8 Years Ago

For me, September 11, 2001 was pretty uneventful. I am one of the few Americans who, when asked about 9/11, have to retrieve my shock from a mental file labeled 9/12.

I was in Kwangyang, South Korea serving as a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The attacks happened right around midnight local time. I learned about them at 6:40 am, while I was studying scriptures with my companion.

The phone rang and my supervisor told me there had been an attack on America. Something about explosions and planes in New York and Washington, and we were to stay inside that day until we were sure it wasn't open-season on Americans.

A while later I received a call from a friend in Naju. She asked if I'd heard about the attacks, and I begged her for details. She spoke excellent English, and almost always spoke to us in our own language. She told me about the planes and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and I passed the information on to my companion.

Then she said, "The towers are gone."

To which I replied, "Gone?!" It made zero sense, and I figured she just mistranslated something, so I switched to Korean. "No longer exists?" I asked. She agreed. "Completely gone?" Again in Korean.

"Completely gone."

I can't exactly remember what happened next. I remember sitting down. I remember being lost for words (the only one I could find was "How?"). I remember staring into the middle distance (and I'd always thought that a cliche). While I sat stunned, she gave me what details were known about the hijackings.

About an hour later, my supervisor called back with actual details, nothing I didn't know now, and told us we were allowed to go out. We had shopping to do, so we went out. Every store and restaurant in town had TVs set to CNN, where we saw the attacks and subsequent falling towers. It was unreal. Looked like bad special effects. We all know what it looked like.

The Koreans were great. They expressed sympathy to us, and were nothing but kind. They knew what it was to see your country attacked. They had been there. They understood.

I finally understood them.