Cover of Stars and Stripes, September 12, 2001
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today, on the 25th anniversary of this terrible attack, freedom of the press, the troops’ newspaper and Democracy itself are under siege by a Trump Administration that views truth as the enemy, and lying a virtue. The 2,977 people who lost their lives that day, and the men and women who fell on the battlefield avenging that attack, deserve far better.
It was just another Tuesday morning in the Stars & Stripesnewsroom located on the third floor of the National Press Building in Washington, D.C., 25 years years ago today.
I had just grabbed a second cup of coffee, and was a bit bleary-eyed after staying up late the night before watching my beloved N.Y. Giants lose again on Monday Night Football. I cracked open my computer to begin getting a pulse of the world, and a sense of the news we would dish out to our readers around the world that day.
As I shuffled out of my office, which looked out over a windowless sea of cubicles, one of our junior editors, a daughter of Nebraska, said something that was uncommonly negative, as she openly challenged the print gods to a duel.
“Man, I am sick and tired of these slow darn news days!”
Now just about anybody else who worked in that newsroom would have chosen spicier language, but that’s about as frustrated and angry as Stephanie ever got.
Five minutes later, another editor who was watching the bank of TVs on the starboard side of the newsroom screamed. A passenger jet had just slammed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.
All those slow news days began their descent into hell …
Another plane blasted into the other Trade Center tower, another slammed into the Pentagon, and still another that we later learned was headed for the White House and/or Capitol Building just a few blocks away from us, went down in a Pennsylvania field.
How many damn planes were there????
We had two reporters in the Pentagon, and spent what seemed like forever getting (please, God) confirmation they had survived the blast. When we finally learned they were OK, we also learned they were going to be busy pulling bodies from the wreckage.
There were more important jobs to do than being a newspaper person on that terrible day.
Sandra and Lisa were two of the finest reporters I’ve ever worked with, and were even better people.
Sandra, a trained EMT, literally helped save lives.
“I treated one guy, he had second-and third-degree burns over 80 percent of his body, and another guy with less [burns],” Sandra old me on the phone. “At first, triage was [chaos], too many people were trying to call the shots, but things have settled a bit.”
“It’s basically a body-recovery operation; nobody has come out for hours … I see them bringing in dogs, I think body-sniffing dogs,” Lisa said.
They both filed a helluva story many hours later that described that dark, deadly day in their workplace. I could go on all day gushing about them and their incredible work on what might have been the grimmest Tuesday in American history.
For this report, however, they will be part of the larger point that needs underlining.
Back in the newsroom a few miles away from the burning Pentagon, we were sorting out the biggest news day of our professional lives.
Stars & Stripes is an editorially independent daily newspaper which serves the troops and their families overseas. It has news bureaus all over the world, and two main hubs in Germany and Japan with remote printing operations in several other countries.
At the time, the Central Office in D.C., collected all the news coming out of the those news bureaus which were based with our troops and built six editions of the paper each day, supplemented with wire copy targeted at the areas in which those troops served.
Once the pages of these editions had been laid out and blessed by many discerning eyes in the Central Office, they were beamed via satellite to those remote printing locations overseas, and distributed to the troops and their families stationed around the world.
No paper has a more expansive distribution route than Stripes. When it delivered to war zones, which it was about to do following the attack on 9/11, things really got sporty.
It was one helluva an irony then, that the journalists who were putting the papers together for our troops and their families overseas that gruesome day, were the ones who were currently under attack in Washington.
As the hours passed, and we were slowly coming to grips with this terrible, terrible event, I called a meeting in our large conference room with all the editorial staff.
I reckon there were about 35 folks in that meeting — mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, boyfriends, girlfriends … journalists.
I wanted them to know that because they were mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, boyfriends, and girlfriends there might be more important places to be than where they were, making sense of hell, and getting the paper out that day.
It looked like we were safe for now, and there would be no more incoming planes aimed at our city. But nobody knew for sure. This kind of attack wasn’t supposed to happen on American soil, a country protected by our two largest oceans.
And another quick anecdote about the city itself that day:
I remember shortly after the attack, making a point of taking a few minutes to head out of the building and into the street to get a sense of things.
As I stood on 3rd Street facing in the direction of the White House, it reminded me of a scene out of a Godzilla movie. People were running this way and that. Some were screaming, most were in despair, all were bewildered. There were loudspeakers imploring people to remain calm, and directing them out of the city.
I knocked back a third cup of coffee, wished I had a cigarette, shook my head, and went back upstairs.
When I had climbed the stairs back to the third floor, I was told by security personnel outside the glass doors to the newsroom, that they were ordering an evacuation of the building. I told them that we weren’t going anywhere. I told them that we had a newspaper to get out to the most important readers in the world.
I pushed past them and through those doors, locked them behind me, and never heard from them again.
Back in the meeting of the mothers and fathers … daughters and sons … I made it clear that anybody who wanted to go home to loved ones should leave right away. Nobody would think any differently if they did. We all could have used a hug at this point.
It got quiet.
Nobody moved.
Not one.
I learned a couple of people had even walked across the 14th Street Bridge from Virginia to GET INTO the office, so they could help get the paper out to our readers, who as it turns out, were about to put their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our reporters were about to do the same, because Stars & Stripes goes with the troops to report on the troops.
Look, journalists get a lot of crap. It comes with the job. Readers should know the best of us hold ourselves to a higher standard than the people who give us all that crap ever could. The people I worked with in that newsroom and in the Pentagon on that hellish day didn’t blink.
So we all left the conference room, and got to work cobbling together six editions of the paper, including an extra bulldog edition targeted to our readers in Europe.
There were no more planes.
Sandra and Lisa filed their stories, and we checked in with our staffers around the world to begin planning for coverage of the most serious attack on America’s mainland in history.
When the paper was finally put to bed, people quietly starting shuffling out of the newsroom. The slow news day wouldn’t visit that newsroom for another decade.
We went with the slammer AMERICA ATTACKED on the front page.
I got the last train out of the city shortly past midnight.
It was now 9/12.
As the Blue Line train of the D.C. Metro system slowly rumbled through the Pentagon Station toward my home in Virginia, you could smell the smoke and death. There would be no stopping there that night. The adrenaline of the day had quit pumping and I finally allowed myself to open the door a crack for some reflection.
And then it hit me.
Things would never be the same.
That’s when I cried.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.