Memories Too Painful to Watch

By Conor O’Clery

I’VE seen a lot of terrible things in my career as a correspondent — villagers killed in East Timor, children shot dead in South Africa, bodies crushed by an earthquake in Armenia. You get hardened after a while. It’s what you do. It’s a job. You get upset but you don’t think too much about it and you move on, to other stories.

Police and firemen see terrible things every day in road accidents and other disasters. They learn to distance themselves from the horror, at least far enough to stay sane.

But I witnessed two events in my career which had a profound effect on me. Both were in the U.S.

The first was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The second was the execution of a criminal in Jacksonville, Florida.

Let me tell you about the execution first and why it is relevant here, writing about my personal memories of September 11. I went one day to watch a murderer being executed by electric chair. It was part of my research into a feature on what capital punishment really means.

It took six minutes for the guy to die, with his hands twitching and smoke coming from his knee. I was pretty shaken by the experience. Afterwards I bummed a cigarette to steady my nerves, though I had given them up.

But that was it. I wrote my article and moved on. I didn’t realize for a long time just how deeply in this case — for some reason — watching a fellow human being killed had cut into my psyche.

Then years later, watching the movie Dead Man Walking, the suppressed emotions of that day in Jacksonville came rushing to the surface. I found myself weeping uncontrollably.

I relate this to explain something about how September 11 affected me. To this day I am unable to watch footage of the attack on the Twin Towers.

Even as I write this I am struggling to keep the images out of my mind, of men and women falling to their death from the North Tower, waving frantically in my direction as I watched helplessly from my 41st floor office four blocks away. They fell in ones and twos, twisting and flailing down like bits of debris.

I spent that morning watching, then working, giving radio interviews, writing accounts for The Irish Times, so I was able to bring some professional detachment to bear. Four years later I moved on, as I always did in my career, to another country.

But I am extraordinarily wary of revisiting in my mind that day of unfathomable terror, of confronting the reality of what I was watching, of releasing whatever deep emotions are lurking. That’s why when pictures of the burning, collapsing towers appear I automatically reach for the TV controls.

So if this is the effect on me, a professional observer of conflict and tragedy, who lost no friends or relatives in the attacks, what must it be like for the tens of thousands of New York people who experienced September 11 close up?

What must it be like for those who have the extra burden of the loss of loved ones among the 2,752 people who died in three hours that day in New York — more than two-thirds the total number killed in the Troubles in Northern Ireland over three decades?

I have some idea of the trauma people suffered. I saw it come to the surface in sobs and tears 32 months after September 11 when New Yorkers attended hearings of the independent commission investigating the attacks in a Greenwich Village school. Relatives in the audience held hands and wept openly during the showing of a dramatic video of the planes smashing into the towers. Up to then news channels had not run the footage very much out of sensitivity for the bereaved.

There were survivors there too giving evidence and choking back tears. Who can ever know how deeply they were scarred by the experience, and what they still suffer today, five years on, every time they see the television pictures?

There are other personal reasons why the impact of September 11 on me was greater than anything else I witnessed, in Belfast or in Kabul. In this case my neighborhood was smashed up, not someone else’s.

People forget that the World Trade Center was not just two tall towers — it was where we shopped, took coffee and browsed in book stores. There was a chocolatier, a hot bread shop, a kitchenware store, a J Crew clothing shop and a Banana Republic. There were magazine kiosks, a cobbler’s, a hair salon, and dozens of other little outlets whose names I cannot recall.

There was a big coffee bar near the subway entrance and the best bookshop in Manhattan with deep armchairs. There was a police station and a cavernous delicatessen full of exotic foods. There was a cosmetics store where I bought a wooden-handled London Fog umbrella. We have it to this day and never take it out in case we lose it.

Millions of Americans have their own personal experiences of that day. They were affected just as profoundly, maybe more so, watching on television in Florida or Oklahoma.

Because it was their country that was attacked. It was the day their country lost its innocence and slipped into war without end.

(Conor O’Clery is the former New York and Washington, D.C. correspondent for The Irish Times.)