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The rest of the city was strangely quiet, missing something, like when you have a tooth pulled and keep feeling for the space with your tongue. The World Trade Center towers were so big they had their own ZIP code; will that number now be retired, like that of a baseball hero suddenly gone? Amid the cortege of families wandering from hospital to hospital--Have you seen my wife, she was six months pregnant, on the 94th floor?--one man had a postcard of the Twin Towers, with the message written: THEY ARE MISSING. I AM LOOKING FOR THESE TWO GREAT BROTHERS OF NEW YORK.
O God, our help in ages past Our hope for years to come. Our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home...
At Washington National Cathedral on Friday, the Day of Remembrance, they sang these old hymns, the ones sung after wars broke out and Presidents died. There sat five Presidents and the generals and statesmen who came to hear lessons about mercy and justice, about the temptations of vengeance and the duties of leadership. Congress had become a coalition government; defense is not foreign policy anymore, it's domestic. President Bush declared a state of emergency and called up the reserves; Congress wrote a $40 billion check. Soldiers at home and around the world were on high alert, and ready; 200 of their comrades had been burned and buried alive at the very command center of armed force. "This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger," the President said. "This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing."
But it will also come in a way we still cannot imagine, because we are fighting an enemy we have never met. Suicide bombers are supposed to be 17-year-old zealots with nothing to live for but the hope of a martyr's welcome by 72 virgins in paradise. These men, the FBI reveals, lived middle-class lives, had degrees and jobs and wives and kids and a willingness to leave them all to kill us. Among the casualties last week was our sweet certainty that anyone lucky enough to be able to live in America, share its vices and freedoms and gifts, surely would not want to destroy it.
Colin Powell, the wartime general, was back out front, pulling together the support of allies in both the hunt and the fight and letting others know that from this point on, if you do not act as our friend, we will consider you our enemy. Bush and Powell didn't have to work hard to mount a coalition, though, because the bombers had done the job so effectively. As many as 500 Britons are feared to have died in the World Trade Center, along with Colombians, Canadians, Australians, Japanese, Egyptians and countless others; the terrorists had unified their opponents in an instant. The band played the U.S. national anthem during the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Dublin's shops closed for a day of mourning, and Canadian stores sold out of American flags. WE ARE ALL AMERICANS, was the headline in Le Monde.