I watched 9/11 live on television. I was 12 years old, still a kid, really, and although I obviously didn't understand the full significance of what I was watching, I knew that something enormous and terrible had happened. I didn't understand terrorism or geopolitics, I didn't know what Afghanistan had to do with any of it, and I certainly couldn't have predicted what would follow. I just remember the feeling that the world had suddenly become a much scarier place. Looking back now, I think that was the day my innocence died.
At the time, my dad was still serving in the Army and we were living in Cyprus, so the events unfolding thousands of miles away in New York and Washington weren't quite as distant for us as they might have been for other families watching the news. We were living on a military base, and it didn't take long for the consequences to reach us. The base was put on alert and a curfew was imposed. I remember locals riding through the camp on motorbikes, waving machetes in the air and shouting “Osama Bin Laden”. Suddenly, something I'd been watching on television was happening outside my home. I remember watching battleships passing my school on their way towards the war that was beginning to unfold. There's something deeply strange about seeing a warship sailing past the place where you go to school. School is supposed to be ordinary: homework, friends, teachers, lunch, while outside, enormous grey ships are heading towards a war that has barely even begun.
That was probably the first time I really understood that the world had changed. Before that, war was something that happened somewhere else, to other people. Terrorism was something I'd heard about without really understanding what it meant. The people fighting wars were people I'd never met. Suddenly, all of that had become part of my everyday life, and I was being exposed to things that I hadn't previously had any reason to think about.
Then, not long afterwards, the war came home in an even more literal way.
My auntie was dying of cancer, and we got the call that she wasn't expected to survive the night. Because we were in Cyprus, getting home quickly wasn't as simple as jumping in the car and driving to the hospital. The military arranged for a helicopter to pick us up from Ayios Nikolaos and take us to RAF Akrotiri, where we boarded a military medical evacuation aircraft back to Britain.
The aircraft was full of injured soldiers returning from Afghanistan.
I was sitting on a military medevac aircraft surrounded by people who had been physically wounded in the very war that had grown out of the events I'd watched on television. I wasn't there because I'd been injured, of course. I was there because someone I loved was dying. But that didn't make the contrast any less surreal. The war had been this enormous, abstract thing I'd seen on the television, something happening thousands of miles away. Now I was sitting in the middle of its consequences.
We landed at RAF Brize Norton, where a car was waiting for us on the tarmac to take us straight to the hospital. And, thankfully, my auntie survived that night.
That time.
She didn't, in the long term.
I think that experience is part of why 9/11 has always felt different to me from other historical events. For many people, there is a clear dividing line between “before 9/11” and “after 9/11”. For me, that line is woven into my childhood. My life feels divided between the innocence of what came before and the world that came afterwards. Before 9/11, war was something that happened somewhere else. After 9/11, people were shouting outside our home, military bases were on alert, curfews were imposed, warships passed my school, and I found myself travelling home on an aircraft full of wounded soldiers.
I'm old enough now to understand that the world wasn't actually as innocent or safe before 9/11 as it felt when I was a child. Bad things happened. Wars were being fought. Terrorism already existed. The difference was that I hadn't yet had any reason to understand those things. What really died that day wasn't the world's innocence, but mine.
And sometimes I think that, in that sense, the terrorists really did win.
Not because they destroyed America, and not because they achieved everything they wanted. They didn't. But because they managed to change the way an entire generation saw the world. They took an ordinary Tuesday morning and turned it into a dividing line in history. For me, they also turned childhood into adulthood a little earlier than it otherwise might have happened.
Twenty-five years later, I can still remember sitting in front of the television and watching those images unfold. I can remember the fear, the warships, the curfew and the strange feeling that the world had suddenly become something I no longer recognised. I can remember that medevac flight, surrounded by injured soldiers, and the desperate reason my family was travelling home alongside them.
And I can remember getting to the hospital and finding out that, somehow, my auntie had survived the night.
She wasn't supposed to.
But she did.
That was the first time I learned that even when you're certain something is about to end, sometimes it doesn't.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the last time I would have to learn that lesson.
