As the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks passed this month, a writer for the conservative outlet RedState published a personal recollection of that day, arguing that Americans who lived through the attacks have an obligation to keep telling their stories before the generation that remembers is gone.
The writer, Jen Van Laar, was 29 years old and working as a freelance court reporter near Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 11, 2001. She was assigned to cover a North Carolina Utilities Commission hearing on cell phone towers, held not downtown but in a conference room at North Carolina State University because it was a public-comment forum rather than a formal hearing.
The hearing had already started when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. A man arrived late and told the room a small plane had struck the towers, explaining that his sister worked there and had called him. About an hour later, the same man interrupted the proceedings again, this time to say it had not been a small plane at all — a second jet had hit the other tower, the Pentagon had also been struck, and all air travel in the country had been grounded. He wanted attendees who had flown into Raleigh to know, so they could arrange other ways home.
During a break, Van Laar stood in the lobby with a group of construction workers watching ceiling-mounted televisions. The first tower collapsed while they watched.
“I wondered, how many people just died in front of my eyes? How many moms and dads were never coming home?”
She had two sons at the time, 7 and 4 years old. Her then-husband had the younger boy, Jacob, with him at the family’s commercial office supply business. She wanted to retrieve both children immediately, but her older son’s school would not release students until officials had a better sense of what was happening, and the hearing she was covering had not yet been dismissed. The meeting was eventually recessed indefinitely. By the time she got home, her older son, Spencer, was already on his way there by school bus.
The family lived about 20 miles from Fort Bragg, and many of the fathers at Spencer’s elementary school were active-duty military. Within weeks, most were deployed. Van Laar wrote that the school community responded with visible patriotism, including a sign made of painted plastic cups that stayed up for more than a month.
The family traveled to New York City that December, taking advantage of low airfares to see the city and pay respects near Ground Zero. Van Laar described the grief as still palpable in lower Manhattan, with trucks hauling away single steel beams from the site one at a time. Although the fire at Ground Zero was officially extinguished on December 20, she wrote that smoke was still visible rising from the rubble on December 26.
An argument for bearing witness
Van Laar’s broader point was about memory and denial. She noted that as fewer people who lived through September 11 remain, the attacks become more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and denialism — pointing to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s past description of the attacks as “some people did something.”
She drew a parallel to Holocaust denial she says she has encountered in political circles, contrasting it with her grandmother’s accounts of her grandfather’s service in the Signal Corps with the Ninth Army during World War II, including his discovery of a concentration camp shortly after its liberation.
“Because I have that personal witness from my grandparents, I’m not at all inclined to entertain denialism.”
Van Laar’s third son was born in 2003 and has known September 11 only as history. She wrote that she intends to make sure he, and any grandchildren, never forget it.
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