While Memory Remains

Nearly a third of today’s Americans were born after 9/11. To grow up in the shadow of an epochal event is not unusual. There were generations of Americans born in the years after the Revolution, after the Civil War, and after WWI. I was born eight years after the end of World War II, as part of the Baby Boom generation. The fathers of nearly all the children I knew had served in the war. But as we are often reminded of these days, they didn’t talk about it. And they didn’t talk about not talking about it. The war was somehow there without being conspicuous.

I didn’t know much about my father’s service in the Pacific until after he died and I was in my mid-40s. By then I had seen plenty of WWII movies and had read enough books, both history and fiction, to have a good picture of the era. I had both the cold facts and the deeply imagined versions such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I grew up playing board games such as Midway, based on the battle that changed the tide of the Pacific War. After my father died, I went through his papers and discovered a man I never knew, one who served four years in naval intelligence and kept his lifelong vow of confidentiality. He was one of many, of course, who just went on with his life, not hiding secrets about his past but seeing no need to build a story around the common experience of the many who served.

How different it has been for those who grew up in the shadow of 9/11.

They have been inundated their whole lives with accounts of the horrific attacks of that date, the heroics of first responders, and the valiant sacrifice of the men on Flight 93. They have heard the “9/11 truthers” spinning out fables aimed at debunking what happened. They may have visited the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center or the other sites. There are more than a thousand memorials across the country and around the world. Everyone who was of an age to register the event has a memory and a story to tell. And those stories, unlike WWII stories, are readily told.

Here’s mine.