Early Friday morning, Indiana University hosted a commemoration at Sample Gates.
Few students on this campus are old enough to remember. Most of them were not yet alive.
But it has been 25 years since hijacked airplanes struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing almost 3,000. Hundreds of miles away and a quarter of a century later, the attack still shapes the lives of people in Bloomington.
James Buher was in Washington, D.C. Then director of the School of Public Affairs at IU, he led a class of 25 employees from Crane naval base. At 9 a.m., they arrived at a meeting with Susan Livingston, undersecretary of the Navy at the Pentagon.
“I feel like it's something that I need to talk about,” Buher said. “I need to tell people about it if they ask.”
They met Livingston at a fifth-floor classroom.
“It wasn't a loud explosion,” Buher said. “All we heard was it was like air rushing in fast, like an old department store, like a whoosh. It just sort of hit. And her comment was, ‘It must be a bomb. We need to get out.’”
Buher and his group covered their mouths and crouched low through hallways black with smoke. What he didn’t know was an airplane had entered the building almost directly beneath him. Minutes later, that section of the Pentagon collapsed.
Buher pulled a diagram from his folder.
“That's the path of the plane going to be coming in,” he said. “Right within 50 feet of the classroom itself.”
He and the Crane employees all made it out alive. One hundred twenty-five others didn’t.
Four thousand miles away, IU math professor Amr Sabry attended a conference in Italy. He watched the second plane hit the South Tower on aTV in the break room.
“It's like one of those moments where it's like, surreal,” Sabry said, still grasping for words years later. “This is surreal. This is unbelievable. It's like, what is happening?”
Thousands of flights were cancelled. Sabry said he spent two weeks away from his family, in shock, across the Atlantic.
Former IU history professor John Bodnar studies the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
“Because there was confusion, much of the process of remembering and reacting to 9/11 was oriented toward making sense of it,” Bodnar said.
In Bodnar’s research for his book Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11, he found two competing impulses. In the immediate aftermath, people were floored by pain and loss. But as the shock wore off, they searched for meaning.
“Many felt we had to move on from that as a nation and as a people, so that we didn't simply remember this terrorist attack as debilitating,” Bodnar said. “That we were strong enough to rise above it and fight back.”
President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were determined to give it to them.
“The major implication or impact of structuring American memory of 9/11 was the decision to go to war,” Bodnar said.
Unexpected call to war
Deborah Deckard joined the Indiana National Guard at age 34 in 1988. She was driving to a work meeting and listening to the Bob & Tom Show when news of the attacks came on the radio.
“At that point it was like, we're National Guard. Chances of us doing anything are probably (little) to none,” Deckard said.
She was almost 50 when Major General Roy Umbarger volunteered the Indiana National Guard to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan and later Al Qaeda in Iraq.
They went from responding to natural disasters to serving on the front lines. As a foreign weapons specialist, Deckard’s job was recovering caches of enemy arms.
“For us, it was an everyday thing,” she said. “You wake up that morning and say, ‘Well God, I hope I'm back this afternoon.’”
Most of her comrades were young men from Indiana. Deckard remembers when four people in another company were killed by landmines left over from Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union.
“I think they just had mixed feelings about why you should even be in war,” Deckard said. “Majority of those went because there was a bonus given to pay for their college, and a lot of them didn't have money, or the families couldn't afford it.”
She saw her own deployment as a duty.
“When you gave your oath, you signed that paper,” Deckard said. “When you signed that paper, your life, in a sense, was no longer really yours. You belonged to the government then.”
More than 7,000 U.S. service members died in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, among them at least 135 Hoosiers. Over 8,000 U.S. contractors were also killed, according to researchers at Brown University. They estimate the direct and indirect death toll of post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen at 4.5 to 4.7 million.
Deckard said there were positive aspects to her service in Afghanistan and Iraq. She worked closely with a local interpreter who exposed her and other guardsmen to Afghani culture – he’s since moved to the United States, and she said they remain friends.
Deckard said Americans also improved quality of life for many Afghans, for a time.
“These people were getting better educations. They were living longer. They had more things going for them,” she said. “The Taliban and ISIS came back and took back over Afghanistan again and ruined everything that we developed for them.”
‘Best and worst of Bloomington’
Bush told the country it was fighting a war on two fronts. The Patriot Act allowed federal officials to suspend the rights of people at home suspected of terrorist activity.
“There was like a certain illusion that this is the way things are in America,” Sabry said. “This is your place, and this is the country where everybody is welcome.”
Most of Bloomington’s Muslim community in 2001 were foreign students, including the president of the mosque.
“There were two FBI agents at the door at all times outside,” Sabry said. “They would come and knock at his door at eight a.m. in the morning.”
The mosque president left the country, leaving Sabry as interim president. The math professor became the community’s representative to the media and the FBI. He soon had to contend with questions about a Bahraini man who worked briefly at the mosque in March 2001: Juma Al-Dossari.
Sabry said he led prayers that year for Ramadan.
“He was there, and then he disappeared,” Sabry said. “Then he was in Guantanamo. That's the next thing we heard.”
The FBI said it had connected Al-Dossari to the “Lackawanna Six”, six Yemeni American men in upstate New York who attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Pakistani border guards captured him on the Afghanistan border and turned him over to the Americans.
News of Al-Dossari’s alleged terrorist links drew scrutiny to the Bloomington mosque. Federal investigators used a spy plane to monitor residents and the news media quickly ran with the story.
Indianapolis TV station WTHR interviewed Sabry about Al-Dossari’s time in Bloomington for a 2003 feature story, Under Surveillance. He said he had few memories of the former prayer leader. Five minutes into the story, it showed Sabry’s picture beside an image of Al Dossari, in front of the Bloomington mosque.
“It's not like they lied about anything I said. It's just putting the association this way, and the damage is done,” Sabry said. “Even if they retract it or they say, ‘We didn't mean to,’ people have already seen it.”
Al-Dossari was held and tortured for five years at Guantanamo Bay.
Despite the government’s claims that Al-Dossari fought for Al Qaeda, it provided no evidence and never charged him with a crime. He was released in 2007.
Over time, Sabry said he developed good relations with the Indianapolis FBI.
“At some point I actually felt bad for the agents I was talking with, because they really had no background to understand the religion or the culture,” he said. “They were understanding, after a while.”
In one case, the FBI publicly apologized for mistakenly arresting an Egyptian man in Evansville on a bogus tip.
“For the heads of the regional of office to come and apologize, it was significant,” Sabry said. “Like they are trying to understand and trying to see what was going on, not jumping to conclusions.”
But some suspicions were harder to dispel.
In 2005, someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the kitchen window of the Bloomington Islamic Center. Sabry said Muslim women sometimes faced harassment for wearing Hijab, or headscarves, in public.
He also remembers support and solidarity from his neighbors, especially at the university and at churches and synagogues.
“We've seen the best and worst of Bloomington at the time,” Sabry said.
Ongoing impact
Beyond the death, destruction and individual acts of heroism, Bodnar said the echoes of 9/11 continue to manifest as a war mentality and a constant search for invaders in our midst.
“There's an aftershock of revenge, of federal authority, almost authoritarian level of authority, and a disregard for civil rights and legal rights that I believe accounts for the way immigration has become such an issue,” Bodnar said. “The war on terror led to the war on immigrants.”
Since 2001, Deckard says she’s seen progress rolled back, not only in the countries she tried to help but at home as well.
“There's just so many things that don't seem like it's going forward,” she said. “I mean, it seems like all of a sudden we've got all these people that are racist all of a sudden, where'd this come from?”
Deckard said she’s also troubled by the rise of political violence at home since she returned from Iraq.
“It just seems like they don't want to sit, don't want to talk, or don't want to just punch it out,” she said. “They want to actually hurt somebody seriously before it makes a difference.”
Sabry said the open Islamophobia and extreme rhetoric he sees today is different from the early 2000s, but he believes the undercurrent was already there.
“The fact that it's now more apparent or more systematic is a natural kind of progression,” he said. “I mean, what do you expect if the top leadership encourages that behavior?”
Bodnar said he was anticipating the 9/11 ceremonies with curiosity. How will the tragedy of September 11 be remembered, and who will determine what parts of the story are worth telling?
“There's heroism out of 9/11, there's tragedy, but there's I think a darker fallout,” he said. “A result that is sort of still working its way through our politics and through our culture.”
