Even the young Zoomers who were either not alive during or too young to remember Sept. 11, 2001, have the images of firefighters, in the rubble of ground zero, raising the American flag ingrained in their memories. They have never escaped the images of president after president dispersing more troops across the planet to avenge the 2,977 civilians killed that day, and they cannot forget the image of the Falling Man, the would-be victim seemingly gliding peacefully from a certain death by burning to one of his own limited agency.
But the Zoomers who are apparently giving Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" a second look have not seen the images and videos purged and scraped from the internet by the nation's intelligence. They have not seen the rare and horrific clips showing the conclusion of the snapshot of the falling men and women, the videos that show those gliding figures splat like meatballs onto the pavement of Lower Manhattan. They have not seen the pictures carefully pushed into the recesses of the darkest corners of the web imaginable that show the pictures of disembodied limbs and organs and body parts so utterly destroyed by fire and ash and blood and the impact of the attacks that they do not look like anything once relating to "humanity" or human life at all.
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Law enforcement had good reason to scour both the scene and, later, the internet for the media documentation of that day. For starters, although we have benefited from a nearly quarter-century's effort to destroy the network of pan-Islamists who became an existential threat to the West, it was not always a foregone conclusion that the West would win. Law enforcement required every possible clue available less to extract the identity of who had done this, but how they had pulled it off.
But just as importantly, unlike the death cult of jihadists who celebrate martyrdom and death in pursuit of 72 virgins in the sky, Western law enforcement wanted to preserve the dignity of the lost. The stories were awful enough, they must have assumed, that spoiled, pathetic, and civilizationally suicidal Zoomers would not be so sociopathic that they would one day give bin Laden a second consideration. (Also recall that in the thick of 9/11 — and you can just watch the bloodlust of Howard Stern, of all people, during his broadcast that day — once the second plane hit, the nation had zero idea how much longer the attacks would go on.)
There are many reasons to discuss why bin Laden's letter is an intellectual failure on the merits — lamenting that the Jews control the money out of pure jealousy because moronic Islamists ban usury, an unadulterated moral good in the history of civilization, is pure cope. But Zoomers should ignore the rational argument for a moment and instead consider just how unprecedented the carnage of those attacks was in the scope of human history.
For millennia, innocent civilians have unfairly died in warfare, whether by sword, gunpowder, blockade, rape, or ravishing. But crashing a plane into a building more than 1,000 feet from the ground is something Dante himself could not quite have conjured. You may think of the "jumpers" or those who fell from the towers as those who were spared the fiery inferno of death. You would be wrong. In a book compiling the oral history of 9/11, emergency medical specialist Ernest Armstead shared his story of one of the unlucky ones who survived, for a moment, the fateful fall to the ground. I'll close this case with her final moments, as relayed by Armstead, in their entirety:
The psychiatrists and those from the post-trauma team say it is good for me to talk about her and the rest of that day. They say it is the only way I will come to terms with what happened and finally free my mind of her. So here I am talking to you. This lady was among a half-dozen people I saw who probably fell a thousand feet or so when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center. I am not sure how she got on the plaza. Maybe she was on her way to Los Angeles and was ejected from the jet by the force of the collision. Or maybe she was an office worker in the tower sitting near one of the windows and she was swept away when the building caved around her. Or maybe she was trapped and jumped to escape the flames, though I don't think so.
I happened upon her even before most of those people were seen jumping. She was an elegant lady. About my age, early fifties. I could see that even with all that she had been through. I could tell that she had her hair done up very nicely. Brunette. She had on tasteful earrings. She was wearing pretty makeup. And in my profession you notice clothes because so often you have to cut them into pieces to save lives. That was the first thing that came to mind: This lady is well dressed. ... Triage is the first thing that should be done at a disaster like this. It basically means dividing the injured into four categories so that backup medical teams can move quickly in and give treatment to those who need it most urgently. The categories are indicated by colored tags that are hung around the injured person's neck. Green is the least serious. Yellow more so. Red indicates critical injuries. And black means the person is dead or close to it. When you're engaged in triage, you have one thing in the back of your mind all of the time, My backup is coming. My backup is coming. That's the reason you can tag people who obviously need help and not stop and give it to them right then. You know you need to get everyone tagged, and you know that someone with a medical bag is coming right behind you. That certainly is what I was thinking when I met the lady in the plaza, the big open space between the two towers that had a fountain and a round sculpture in the middle.
I had finished tagging everyone from the stairwells, when I turned to face the plaza. I had not noticed the people there on my way upstairs because I was in such a hurry and there was such a crowd of firefighters blocking my view out the window. But now I saw something that was so horrific that I am glad I missed it the first time around. When the plane hit, an incredible amount of debris from the collision rained down on the plaza. Most of it was chunks of airplane and building that had little meaning to me. But amid the destruction, there were a half dozen or so people, I ran toward them, my triage tags in hand. There was a man having a seizure and his eyes were rolling into the back of his head. He had struck the pavement so hard that there was virtually nothing else left of him. There were a couple others that I never got to, but I could see from a short distance that they were dead. And then there was the lady with the nice hairdo and earrings.
When I got to her, I ripped out a black tag. What impressed me — and scared me — was that she was alert and was watching what I was doing. I put the tag around her neck and she looked at me and said, "I am not dead. Call my daughter. I am not dead." I was so startled that for a split second I was speechless. "Ma'am," I said, "don't worry about it. We will be right back to you." That was a lie. She couldn't see what I could see. Somehow, I guess it was an air draft or something, her fall had been cushioned enough so that she didn't splatter like the others. Still her body was so twisted and torn apart that I could only ask myself, Why is this lady still alive and talking to me? How can this be? Her right lung, shoulder and head were intact, but from the diaphragm down she was unrecognizable. Yet she was lucid enough that she continued to argue with me. "I am not dead," she insisted again. I am convinced she had some medical training because she knew I had given her the black mark of death. And she resented it. "Don't worry about what I put around your neck," I told her. "My coworkers are coming right now. They're going to take care of you."I knew I had to keep going, but she had so deeply shaken me that I lingered for a second or two.
Then I stepped over her to get to the others. I put a black tag on the man having the seizure. But another wave of casualties arrived in the lobby from upstairs, so I needed to return. As I headed back, I stepped over the lady one more time. And as eerie and unsettling as our first encounter had been, the second was even worse. She started yelling at me."I am not dead! I am not dead!" "They're coming, they're coming," I replied without stopping."I am not dead! I am not dead!" I went back to the lobby, putting her out of my mind for now.
There was so much that needed to be done. I began tagging the hundreds of people coming out of the building. ... I can honestly say that I didn't fear death, though I walked for hours in a wretched place I can only describe with a biblical reference — "the valley of the shadow of death." I felt death, I heard it, I saw it, and I smelled it. And with that lady in the plaza, I even talked to it.