This is a first-person account, written ten years to the day after the attacks. The author had spent 2001 building a company and getting married in New York. He opens by saying he still cannot think about the day for a minute without crying a little.
The account is unusual in how openly it doubts itself. The author states plainly that he is not sure he can remember things as they were. He suspects televised images have displaced parts of his own memory.
Key findings
- The Twin Towers were part of the author’s private life before they were a news event. His wedding weekend, three months earlier, began with a party at the top of them.
- The morning began as an ordinary working one. He was in a nearly empty office on Broadway briefing an ex-colleague on a client video when his wife called.
- He locates the turn precisely at the first collapse seen on television. That is the moment he names as the loss in the title.
- The dominant fact of his day was absence, not carnage. Ambulances arrived roughly one every half hour or less, and he does not think he saw any blood.
The morning, and the run west
His first response was practical and, by his own telling, a form of denial. He picked up a first aid box bought for a boat, ran down the stairs and headed for St Vincent’s Hospital. He expected thousands of minor injuries the hospitals would not have room to treat.
He was stopped crossing Fifth Avenue, which had a clear downtown view. He watched the second tower go down from the street. He describes falling to the ground as it fell, and offers an explanation for it.
What organization looked like at the hospital
The blood donor line outside St Vincent’s had already formed within seconds of the second collapse. He records it as four people wide and several hundred deep, and says he still does not understand how it assembled so fast.
He got past the police barrier by helping unload a blood delivery. The work that followed was logistical rather than medical.
The account contains one concrete operational failure, observed at close range. Medical supplies for restocking ambulances had been dumped in a single pile, and incompatible components were mixed together. He and another volunteer sorted them into matched sets.
Rumor in the absence of work
With nothing to do, the waiting staff and volunteers turned to speculation. Reports circulated about further planes and further targets. The author draws a direct link between idleness and the spread of these stories.
He is candid that accurate information was rejected when it arrived. People returning from downtown reported no victims, and were disbelieved by everyone present, himself included.
The site itself
He traveled downtown on a flatbed truck with about twenty volunteers, mostly doctors. The streets emptied as they went. He describes ground conditions in terms of powder rather than debris.
The search at the site produced nothing. A group of five looked for casualties and found none. The triage area set up further south held no injured people either.
He returns to the exposure question at the start of the piece rather than at the end. He was in the dust up to his knees and breathed it in, and he had just heard of a fireman dying of cancer from the same exposure.
The claim in the title
The closing lines make the title’s claim explicitly and without qualification. The author frames the day as a permanent change of state, personal and general at once.
Scope and limitations
The author disclaims the reliability of his own account in the piece itself. He says he does not fully trust his recollections and included photographs to anchor what he remembers seeing. Readers should treat this as testimony recalled at ten years’ distance, not as a record made at the time.
It is one person’s vantage point on one part of Manhattan. The absence of casualties he describes is what reached St Vincent’s and the streets he walked. He states directly that he is uncertain about parts of what he saw downtown.
Source
This page summarises The Day We Lost Our Innocence – My September 11, 2001, by Marc de Swaan Arons, September 2011.