Dick Thomas
October 4, 2001
Dear Richard:
This letter-writing thing has turned out to be quite challenging. For one thing, I don’t have any writing paper. Two, I don’t have a decent pen. And three, my handwriting is illegible for a decade or more of not using it.
I had just walked off the elevator of the 20th floor of Exchange Place, a forty-story glass tower overlooking Boston’s Logan airport. An attorney who has a little Sony TV on for the news came out of his office and told us what had happened. And we all thought that it was the miss-calculation of some hapless commuter plane. But soon we were to be proved wrong as the second plane did its awful deed.
We all poured down to the second floor where we have a huge conference center and a jumbotron television screen. We watched in horror as the towers collapsed. And then we got a bomb threat as did several other of the major towers in Boston and the whole city was evacuated.
Needless to say, Mr. Lawless who was head of security at Logan airport was relieved of his duties by Gov. Swift (“Bubbles”) a few days ago. His main claim to fame was that he was Gov. Weld’s former chauffeur. He liked collecting the $132,000 annual salary but knew nothing about security and even less about airport security. The next one to go will be a woman called Katherine Buckingham who is the director of MassPort, the authority that owns the airport. She was Gov. Celluci’s assistant. That is how she got the job when he buggered off to be ambassador to Canada. I might add that both of them get cars with the seal of Bostonia emblazoned in gold on the passenger doors.
That day the busses were free in their effort to empty out the city. The eariest thing of all was having Logan closed for four days. In South Boston where I live I am so used to the noise of incoming and outgoing aircraft that it felt ghostly not hearing that background noise. Instead the whine of F16s as they crisscrossed the sky for four days and nights. Meanwhile those poor people in New York, DC, and Pennsylvania. What a disaster of major proportions.
The entire action took less than an hour as you say and equally chilling is that it probably cost no more than $200,000 to organize. Consider the $105 billion it will cost to rebuild. These people who pervert Islam to achieve terrorist events of such mindboggling excess and success are an enemy of whom we have no concept. I imagine Mr. Bush is getting quite an education on countries and peoples he didn’t even know existed prior to 9/11.
I personally survived many terrorist attacks both in London and Rome and we even had Yukio Mishima have himself beheaded which was quite something in Tokyo when I lived there. The Foreign Press Club located on the upper floors of a glass tower near the Ginza shopping district had a bomb go off in the street it is on and my friend Susan Lower was badly cut by flying glass.
I was in a bus along the Tevere in front of the synagogue when Palestinian terrorists (three of them) wrapped in black from head to toe strafed about forty children coming out of shul on a Saturday morning. The bus driver, frozen in terror, was being screamed at by everyone “Avanti, dai, avanti!!!” We disembarked at Piazza Sonnino and I was running with Tobias who was two at the time in my arms. Old nonni were shouting out of their windows at me “Dai in casa, signora!” But I couldn’t make it home so I stopped in Piazza Sta. Maria where DIGOS (Italian version of SWAT teams) were rappelling out of a hovering helicopter; unmarked police cars and squealing brakes added to pandemonium. I ran into Galleassi our local ristorante and I sat with the owner and four of these guys burst in through the front door and ran through to the back. Needless to say, these terrorists evaporated into thin air – they never found them.
I had just arrived in East Haddam, CT for some holiday from Rome, and on television was the news that Palestinian terrorists had strafed the TWA desk at Fiumicino killing three of my firm’s clients. The blood drained from my face as it registered that I had only been standing at that very same counter hours before. From then on in you boarded TWA through a beige door that only passengers knew about.
I was very pregnant with Tobias when they planted a truck bomb in front of Regina Ceoli (Queen of Heaven) Jail in Trastevere. It was late spring and unseasonably warm so all the windows were open otherwise we would have been covered in glass. BOOOM! This bomb left a 50 foot deep, 100-foot diameter crater in front of Rome’s oldest prison.
You may recall my second husband, Bill Laws. We were staying at the St. George in Beirut. A lovely city – the Paris of the Middle East – and on our third day, we were telephoned by the British Embassy that war was about to break out and that we had to leave. I looked out the window and all along the esplanade were tanks and military people. We had to bribe our driver to take us to the airport. The Fadeeyan were shooting at airplanes taking off. The only flight we could get was to Athens. The next day the front page picture in the International Herald Tribune was of the strafed departure lounge at Beirut Airport after it had been closed hours later.
I have been evacuated from every major department store in London at one time or another for suspect packages or phone-in threats. The Horse Guards in Sloane Square where Bill and I lived were bombed. The Horse Guards on parade in Hyde Park were bombed. Horse parts everywhere. And I was there a few years ago when that Irish guy got on a double-decker bus not far from Trafalgar Square and the bomb went off killing him and incinerating the bus.
However, all these were pesky little skirmishes compared to 9/11. And even though you enumerate war dead in other actions; they were military dead. They were in battle; they were at war. These 6,000 souls from around the world were innocent civilians going about their morning tasks.
I think that Osama bin Laden is a dead man walking. All it takes is for one of his own men with a gripe to flip him. I actually favor the use of the Russian mafia and the drug cartels for intelligence and containment. This country forgets or doesn’t know that we supported bin Laden for years because he was fighting Communists and then supported the Taliban despite their abuse of women because they helped in the Drug War and stopped opium production. I understand from a BBC documentary on Afghanistan that this is not wholly true but an impression that the Taliban left George Bush thinking was true.
I am told that to actually be at Ground Zero and to see the devastation for oneself is overwhelming and incomprehensible. That television just does not convey the enormity of the damage. Consider that fires are still burning nearly four weeks later. Apparently, you cannot get any closer than 23rd Street unless you are a friend of Rudy’s or George’s. I might rendezvous with Molly when she stops in NYC prior to UK departure and go and have a look at it. My last memory was last year this time when my American New Yorker friend who lives in Rome and I walked by the towers on our way to the Staten Island ferry. We commented about the bombing in 1993. We took the ferry over and immediately ran around through to the other side and took the next ferry back. As we were returning the sun was beginning to set and the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers and the buildings all around shimmered orange and pink and blue. It was quite the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. I am so glad that I have that memory and not the Nagasaki-like devastation one sees daily on TV.
Yours, ever
Candace