Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World. Christina Lamb
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him that smoking was forbidden on the plane. He promised to stop, but a few minutes later she smelled more smoke.
To her horror she found Reid hunched in his window seat holding a lit match to one of his shoes. As she went to grab him, he pushed her away so hard she fell. ‘Get him!’ Moutardier screamed. Her colleague Cristina Jones rushed to the scene and threw herself at Reid, who was six feet four and snarling like an animal. He bit her hand and she screamed. Reid was not easy to control, but a small army of flight attendants and male passengers managed to hold him down, doused him with bottled water and tied him up with seatbelts, plastic handcuffs and headphone cables. A doctor on board sedated him. His shoes were then carried into the cockpit for inspection by the pilots, and only then were the fuses spotted.
The ordeal wasn’t over. The crew had no idea if he had any accomplices onboard, so the remaining passengers were kept in their seats for the final nerve-racking two hours and fifty minutes until they could land at the nearest airport, which was Boston. Afterwards they found numerous spent matches. No one knew why they hadn’t caught light. If they had, the shoes had more than enough explosives to blow up the plane.
Less than a week later, on 28 December, General Franks went to visit President Bush on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush told reporters afterwards that they had discussed Afghanistan. In fact it was the first detailed briefing to discuss plans for a war in Iraq.
4
Manhattan, New Year’s Eve 2001
It was the charred smell that would most stick in my mind, a mix of jet fuel, burned carpet and ground cement. That and the fliers. Smiling faces of the missing stared out from A4 sheets on every wall and noticeboard, made all the more poignant by the fact that most of the photographs seemed to be of happy occasions – tossing a mortarboard at graduation; sitting in a boyfriend’s lap; sipping colourful cocktails through a straw with friends; or laughing windswept on a beach with dogs or children or both. People with everything to live for. Underneath were brief descriptions, some printed and some handwritten, and from those few lines one could imagine a life.
‘We are searching for information for our daughter who worked on 93rd floor,’ read the first one I saw. ‘Black hair, grey/blue eyes, kind smile, wearing white scoop neck.’ The photograph showed a gentle young woman with olive skin and dark hair who looked like someone easy to confide in. Overlapping it slightly was a beaming black man: ‘Patrick Adams. Age 62, Security Officer, Worked on 80th Floor, Tower 2. Wife (for 47 years): Allison Adams. Left a message on the answering machine at home informing his wife that he was trapped. 32 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.’ Next to that was ‘Missing NYC Firefighter, former US Army Reservist’, with a picture of a powerfully built white man. Several were headed ‘Desaparecido’. And, faded by the wind and rain, I could just decipher a child’s drawing in coloured pencils of a house with stick figures of a couple, two children and a dog. On top was the plea, ‘Daddy Come Home’.
More than three months after the 9/11 attacks, these posters were still pinned all over New York. At subway stations, bus stops, walls and phone booths where once there might have been adverts for dog walkers or masseurs, instead there were ‘Missing’ faces. Thousands of them, interspersed with miniature Stars and Stripes flags, small wilted posies, crucifixes on strings, ribbons, teddy bears, poems and finger paintings. I realised that all that time I had been in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11, unable to read Western newspapers, I had thought about the attack as an event so massive as to be impersonal, not about the individual victims. Now I read every such poster I could find.
I had gone to New York on a crazy whim. On Christmas morning I had arrived home in London from Afghanistan after three months away from my family, and I would be heading back there within weeks. I had been away so much that when I held my two-year-old son he said ‘Bye-bye.’
However, in Afghanistan almost everyone I had met kept asking, ‘What is this building that the planes flew into?’ In a country where the tallest office building was a five-storey block in Kabul and there were no escalators, they could not conceive of towers 110 floors high. I had promised to bring back pictures of the World Trade Center.
I could have just downloaded them from the internet, or cut a picture from a magazine back in Britain, or got a friend to send some. A last-minute flight just for the New Year holiday cost a fortune. But I desperately wanted to see for myself the place at which all our lives had changed.
So, within a few days of arriving home, I left my son with my parents and dragged my bemused husband Paulo through the newly tightened security at Heathrow (laptop out; belt off, and now shoes, though not yet water bottles and cosmetics) and onto the Virgin Atlantic flight.
As to so many people, New York was a special city to us – we had got engaged there five years earlier, and had always adored visiting it. But this was a very different trip.
Next morning, fortified by the espresso I had so missed in Afghanistan, we went to Grand Central Station to catch the subway downtown. A makeshift board of the missing had been set up which showed people of almost every colour, nationality and religion. Looking at names like Cohen, Greenstein and Rosenblum, I grimly remembered General Hamid Gul and countless other Pakistanis insisting to me that Mossad was behind the attack, and that no Jews had gone to work that day. Most of all I noticed that so many seemed to be thirty-something mothers and fathers, just like me and Paulo. Later I read that the age of the greatest number who died was between thirty-five and thirty-nine.
Eighteen thousand people had gone to work in the towers that day. Almost 3,000 never came home, most dead by the time they would normally be fetching a morning coffee. One hundred and forty-seven died on the planes that crashed. Three hundred and forty-three firefighters and emergency workers and sixty police who had gone to rescue the victims became victims themselves.
Friends and relatives had started putting up the missing posters the day after 9/11 in the hope that their loved ones had wandered off dazed with amnesia, or were lying unidentified in a hospital bed. In fact very few were pulled out alive after the towers had collapsed, and what had started off as pleas of hope were now poignant memorials to loss.
Almost a mile away from Ground Zero, my nostrils already twitched with the smouldering smell of burned paper and metal still in the air all these weeks after the attack. The subway stations near the Twin Towers remained closed, so we got out at Battery Park, near the bottom tip of Manhattan. A cutting wind was sweeping in from the Atlantic. There was no need to ask the way – lines of people bundled up against the cold were shuffling in the same direction. A few canvas booths had been set up along the route as prayer stations for those wishing to commune with their God.
Thousands of posters fluttered from the park railings, as well as personal mementoes and ‘I Love NY’ postcards. One section of fence was entirely pinned with soft toys. Every so often we would pass a small shrine with candles.
There was another wall of remembrance outside St Paul’s chapel, just across from where the towers had stood. A blonde woman, her face streaked with tears, was tightly clutching the hands of three angelic little blonde girls in smart brass-buttoned coats. ‘Uncle Luke, we miss you’, they wrote on the wall.
As we stopped to look, many people seemed to be discussing where they were when they heard the news. In that way 9/11 had already become the J.F. Kennedy assassination of my generation.
Where the towers had stood was still a crime scene, and there was yellow tape all over the place, stamped ‘Police Line Do Not Cross’. We joined the queue pressed behind police barricades to shuffle slowly up the ramp to a viewing platform which had just opened. A large American flag flew overhead. There was utter silence as we reached the top and looked down.
Below was a vast chasm in the earth, far, far bigger than I had envisaged. Where once there had been two gleaming concrete-and-glass towers with 110 floors full of people just starting their working day, there was a seventy-foot-deep pit stretching for ten acres, filled with rubble, mangled steel girders and twisted bits of building. Dust was rising from diggers