Title: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11
Published: September 2019 - Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
On the 18th anniversary of 9/11 this year, I was reading an article that mentioned this book, I believe it was an article in The Atlantic. I decided to look it up because the book sounded very interesting - the Author, Garrett Graff, spent three years assembling interviews from hundreds of people, and produced a chronological retelling of the 9/11 story from various points of view. You have interviews with people who were in the Twin Towers and at the Pentagon that day, interviews with first responders, interviews with military and government officials and interviews with people who were part of the President's entourage that day. You will find the style of this book to be a bit different. The chapters are composed of brief snippets of interviews from several people all at once. This gives you multiple perspectives on the same event, which takes some getting used to, but ultimately is well done and makes sense.
It is an extremely difficult book to read, at times. It highlights, in vivid detail, the human cost of the events that unfolded that day, but it also reminds me of how scary that day was. I was a senior in high-school, just outside of Minneapolis, and I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was scared, sitting a thousand miles away, and I can only imagine what it was like to be in New York, or Washington D.C. and seeing that stuff happen in real life.
I had to do a bit of self-examination as to why this type of thing seems to draw me in - I'm sure part of it is my on-going fascination with the morbid. I've had that since I was young. Part of it though is that I feel like because I was alive and aware on that day, it is a shared-experience. I saw the macro event - the planes hitting, the buildings falling, etc. What I didn't see was the micro-stories within the macro event, and those micro stories are so much more revealing about what that day was than planes hitting buildings.
For example, the book goes into detail about what the military response on 9/11 was and just how close some jet fighter pilots came to shooting planes out of the sky. Also, because all of the terrestrial communication systems we over-loaded that day, The White House had trouble communicating with the President, who was on Air Force One flying above the United States and that caused some serious headaches. Additionally, you get some first-hand accounts of some of the real heroes on the ground - people who put themselves in significant danger to help other people, including a guy like Donald Rumsfeld, who was at the Pentagon when it was hit, and who insisted on helping people rather than retreating to safety. Rudy Giuliani, regardless of what you think of him now, was an absolute hero on 9/11 and he could easily have been killed that day, trying to coordinate a command center for emergency and government personnel.
I highly recommend this book to anyone, but especially to people who are too young to remember that day. This is as vivid of a picture as you will get of what that day was like and what the mood of the country was on that day.
**P.S. I can't help but wonder what that day would have been like if Twitter (or the majority of social media for that matter) had existed. I suspect that it would have made our National experience quite a bit different. Can't decide if that would have been better, or worse. I'm leaning toward worse.
