Alive Day

September 11th is here again, and it's interesting how far removed this day feels to me from six years ago. The wound is scabbed over, the emotional rawness is gone. I suppose that's a good thing. The only time it comes back to me is when unexpected shit happens in the city and people do the confused mass exodus dance. Like when an 80 year-old steam pipe explodes, for example. Or when there's a blackout. Oh yeah, I'm forgetting the daily subway ride. That's a bit different now. The background paranoia, the Is-This-The-Day feeling that sometimes taps you on the shoulder while you're busy listening to your iPod or reading a book. Would I even see it coming? I wonder sometimes. I don't suppose that feeling's going anywhere anytime soon. I have a feeling the New York subway is going to get smacked one day, it's just a question of when and whether I'll be on the wrong train at the wrong time. Morbid, oh yes. But you either give in to the bullshit and never leave your house, or you live your life. Nobody lives forever. When they call the number on your ticket, all you can do is hand it over.

I have the sense that most of the country moved on from 9/11 a few years ago. If you weren't in New York or Washington, D.C., or Shanksville, Pennsylvania, or didn't suffer a personal loss on that day, you likely didn't feel the impact as greatly. That makes sense, it's natural. But what surprises me a little, six years later, is that most people, even people in NYC, seem to want to put 9/11 behind them. Now it seems that it's only the people who lost loved ones, or who spent weeks after 9/11 digging through the mountains of rubble trying to find survivors or human remains, who still have a deep connection to the emotion of that day. I have a firefighter friend who lost many people he knew, and who is now sick from the toxins that were in the air after the buildings fell. He sent me an email tonight that reminded me that a lot of people still feel the pain of 9/11 every day. A lot of people.

The rest of us? I am writing this in the early morning of 9/11/07, so I can't say for sure, but I don't think we feel it like we did before. I don't think many of us will be inspired to get up in a few hours to hear all the names be read like we did before. Each year, it seems, the readers of the names inject more and more personal comments into their readings, as if it's about them. I don't think we'll watch those videos of the planes hitting, over and over and over again, like we did before. I don't think we'll want to rehash the events of that terrible day. We'll probably pay our respects, give a moment of silence, maybe watch some snippets of historical news footage, and then we'll go about our business.

When I ask myself why 9/11 feels like ancient history to me after only six years, I really think it's because of the carnage of Iraq. The Iraq War is the deformed twin brother of 9/11. Over 3700 American soldiers have been killed. And how many Iraqis? Is anyone counting? It has to be over 100,000, at least. And over 27,000 wounded soldiers. That's 27,000 men and women who likely would be dead if we'd been fighting this war a decade or two ago. The Pentagon -- with the media's obscene cooperation and acquiescence -- has done a very good job of hiding from us footage of our dead and injured soldiers in Iraq. It's been a very "clean" war from that perspective. I have this theory that if the media was doing its job and the average American could see what was really happening over there, if we had clear pictures and video of the dead and dying, of people being shot and blown up, we'd be able to see the reality of war for ourselves. Then maybe more people would be asking WHY a lot more loudly and with greater persistence. Then maybe our soldiers would have come home by now. I also think that if we had a draft, El Commandante Bush wouldn't have had the balls to start this war of opportunism in the first place.

Last Sunday night, I watched an HBO documentary where James Gandolfini interviewed ten American soldiers, nine amputees and one PTSD victim, from the Iraq War. You can see their pictures and stories here. Many of the interviews begin with real time video footage of the ambush or incident that nearly killed the soldier being interviewed. The footage was released by the insurgents who set the IEDs. You see a Humvee in a convoy of four other Humvees rolling down a street or dirt road. You're watching and waiting. You know something bad is coming, just like in the movies where the killer is hiding in a closet and you've got your hands over your face because Jamie Lee Curtis is about to open the closet door. You wait. You wait some more. Wait. Then BOOM!!! A loud crackle and a huge orange and white fireball the size of a small building incinerates the truck. A black, billowing smoke cloud rises into the air and you wonder how the fuck anyone could have survived an explosion like that. It's beyond overkill. Then you learn that two, three, four people in the Humvee were killed and the only survivor is the triple amputee sitting in the chair across from Jim Gandolfini. The guy's saying that if he lost both arms and both legs, it wouldn't be worth living anymore because he wouldn't be able to do anything on his own. He's just happy he still has his right arm. A female military policewoman whose right shoulder and arm were torn off by a rocket propelled grenade says she hates her prosthesis and refuses to wear it most of the time. They show her on the metro in Washington, holding on to a pole with her good arm. A few moments later, she appears wistful, looking off in the distance, and Gandolfini asks her what she's thinking about. On the verge of tears, she says she's thinking that she'll never be able to hold her own baby in her arms. She wonders what her children -- if she ever has any -- will think of her. A soldier blinded by shrapnel from an IED is missing both his eyes. He has one fake one, in his right eye socket. It's a dark blue orb with eight diamonds grafted onto it. He says when he came back from Iraq without his eyes his wife left him. So he took her wedding ring and had a jeweler set the ring's diamonds into a fake eye. His left eye, by contrast, is entirely empty, and it's shocking at first to see that there's nothing there except a sutured flap of skin. He says the doctors told him that the scarring was too thick to hold a fake eye, so he goes with only one. Besides his missing eyes and the scars on his skull, the rest of his body is pristine and wholly intact. He has both arms and both legs. He can walk, he can dance, he can feed himself. But he can't see, and he never will again. Another Marine sits with his mother, who holds his hand. His bald head has deep, ridged scars, and he has an unrecognizing look in his eyes. He took two bullets to the head and suffered injuries to 2/3 of his brain. He's in a wheelchair and barely speaks. He sometimes laughs for no apparent reason. He's 22. They show a video of the same guy dancing and joking before his injury and it tears your heart open.

They call it "Alive Day." The day they didn't die. Some of them celebrate it like a birthday, happily commemorating the day of their survival. Others consider it the worst day of their life and don't celebrate it at all.