PLUS: Scott Raab on the Rebuilding >>
On the morning of September 11, 2001, editors and designers at Esquire were making final changes to the November issue. By midmorning, the November issue would change significantly — and so would the next ten years' worth of writing in the magazine. You could argue that every issue of Esquire (and most other means of expression in America) since then has been influenced by the effects of that morning. But in a literal sense, we published scores of major stories that arose entirely as a consequence of September 11. Many of them great stories, some of them among the greatest this magazine has ever published. To mark the tenth anniversary of the wrenching start to this era, we assembled this mosaic of fragments from almost forty of those stories. One set of tracks in the impossibly long road behind us.
A plane has hit the World Trade Center, but I'm ok. —E-mail from a lawyer, who remains missing, to his wife, 8:51 A.M., September 11.
—E-mails from Hell, November 2001
"We kept running over body parts," the fireman whispered. He was staring into my eyes with a pleading look, as if seeking forgiveness. "I mean, the ash was so thick, you'd see things in the street, but you couldn't tell what they were until you ran over them. I mean, what the fuck were we supposed to do?"
I nodded, patted him on the shoulder, and when I did, he let out a single sharp sob, almost like a hiccup. I looked past him at the 150 or so other firemen resting in a tunnel nearby.
—In Country, by Scott Anderson, November 2001
I stopped and said, "Don't look outside! Don't look outside!" The windows were stained with blood. Someone who'd jumped had fallen very close to the building.
It felt like my head was going to blow up.
—The Survivor, What I've Learned: Michael Wright, interviewed by Cal Fussman, January 2002
You see, he always knew. He always knew that we were vulnerable, that an event as catastrophic as September 11 was not only likely but inevitable, that bin Laden's minions were here, among us, on our soil, plotting and waiting. According to legend — and the O'Neill legend began to take shape as soon as he was listed among the missing — he was talking about the imminence of a terrorist attack the night before he died. He was at Elaine's in New York and about to head out to the China Club when he nodded to a friend and said, "We're due. It's gonna happen...."
—The Man Who Was Supposed to Save Us, by Tom Junod, March 2002
"We had flown out of Washington on the tenth of September, had arrived in Crete to let the crew rest on the morning of the eleventh. We had the news on when the strike occurred on the World Trade towers. I'll remember it for two reasons. Because it was 9/11 and we saw what we saw. I'll also remember it because as we were headed home, the crew was a bit concerned about whether we would be able to penetrate U. S. airspace. At one point, my wife went up and had a conversation with the communicators. Cathy asked, "How's the flight going?" The young communicator looked up and said, "There is no traffic over the Atlantic." That comment has stuck with me and probably will for the rest of my life.
—What I've Learned: General Tommy Franks, interviewed by Cal Fussman, August 2002
Aboveground, people had worked as if every minute counted and no effort could be spared; but here, away from the eyes of their peers, in the silence and among the dead, some of the rescuers had been filling their pockets.
Later, we went aboveground and talked with four [New York National Guard] soldiers who had seen rescuers stealing from the Millenium Hilton, from the concourse, from shops near the site. They had reported it, they said, but no one seemed interested in hearing bad news from the pile; it didn't fit the script, and it was a distraction and too much of an insult to the thousands who had died.
The young soldiers and I sat on a park bench near the colonel's command post, going over what they had seen. Captain Heintz was at the command post when one of the colonel's staff officers, a policeman from Long Island, began to complain bitterly that word of the looting had gotten out.
"You're an asshole ADA," he snapped at Heintz.
"And let me guess, you must be a cop," Heintz shot back.
The staff officer moved close to Heintz. "Get the fuck out of my A.O.!" he shouted, before the colonel stepped between the two men.
After a few minutes, Heintz and the enlisted soldiers went back to security duty. "C'mon, sir, there were thieves down there," said one soldier under his breath.
Costagliola was seething, hanging back... He paced, smoked, paced again. He was mad, but he also had no doubt that thieves in uniform had stolen whatever they could.
After a few minutes he came over to me, and we walked for a while across the lawn under the darkened trees. Costagliola was calming down, thinking things through. Maybe when it all blows over, we'll see the bright side, he said. Maybe the thieves had broken the spell. "Look at it this way," he said, and laughed, exhaling cigarette smoke and running his hands through his salt-and-pepper crew cut. "Things must be getting back to normal. People are stealing again."
—September, by C. J. Chivers, September 2002
Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn't jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn't jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.
Oh, no. You have to fall.
Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 A.M., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.
That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.
—The Falling Man, by Tom Junod, September 2003
And then on the third morning in the valley, just as he was waking up, he heard aircraft that he wasn't expecting. He fiddled with his radio to hear what was coming. It was a flight of Navy F-14's in search of a nearby Green Beret team. The pilots sounded frustrated. They had orders to hit targets for the team, but they couldn't find them. Did he have any targets? Matt smiled. Oh, yeah, he said. Everywhere.
...Soon a flight of F/A-18's materialized and joined the F-14's in battering his targets. Now, this was more like it, he thought. One pilot spotted a cluster of Soviet tanks a few hills away, and a deep tearing sound echoed through the valley as the armor blew apart. The Northern Alliance soldiers heard it and danced. It was still only dawn, and they were just waking up, but enemy bunkers were collapsing already, tanks exploding, trench lines filling with fallout. They had never imagined war like this. With each strike, Matt was taking out ten, twelve, twenty men. The Northern Alliance guys shouted and doubled over with laughter as the bombs fell.
"Sergeant McCleave," says Rivera. "What's wrong with you?"
"Who ... are ... you ... ?" McCleave doesn't say it, just looks it.
"Sergeant McCleave! Please tell me! What's wrong with you?"
"Where ... am ... I ... ?"
"Sergeant McCleave!" Rivera screams, shaking him vigorously.
Some slobber comes to McCleave's lips, and he says audibly, "I ... don't ... know...."
Rivera rips off McCleave's gloves and says, "Good." He looks at McCleave's Interceptor and says, "Good." He cuts McCleave's pants, and on both of McCleave's legs, both upper and lower, he sees dozens of holes from the same indiscriminate mortar round that hit Miranda and Abbott. Now, shrapnel is painful wherever it is. Unlike a bullet, it enters red-hot, and it starts burning the flesh, fat, muscle, nerves of the boy who haplessly caught it. McCleave's state of shock isn't in any way overwrought. He can't raise either leg, so Rivera props each leg on his knee like a two-by-four that he's sawing as, with his hands, he wraps on the Kerlix, lest his good buddy bleed to death and, at their camp, his cot right next to Rivera's become unoccupied.
By now Rivera's the only medic in either platoon, or so Rivera reasonably believes. But now from the other platoon, a hundred meters away, a hundred meters of bullets, grenades, and mortar rounds raising divots, there comes a cry of "Doc!" and Rivera, as intuitively as a champion sprinter at the cry of Go, commences a deadly hundred-meter dash. I'm running, he thinks philosophically — running for my life for someone else's life."
—The Inside Story of Operation Anaconda, by John Sack, August 2002
Robert Giroux/Getty Images
The second plane hits the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001
Kûnduz, Afghanistan, November 29, 2001
As Chang and I sat on the floor of Namangani's study flipping through his books, I recognized the material immediately. Much of what was in the jihadi pamphlets and books I knew from my own study in Marine Corps schools and the Army's Ranger course. Here a notebook contained diagrams for rigging mines and booby traps, there instructions for mixing Molotov cocktails or for connecting explosives to a timed fuse. Almost all of Namangani's books covered infantry arms, tactics for small units, and improvised demolitions. Some contained handwritten firing tables for mortars; one had four-man patrolling formations cribbed from the Marines and a reconnaissance technique used by Army Rangers.
—What I Learned at the Jihad, by C. J. Chivers, October 2003
About ten days after I left Iraq, Richard put three bullets into a man he was supposed to be protecting. Apparently, it was an accident. He'd forgotten to take his rifle off automatic and ... well, you know. The man survived. Richard was fired. It turned out he had never served in the SAS.
I ask why they think there has not been a bombing lately.
They look at each other, and Morty says, "The intelligence has been good and it's been lucky."
I ask Kleiman if he thinks we should brace for suicide bombings in New York. "Are you nuts? They already did it. Except they strapped jumbo jets to their backs."
—Morty the Cop: A Manhattan Homicide Detective Assigned to Israel, by Thomas Kelly, October 2004
As we settled into the Roosevelts' old office, Libby asked me what I wanted to know. Libby is a slight, fit man with sandy hair and a penchant for secrecy that rivals his boss's. Indeed, the vice-president's chief of staff is known as Cheney's Cheney. He is courtly yet intense and is given to saying, "Please, call me Scooter."
Well, I said, like most Americans, I know well the actions taken by this administration; I'm less clear on why. So I'm interested in the vice-president's overall view of the world — how he sees our grand strategy in the war on terrorism, how that fits in with his broader ideas about how the world and the United States are changing.
This was like farting in church. The sunny day seemed suddenly overcast and the temperature in TR's old digs dropped 15 degrees.
"That's a conversation stopper," he warned me. "Don't try it."
—The Revolutionary: Dick Cheney, by Walter Russell Mead, November 2004
I looked into the Marine recruiter's eyes and was kinda confused. I said, "Look dude, you don't understand, I want to be a Marine, like right now. I swear to God, I'll sign the fucking papers right now." I was serious, too; I swear to God I would have signed the dotted line if he brought the papers out.
He then just kinda smirked and said, "Sure you do, but we're way over our quota this month, we have more people than we know what to do with right now. Just fill the card out and we'll call you in a couple." Fine. So I filled the card out, gave him a half-assed thank-you, and walked out. And no shit, waiting patiently for me right outside the Marine Corps door was the Army recruiter with a handful of green pamphlets. As soon as I stepped outside, he extended his hand and said, "Hello, I'm a recruiter with the United States Army. Have you put any thought towards joining the United States Army?" I chuckled at his boldness. But I was also kinda shocked that he had the balls to wait right outside the Marine recruiting office for me. I told him, "Sorry dude, I'm not interested in the Army, I already made up my mind that I'm joining the Marine Corps." And as I was walking away from him I heard him say, "That's cool, good luck with the Marines." And then in a lower tone just loud enough for me to hear, he said, "Just so you know, the Army offers two-year enlistments right now and up to a $4,000 signing bonus."
Right when I heard him say that, the weirdest thing happened. I immediately envisioned myself in an Army uniform singing Airborne Ranger cadences. I felt like the Samuel L. Jackson character in Pulp Fiction when he says, "Well shit, Negro, that's all you had to say!"
—The Making of the Twenty-First Century Soldier (Part 1), by Colby Buzzell, March 2005
Patricia McDonnough/Gamma
Then: The view from the living room of photographer Patricia McDonough, overlooking the World Trade Center, as the South Tower began to collapse on September 11, 2001.
"We're ready to build," Becker says. "We're ready to go. I don't get involved in politics. All I can tell ya is we're ready to build. I've been here since 9/11; it's very personal to me. I saw all the horrors. I mean, the horrors. I saw what the poor souls looked like after they jumped outta the buildings. Whatever got pulled outta the debris, I saw it. It's personal. It's personal. I don't forget it."
—The Rebuilding, Part 1: The Foundation, by Scott Raab, September 2005
A TOW missile was launched from a Stryker and impacted the top part of the tower where the balcony railing was located, making a huge explosion, but amazingly it didn't take down the tower like it does in the movies. Once again, everybody stopped shooting to cheer like it was another touchdown for the home team. I expended a whole thirty-round magazine of 5.56, and as I was putting another full magazine into my weapon I looked over at a nearby Stryker and there was a soldier in the back air-guard hatch hysterically throwing up the heavy-metal devil-horn hand signal like it was an Ozzy Osbourne concert, yelling, "Woo hoo! Fuck you, mosque! Fuck you!" Again everybody started engaging the mosque with everything they had. While this was going on I was in total disbelief that we were actually engaging a mosque. Like isn't this against some kind of Geneva Convention thing?
—The Making of the Twenty-First-Century Soldier (Part 3), by Colby Buzzell, November 2005
"We are at a strange state in this project [says the architect, David Childs]. It's going to be built — but will it be built well? This is going to be up there forever. Larry [Silverstein] knows this is the building on which he's going to be judged, and his intentions are right, but we've got to fight together constantly to get this thing done well."
—The Rebuilding, Part 2: The Engineers, by Scott Raab, February 2006
Wallace's replacement at Leavenworth is arguably the Army general whose star is rising most rapidly on the basis of his performance in Iraq, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who led the 101st Airborne Division in northern and central Iraq during the first difficult postwar year and then assumed leadership of the coalition effort to rebuild Iraq's security forces. With his Princeton Ph.D. in international relations, Petraeus is the closest thing the Army has to its own Lawrence of Arabia, a comparison he does little to discourage.
—The Monks of War, by Thomas P. M. Barnett, March 2006
At some point, I stopped telling people that I was in the Army and that I had gone to Iraq. I found that if you start to tell people that you served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, they say:
"Thank you for serving!" followed by either a) some flag-waving bullshit, or b) equally bad, "I just want to let you know that I'm strongly against the war, but I support the troops!" (This always confuses the hell out of me.)
Sometimes, with a smile, they ask you if you killed anybody.
And then there are people who think they know everything about everything and want to talk to you about the politics of the war, right or wrong. And most of them base all their political opinions on shit they hear on the Jon Stewart show, and they want to talk to me about what it's like over there.
Then some people don't say anything at all when you tell them that you were over there — all they say back to you is "Oh," with their pursed lips.
So that's why I like to drink alone.
—The Best Years of Our Lives, by Colby Buzzell, March 2006
She shows him a picture of us from Iraq, on patrol on Halloween, wearing fake mustaches. He's crying now, nodding as she points to each of us. He knows us, but he doesn't know the picture. Where is he, and why is everyone holding weapons? Michelle tells him he injured his head in Iraq, and that's why he's having these problems. It will all come back, she says. This just takes time. Your mind is protecting you from things you don't need to remember yet.
He's trying to mouth something to her, but she can't understand.
Can you write it down? He scrawls it on a board: "Please don't forget about me."
Michelle is crying again, for what must be the hundredth time this week. "I could never forget about you," she says. "You've had my heart in your back pocket since the day I met you, and it'll be there forever."
He's confused and teary for the rest of the day, and Michelle has no trouble reading his lips. "Don't leave me here,"he says over and over. "I'm scared."
—Sgt. Wells's New Skull, by Brian Mockenhaupt, April 2006
His father hired him a lawyer as soon as he saw his son on MSNBC. The lawyer immediately wrote to John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and George Tenet and informed them that John Walker Lindh had counsel, and counsel was ready to fly to Afghanistan to meet him. They did not write him back, but John Ashcroft did not believe he was obliged to. He operated on the theory that John Walker Lindh had a lawyer only if he, not his father, hired one, even though at the time John Walker Lindh was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher in Afghanistan. He was being held in a shipping container, and he had a bullet in his thigh, and by the time an FBI agent interrogated him, the bullet had been in his thigh for nearly two weeks and the wound was starting to stink. "Of course, there are no lawyers here," the agent told him, and two days after he gave his statement, he was moved to a ship in the Arabian Sea and the bullet was finally extracted.
—Innocent, by Tom Junod, July 2006
And here, a few feet away, under a cracked and chipping blue wooden cover, sits the useless Freedom Tower cornerstone, absurdly dedicated on July 4, 2004, before Governor George Pataki and the Port Authority realized that the one sign-off the PA itself somehow neglected to get was approval from the New York Police Department for the Freedom Tower, which in the NYPD's opinion needed to be moved and completely redesigned for security reasons — which cost, in addition to tens of millions of dollars, yet another year.
Which is why the most spiritual — and, quite frankly, thrilling — aspect of the pit is the hoe ram, an elephantine Caterpillar 350, a fifty-ton excavator fitted with a huge hydraulic hammer, asleep next to a hill of rock and dirt. The hoe ram works days outside the crash wall — no tunnel, no tracks, no crapped-out boom box — banging through old slab on grade, breaking rocks, readying the pit to receive the massive footings that will brace the inner core of the Freedom Tower.
—The Rebuilding, Part 3: The Blasters, by Scott Raab, September 2006
I've been getting tats since I was eighteen. I had nine tattoos. After the explosion, I had six and a half.
Because the military interrogations of my client are classified, I cannot show them to Hamdan. That's right. Even though he was present at the interrogation, Hamdan cannot see them. Nor can I ask him about what he allegedly said, because he does not have security clearance. The result is that a defense counsel cannot ask his client why he confessed. His client, for example, may have confessed because he was strapped down, unable to breathe because a wet towel was over his face, and, after passing out a third time, was ready to admit to anything. That would be the end of any trial in military or federal court, but commission rules prevent the attorney from discussing this classified interrogation with his client, because to do so might reveal a method or source to his uncleared client.
—The American Way of Justice, by Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, March 2007
Patricia McDonnough/Gamma
Now: The same view on July 7, 2011 — the rise of the new 1 WTC is barely visible (crane at center) behind several other new buildings in the neighborhood.
Truth is, you'd have to be half-dead — or some kind of Islamofascist evildoer — not to feel at least a touch giddy and more than a little moved. Here is where the Twin Towers stood on 9/11, under the same indifferent sky, in a world that felt entirely different then. Here is where time stopped for all time — and where grieving began — for thousands of hearts.
And here, if the posing and the signing ever stops, a piece of steel is going up.... Slow and smooth, the column seems to glide over to where its footing waits, and the Local 40 brown hats, their guide ropes threaded through it, top and bottom, ease it gently down. Down past the sprouting rebar, down atop the metal base plate, down at the bottom of a pit that will never again be nothing but the bottom of a pit.
"Don't scratch the paint," someone shouts as they wrench the lug bolts tight.
—Rebuilding, Part 4: The Steel, by Scott Raab, June 2007
Now bodies is the buzzword. And while the number dumped around Baghdad dropped earlier in the year, it climbed into the summer. June's body count was 50 percent higher than January's.
Petraeus looks at me and says he has tried to be candid, not selling the war but reporting its ups and downs. "I don't think we should be in the business of putting lipstick on pigs, trying to create perceptions that are not well-founded. When that is done, that inevitably undermines the effort.... This is war. It's unlike any other endeavor. And that's a tough part of it. That part never gets any easier. And I'm not so sure it doesn't get harder." Here Petraeus pauses, and when he starts speaking again, his words are stretched out, stark. "I've occasionally wondered if there's sort of a bad-news limit," he says. "How much tragic news can you take in one lifetime?"
—"God's Not Watching Baghdad," a profile of the surge, by Brian Mockenhaupt, September 2007
In conversation, Maxwell calls them "my Marines." He has a thickish southern drawl that he picked up from some mysterious recess of his brain when he began to recover his speech after the injury. In fact, he was born in Ohio.
Maxwell spots the guy he's looking for, moves in that direction, his gait powerful but uneven, like Chesty the Bulldog with a limp. He has a strong jaw and piercing blue eyes; there is a large scar on the left side of his head, a ropey pink question mark that runs like concertina wire below the hedge line of his high-and-tight military flattop. He has trouble reading and taking instructions, his short-term memory is shot — it took him forever to build the little fort in the backyard for his son, he had to keep rereading each step of the directions over and over again. He tells his daughter to put refrigerator on her tuna sandwich. He refers to the airport as "the place where people come to fly" and to Somalia, where he once served, as "that country in Africa…." Though his IQ, his reflexes, his limb strength, all of his measurable functions are down from their "factory original," as he likes to put it, he is still within what doctors tell him are "acceptable ranges." Acceptable to whom? Maxwell wonders. He will never be the same. He will never be as good.
—Wounded Battalion, by Mike Sager, December 2007
And so Fallon, the good cop, may soon be unemployed because he's doing what a generation of young officers in the U. S. military are now openly complaining that their leaders didn't do on their behalf in the run-up to the war in Iraq: He's standing up to the commander in chief, who he thinks is contemplating a strategically unsound war [against Iran].
—The Man Between War and Peace, by Thomas P. M. Barnett, April 2008. [Admiral]
He was placed on top of one of about a dozen workstations, marked by an American flag on the wall and spools of wire to close skull fractures. This is difficult, painstaking work; few of the men and women brought here have died from natural causes or in their sleep, which means that most of them died with their eyes open. Sergeant Montgomery's eyes were blue.
—The Things That Carried Him, by Chris Jones, May 2008
He got the crucial phrasing about organ failure and death from a U. S. law concerning health care.
I can't let this pass. "John, you're a very engaging guy. I like you. I can't picture you writing that phrase, 'organ failure or death.' "
"It's the phrase Congress used," [Yoo] says.
"But health care and interrogation are wildly different subjects."
"That's a fair criticism. But it's still the closest you can get to any definition of that phrase at all."
"But this isn't legal theory anymore. It's going to have a body count."
"It's a difficult issue, I admit. It's the use of violence. It's unpleasant. I don't disagree with that."
"You could have drawn the line in a different place."
"I really tried to distinguish between law and policy," he insists.
When I joined up six years ago, I was under the strong impression that I'd be able to do my time, get out, and move on. Which is what I did, or at least tried to do.
I had no idea that the Army was going to turn into this psychotic ex-girlfriend that you'd need to file a restraining order against because the crazy bitch doesn't get the hint that there's no way we're getting back together again — ever!
—Welcome Back, by Colby Buzzell, September 2008
Now? The future of Ground Zero is its present, days and nights and land filling with work and money again, its soul no longer small and sad and stagnant. It's big and hairy — it smells like sweat and bangs like steel pounding on rock until rock breaks. It hurls curses at the fucking crane operator as he takes his goddamn time on break finishing the Post sports page. It has a thrumming pulse. It feels just like ... New York.
—The Rebuilding, Part Five: Of Time and the Tower, by Scott Raab, October 2008
David Sunberg/Esto
Then: The Twin Towers on a sunny day in 1998, as seen from Jersey City.
Is there any collapse that could possibly surprise us, after the collapses of the last eight years? After the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, the seismic swallowing of the tsunami in 2004, the drowning of New Orleans in 2005, the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, and the collapse of the economy in 2008? If we've learned anything during the Bush years, it's that we're not safe, and nothing is sacred. But we've also learned that there's no such thing as paranoia — that, if anything, we haven't been paranoid enough, as even the most terrible events turned out to be mere portents of more terrible events to come.
—What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years, by Tom Junod, February 2009
One of the lead insurgents flicked on a flashlight. Picking up the path, he switched the light off and continued toward the kill zone. Man by man, each fighter emerged as a green silhouette in the soldiers' keyholes, each to be marked and panned by the vivid line of an infrared laser sight.
The scouts counted twenty-six men walk by their post. Sergeant Reese could not pass this information. The insurgents were too close.
Lieutenant Smith watched. Closer they came, closer, and closer still, until the first man was perhaps six feet away from the nearest American prone on the ground, who switched the selector lever on his rifle from safe to semiautomatic, readying it to fire. The lever made a tiny metal-on-metal noise, a click.
The lead insurgent stopped.
He lowered his head. The American was directly in front of him, a private first class, Troy Pacini-Harvey, a wiry nineteen-year-old with quick dark eyes and a small black carbine, pointed up. Pacini-Harvey's laser had been darting from the slot between the man's eyes to the center of the man's forehead. Now it stopped there. Other lasers, from other soldiers, were locked on each man visible in the column behind. The point man seemed undecided, unaware of the green dot above his brow. He had heard something, but what?
"Fire," Lieutenant Smith said. "Fire, fire, fire, fire."
—The Long Walk: With Viper Company in Korangal Valley, Afghanistan, by C. J. Chivers, August 2009
The plane cruises at eighteen thousand feet, five miles from the target area, but the picture looks as though we're looking down from a couple of stories up. At this distance, the crew can tell a man from a boy, a critical distinction. Nelson and Anderson [at an Air Force base in Nevada] have just taken control of another Reaper recently launched into the night sky over Kandahar. They're spying on a series of compounds a few miles outside the city where several high-value targets are believed to live. In preparation for raids or missile strikes, crews sometimes loiter over an area for weeks, building video dossiers.
...Three people sleep on a rooftop, a reprieve from the summer heat. Cows stir inside a corral. A man rises, walks outside the compound, and stands beside the wall. "They get up, they go to the bathroom, they go back to bed," Anderson says. "That's normal." I wonder what the man would think about a half dozen people on the other side of the world watching him stretch in the dark, scratch his whiskers, and take a piss.
—We've Seen the Future, and It's Unmanned, by Brian Mockenhaupt, November 2009
Safaa has been a cop for four years now, and Mohammed for only two, but much of the training at the Criminal Justice Center is new to them. The three-week basic course includes everything from Iraqi law and first aid to counter-IED and 9mm-pistol training. But like most other trainees here, Safaa and Mohammed don't really care. What's the point of being a good cop when being a good cop is precisely what can get you killed in Iraq? It's not that they don't know right from wrong. But better to stay behind, have a longer life.
"I wish they'd pay us more," Mohammed says.
"Me, too," says Safaa, cleaning his fingernails with his day-worker pass.
"I need to feed a family, you know."
"Me, too," says Safaa, making sure nobody else is listening.
Mohammed smiles. "And to serve my country."
Both of them burst out in laughter.
—It's Impossible to Leave Iraq: Training the Iraqi Police, by Dimiter Kenarov, August 2010
"Nine years have gone by in the blink of an eye for me [says Brian Lyons]. I've been gettin' off that train and comin' in that gate for nine years, man. Every day — six, seven days a week. I go home exhausted every day. The kids are growin' up. And another anniversary's comin' up here soon. The delis, the pizzerias — they all have business now. When we were gettin' started, they were suffering. Now they're busy, they're feedin' their families, the stores are full, tourists are coming. There's a whole different buzz downtown."
..."This is once in a lifetime," [Becker] says. "It's goin' up."
—The Rebuilding, Part Six: Good Days at Ground Zero, by Scott Raab, October 2010
11. All U Can Eat... 36. Gable: "You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how."... 45. E-ZPass... 111. The Green Wave, the Crimson Tide, the Thundering Herd... 121. The slide guitar... 155. New York on a spring day, when the halter tops have begun to run... 161. And skyscrapers, too. 162. Skyscrapers.
—162 Reasons It's Good to Be an American Man, by Charles P. Pierce, December 2001
David Sunberg/Esto
Now: The new 1 World Trade Center on a sunny day this summer, as seen from exactly the same place.
![gaza solidarity encampment columbia police nypd](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/police-take-security-measures-as-pro-palestinian-student-news-photo-1713886844.jpg?crop=0.70669xw:1xh;center,top&resize=360:* ""Gaza Solidarity Encampment" at Columbia University continues")
