues first and foremost.” He attributes the lack of discussion of the hijackers’ motives to political correctness. “The history of the world is not a nice, neat thing . . . Unless we really understand why they did this, it will happen again.” Other politicans – Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his predecessor Rudy Giuliani, the governors of New York and New Jersey read their texts out in the open. But Obama and Bush read from within a bullet-proof glass enclosure. The sound of their voices was muffled, and both disappeared with their first ladies after less than an hour.
Obama reads from Psalm 46, “Come, behold the works of the Lord, who has made desolations in the earth . . . ”
Bush chose a letter from Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost five sons in the American Civil War: “I pray that our heavenly father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost.” Bush was one of the most unpopular presidents in US history when he left office; yesterday at Ground Zero, he was applauded. Obama was not. The weekend felt like a partial rehabilitation of Bush. At Saturday’s memorial service at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United flight 93 crashed, vice-president Joe Biden gushed praise for Bush, “a man responsible for bringing our country together at a time when it could have been torn apart, for making it clear that America could not be brought to her knees and helping us stand tall and strike back”. Bush’s “Bullhorn address” on “the pile” on September 14th, 2001, was fondly remembered. When a rescue worshipper had shouted, “I can’t hear you!”, Bush grabbed a bullhorn and shouted back: “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people – and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
“I never felt better about a president,” said fire captain Denis McCool. “I thought he was gonna find out who did this and take care of them. There was a lot of pain. There was a lot of hatred in my veins.” Yet when bin Laden was killed on May 1st – under Obama’s orders, not Bush’s – “I didn’t really care,” McCool said. “It didn’t change anything. It’s dragged on so long, and we lost so many guys . . .”
Pilots and stewards from American and United Airlines formed a navy blue thread though the crowd on the World Trade Center Plaza. Captain David Bates, the head of American Airlines’ pilots’ union, was a friend of Charles Burlingame, the former navy pilot whose AA flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. “For most people, 9/11 was 10 years ago,” said Bates. “For us, it could be tomorrow.” Like thousands of other pilots, he has joined the Federal Flight Deck Officers, whose members are deputised law enforcement officers, carrying weapons in their cockpits.
Captain Wendy Morse, the head of the United pilots’ union, wore a badge with the smiling face of Lisa Frost, a passenger who died on United flight 175, the second to crash into the World Trade Center. She said relations between pilots and flight attendants have suffered because reinforced cockpit doors remain locked now. “We used to spend a lot more time together en route.” Morse attended the Shanksville commemoration on Saturday, alongside the families of United first officer Leroy Flower and Capt Jason Dahl. “They remain in agony,” she said. She struggled to describe her own emotion. “It is still beyond comprehension that people take airplanes and turn them into missiles.” Americans are often reluctant to say whether 9/11 changed the US for better or worse. Capt Morse called it a “paradigm shift” which drove her airline into bankruptcy. “Our lives have changed forever for worse,” she said. “Our kids’ lives have been defined by this. This is what they remember, the one event that will stand out.”
IN RECENT DAYS, the 9/11 commemoration has become a political football. Left-wing columnists like Tom Engelhardt say the US should “Cancel 9/11” because “the dead of 9/11 . . . have been used as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan . . .” Right-wing commentators like Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan espouse the more mainstream view, that America must “never forget”. Those attending the commemoration yesterday predicted huge ceremonies again to mark the 15th, 20th and 25th anniversaries.
Only one grieving relative, Susan Juarbe, whose firefighter brother died, told me she would not return. “This is the last time. I want to celebrate the way he lived, not the way he died.”