My late grandmother, Anne Marnovich, told me once she remembered clearly where she was when Kennedy was shot. It's a story, along with the moon landing, I'm sure most people of that time can share.
When my children are old enough, I'll be telling them where I was on Sept. 11, 2001. And when I do, I'll pull out the newspaper clippings my wife saved from that week, long before we even had children.
"For those of us who lived through it, it will be a day we never forget," former President George W. Bush told the National Geographic Channel.
The day before I had just started a new job, running an excavator to dig out a parking lot at the sawmill near Big River. I had taken my old camper van up there, towing my little Chev Metro. By the end of the first day of work, I was too tired to set up my satellite disk for the camper, so I left it to the next day.
On the Tuesday, several people came up to me and told me planes were falling out of the sky. Being the new guy on a new job, I thought they were pulling my leg. The machine I operated was older, and had neither air conditioning or radio.
It was only after I got into my car at the end of the day and turned on the radio did I realize what had happened. By this time it was already nearly nine hours after the first plane struck the world trade centre. The world knew what was going on, but in my bubble on the excavator, I had no clue the world had changed.
A call to my wife had me utterly astonished. "We're going to war," I said, adding something along the lines of "This is our Pearl Harbor."
I didn't know against who, or what, but as a NATO ally, I knew we were going to war.
I had that satellite dish up and connected in record time. On every channel, the images were the same - the second plane hitting the World Trade Centre, and the buildings coming down.
I recalled a documentary that pointed out tens of thousands of people worked in those two towers. On that day, it seemed like there could have been easily over 10,000 dead. The final number would end up being one third of that - a remarkable accomplishment in evacuation, really. As bad as it was, it could have been much, much worse.
Personally, my wife and I had just recently received our papers to enrol in the Canadian Forces as air cadet instructors. What were we signing up for? Had we volunteered literally weeks before a shooting war? Could we end up being called up for something beyond cadet service? For me, due to my diabetes, it was highly unlikely. But my wife, a qualified registered nurse, the situation could have been much different.
Eventually I did fill out the papers, and was sworn in that November. Over seven years in uniform, all I did was teach kids how to march and be a better person. Michelle did the same, and spent the next 10 years working in her civilian hospital, as before.
Canada did go to war, but only a small number of Canadians, never more than about 3,000 at a time. Although our "combat mission" has concluded, we still have troops in Afghanistan. However, unlike the First or Second World Wars, there was no general mobilization, no rationing, not much of anything. We lost only 157 people over 10 years, less than what was lost in a few minutes of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. We left 3,367 dead, wounded or captured on the beach of Dieppe in the Second World War.
My life, like most Canadian's lives, did not change substantially. Air travel got a little more arduous. There were some worries, but generally speaking, the post-9/11 world was not remarkably different than the pre-9/11 world.
I astonish myself in writing that, but it's true. Bin Laden may have shaken up the a sleeping giant, spurred at least two wars (more if you count Yemen and Pakistan), created a pervasive sense of paranoia, but most people's lives are still pretty close to what they were before. Perhaps the world had not changed as much as I thought it would.
To that end, the terrorists failed. That, too, I think I will tell my children.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
