By Michael Phillips | Riptide
I was born in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and spent my early years on the Jersey Shore, close enough to New York that the city was never foreign — just an easy drive, a familiar skyline. My family moved to Maryland when I was in middle school; I went to Baker Middle School, then Damascus High School, then college in Virginia. By the time I was grown, I had roots in three places, two of which the terrorists would hit that September.
Both sites were already part of my life before 2001. My mother’s father, who’d died years earlier, was born and raised in the Bronx and worked in the New York shipping industry. My dad was a Navy officer, later moving into the reserves, and his work meant childhood trips to D.C. for his meetings at the Pentagon. Neither building was abstract to me. By the end of 2001, I’d stood in the wreckage of both — without ever planning to, without any sense that I was collecting something I’d still be turning over twenty-five years later.
I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t. I know there are people with far more graphic, far more worthy memories of that day than mine — people who were actually there, who lost far more than I did. I wasn’t present for any of the actual events of September 11, and I can’t imagine what the people who were went through. What follows is just what I went through, where I was, and what I saw in the aftermath — the only genuinely heavy thing I witnessed in person, in the moment, was an accident in NYC on December 27, 2001. Everything else here is proximity, not survival. I think it’s still worth writing down.
“Everything else here is proximity, not survival. I think it’s still worth writing down.”
A Morning in Virginia
I was a student at James Madison University when the towers fell, three hours south of the city I’d grown up visiting. I was at work that morning at a local lumber yard, R.S. Mongers & Sons, and there was no television there — just a radio. That’s how I first heard about the first plane, over the radio at the yard. I lived a block away, and after the second plane hit, I ditched work and ran home to put the news on. What I remember most clearly after that is trying, over and over, to call home, and getting nothing. No connection. Just a fast busy signal or dead air, hour after hour, on a day when every family on the East Coast was trying to reach every other family at the same time, and the networks simply couldn’t carry it. That failure — the not-being-able-to-reach-anyone — is still the clearest physical memory I have of that morning, alongside the radio at the lumber yard and the run home. Everything else is secondhand from news coverage everyone was watching. Those parts were mine.
My dad was in Washington that day, too. He worked in D.C. regularly, and at the time of the attacks he was at a company where he worked alongside retired General Alexander Haig — the former secretary of state under Reagan — and Haig’s son, Alex Jr. While I was three hours south at a lumber yard, my grandmother was in a hospital in New Jersey, and my grandfather had died just two days earlier, my father was working in the city the Pentagon plane had been aimed at.
“New York was the towers falling on a screen. Washington was a hole I drove past.”
Living in Virginia and later Maryland put me a short drive from the other site. I don’t remember exactly when I first drove past the Pentagon in the aftermath, only that I did, several times, and that seeing the scorched, collapsed section of a building that size — a building that’s supposed to be one of the most secure in the country — made the attack feel physically real in a way news footage hadn’t. New York was the towers falling on a screen. Washington was a hole I drove past.
Between the two, in 2001, I saw both American sites the hijackers hit turn from targets into wreckage. The third — the field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the passengers and crew of United 93 fought back and kept a fourth plane from reaching Washington — I still haven’t visited. It’s a gap I’ve been meaning to close for twenty-five years now, and maybe this anniversary is as good a reason as any to finally do it.
A Funeral in the Middle of It
Two days before the towers fell, on Sunday, September 9, my grandfather — my dad’s father, a World War II veteran — died. I got the call right as I was about to walk into church in Richmond, where I’d gone to visit a girl who went to VCU — someone amazing, maybe the one who got away, in the way those early-twenties almosts tend to linger. I was still sitting with that grief, raw and only two days old, when the towers came down forty-eight hours later. The two losses sat on top of each other in a way that didn’t make sense at the time and doesn’t need to now.
In the days right after 9/11, I left JMU and drove back up to Point Pleasant — my grandmother, my mom’s mother, had ended up in the hospital around the same time. She turned out to be fine. Just a lady in her 80’s who had never been sick in her life, taking too much aspirin. That trip is where I first saw it: cars still sitting at the train station on a weekend, when commuters wouldn’t normally have been parked there at all. I’d grown up in New Jersey; I knew what that lot was supposed to look like on a Saturday. It wasn’t supposed to look like that.
My grandfather was buried in Baltimore, Maryland — a World War II veteran who loved a good boilermaker — beer and a shot together — and we sent him off with a six-pack in the ground with him, probably Natty Boh, since that’s what he’d have wanted. I remember standing near his casket while two of my aunts got into an argument, and thinking something along the lines of: our country is under attack right now and this is what we’re doing. It’s a strange thing, watching ordinary family friction keep running underneath a national catastrophe, like the world hadn’t gotten the memo to stop.
“It’s a strange thing, watching ordinary family friction keep running underneath a national catastrophe, like the world hadn’t gotten the memo to stop.”
Marching Into It
By November, I’d already seen those cars once, on the drive up to visit my grandmother in the hospital. That month, I was part of my college drumline, and our band, The James Madison University Marching Royal Dukes, was invited to march in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We drove up the night before Thanksgiving — a Wednesday night going into Thursday — and passing through New Jersey, I saw cars still parked at the Meadowlands, among other commuter stops. There was no reason for commuters to be there at that hour, on that night. I knew that lot too, from years of living in New Jersey and going to games, or taking the train to the City. Two months on, whatever those cars represented — and I can’t say for certain whose they were or why each one was still there — the pattern was the same as what I’d seen at the Point Pleasant station: vehicles sitting where nothing but that fateful Tuesday morning could explain them.
I played the biggest bass drum in the line that year, and I played it with everything I had. We played “Copacabana” on the route, a song I was sick of playing, but I hit that drum like I was Vinnie Paul from Pantera behind it, not a college kid in a marching band. I’m a New York sports fan — I love that city, my earliest memories are seeing the circus at MSG — and marching through it that fall, months after watching it get hit, wasn’t just a gig. I put so much into it that I broke several mallets over the course of the parade. Our drumline lead, Rick, kept a stash of backups in his backpack the whole route, because he knew exactly what to expect from me that day.
The parade itself was strange in the way that first post-9/11 Thanksgiving was strange for everyone — an attempt at normalcy staged a few miles from a hole in the ground that was still smoking weeks earlier. In the staging area, we crossed paths with a scattershot of celebrities the way parade participants always do — WWE’s Triple H, Vince McMahon, Jim Ross, and Kurt Angle, Tony Bennett, Boyz II Men, The Wiggles, Santa Claus, Usher, the boy band O-Town among them, a few others whose faces I remember and names I’ve lost over twenty-five years. At one point, trotting around in my purple band pants, I challenged Triple H to an arm wrestling match. “Grow some arms, boy,” he told me, and I gave him a big, exaggerated flex in response that got a laugh out of everyone standing around. I met and shook hands with Rudy Giuliani and Joe Torre, the mayor and the Yankees manager, both of them still very much the public faces of a city trying to hold itself together that fall — and they both signed the parade participation ribbon I’d been given, which I still have somewhere, packed away.
What I remember most from just walking around the city that week were the boards — fences, walls, any flat surface lined with photocopied photos of people, hand-lettered signs asking if anyone had seen them. Missing. Families who still didn’t know, more than two months later, what had actually happened to someone they loved. Those flyers were still up everywhere in late November, when we were there for the parade. Not fading, not coming down. Still up.
What stayed with me even more than that was after the parade, visiting firehouses around the city with our band — going in, meeting the men who’d survived, and listening to them talk about the brothers they’d lost. I shook hands with and thanked everyone of them. Every firehouse we visited had a memorial set up. The police stations had them too. Every single one had lost someone they knew, someone they’d worked alongside, and it showed — in the memorials, in the way they talked, in the silences between what they said. It was often hard to hold back tears standing in their houses. FDNY lost 343 firefighters that day, entire companies gutted in a single morning, and the survivors we met were still, months later, carrying that. Standing in a firehouse listening to a survivor talk about the man who should have been standing next to him is a different kind of education than anything I got in a classroom that semester.
“Standing in a firehouse listening to a survivor talk about the man who should have been standing next to him is a different kind of education than anything I got in a classroom that semester.”
We went to Ground Zero too, while it was still an active recovery site — a whole area gutted and destroyed, with pieces of steel still standing that would go on to become some of the most reproduced images of that entire year. I took photographs there that I still haven’t found again; they’re somewhere on an old computer from a decade before anyone backed anything up to a cloud. What I remember instead is the weight of it — standing in front of that wreckage and feeling waves of something I didn’t have a name for at twenty-one, and still don’t fully have one for now.
December, and the Fear That Hadn’t Left
I was back in the city again that December, visiting at Christmas, when on December 27, 2001, a 76-year-old delivery driver named Sidney Weinstein was ordered by police to move his van, which was double-parked on 34th Street. The van’s accelerator apparently stuck as he tried to move it, and it lurched forward into the crowd outside Macy’s before slamming into the back of a bus. Seven people were ultimately killed and at least eight more injured as the toll climbed over the following days. And for a few minutes, none of that registered as what it actually was — a traffic accident — because everyone around me reacted as if it were another attack. People scattered in every direction. There was real, raw panic — the specific fear of a bomb, of another wave of something. I lost track of my family in the chaos because I did something monumentally stupid in hindsight: I started walking toward the accident, thinking I might be able to help, and got swallowed by a crowd of people running the opposite way before I ever got close.
I think about that moment as much as almost anything else from that year. Not because of what happened — an accident, tragic on its own terms, with nothing to do with terrorism — but because of what it revealed about where everyone’s nervous system was sitting three months out. New York in December 2001 was a city that flinched.
“New York in December 2001 was a city that flinched.”
The People I Didn’t Expect to Lose
The losses that touched me directly didn’t come from strangers on television. One of my middle school teachers, William R. Ruth — a Mount Airy, Maryland teacher and Army Reservist — was killed at the Pentagon that morning. He’d spent his last years teaching at John T. Baker Middle School in Damascus, the same school I went to. I’d sat in his classroom years before any of us had reason to think about the Pentagon at all.
My cousin Scott had friends who worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — the agency that ran the World Trade Center, and that lost 37 of its own police officers that day, along with other employees. He lost people he knew. My cousin Chris, who worked in corrections, also knew people who were called in to help that day.
A family friend, Thom Zimny — a music and television producer who’s worked extensively with Bruce Springsteen and on projects like The Wire — was supposed to be working at the towers that day. His mother shared with me once that he wasn’t there only because he was sick. His mother, Helyn, had babysat me throughout my childhood and was as close to an aunt as anyone outside my actual family. The randomness of that — a stomach bug, or a cold, being the difference between Thom being there or not — is the kind of thing that doesn’t fully process at the time. It just sits with you.
And later, in a college rock band I played in called PAYLOAD, our singer Josh — who was from Northern Virginia — told me his father had served in the military alongside one of the hijacked pilots, the one who flew the plane into the Pentagon. He didn’t elaborate on who the pilot was or what “served alongside” meant exactly, and I never pushed him on it. I had no reason not to believe him. This was before X, TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram existed — we weren’t living in a world saturated with conspiracy theories the way people are now, and it seemed like everyone around us knew someone who’d been touched by that day in some way. It was emotional, not something you fact-checked a friend on. I still don’t know what to do with a detail like that, except to sit with how small and tangled the connections turned out to be, twenty-five years on: a teacher, a cousin’s friends, a nearly-lost family friend, a bandmate’s father’s old service record, all threading back to the same morning.
What Was Left of Them
I couldn’t enlist after 9/11 — I’d had childhood epilepsy, which disqualified me — and that’s stayed with me too, in a quieter way, as one more thing the day touched that had nothing to do with geography. I watched friends and classmates go. I didn’t get the option.
But I still ended up standing close to what the war cost. By 2004 I was working at a Guitar Center in Rockville, Maryland, a few minutes down the road from Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Wounded soldiers came into that store — heavily bandaged, some missing limbs — looking for something that had nothing to do with their injuries. They wanted to pick up a guitar. Bang on a drum kit for a few minutes. Feel normal again, even briefly, in a giant music store instead of a hospital ward. I sold gear to men who’d run toward exactly the kind of danger I was medically barred from facing myself. That’s about as close as I ever got to the war this country fought after that morning — not in a firehouse, not at Ground Zero, but behind a register, watching guys my age or younger try to find a few minutes of ordinary life again.
“They wanted to pick up a guitar. Bang on a drum kit for a few minutes. Feel normal again.”
I went back years later, too — the first time I visited the 9/11 Memorial, the tower that would become One World Trade wasn’t finished yet, and the memorial plaza itself wasn’t fully done either. The museum was still under construction. I stood at a site that was, even a decade in, still visibly a work in progress — still becoming whatever it was going to become. It’s finished now. It wasn’t yet, the first time I went back.
Twenty-Five Years Later
What I have is what’s in this piece: two wrecked sites visited in the same year, a parade staged in the middle of a wounded city, firehouses full of men carrying their dead, a December afternoon that taught me what a city sounds like when it’s still afraid, a small, particular list of people I knew who were touched by that morning, and a music store in Rockville where I got to watch, in small and quiet ways, what the war asked of people who actually got to go. Twenty-five years on, the debt I still owe this story is small but specific: perhaps a drive to a field in Pennsylvania I haven’t taken yet.
“Twenty-five years on, the debt I still owe this story is small but specific: perhaps a drive to a field in Pennsylvania I haven’t taken yet.”
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