Hard for us old folks to believe, but kids entering college this month weren’t even born when September 11, 2001 became seared into the collective psyche of the United States of America. So, here we are on the 20th anniversary of that most tragic day, and what do we remember? The footage of the planes flying into the World Trade Center towers, for sure. The shaky cam shots of horrified people covered in ash and running uptown to save their lives. A handful of other images that some of us just can’t bear to see again.
What is great about the new series ‘Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror’ is that it recaps the day, but then moves forward into a deep dive of what has happened since then. The actual “war” part – how it came to be, the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, as well as the shady side of things: profiteering, among them.
The 5 episode docuseries begins with “The System Was Blinking Red” and recounts the years leading up to 2001. The message is, “maybe you didn’t expect planes into buildings, but these terrorists absolutely let it be known that trouble was coming.” But why? What were they reacting to so strongly? One thing we know for a fact, it sure as hell wasn’t because they “hate our freedom.”
Each one-hour episode takes us along the timeline, and lest you think the filmmakers have a political agenda, most of the sound bites that aren’t from actual victims that day, come from White House insiders. People like Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales, who served in the George W. Bush administration are given seemingly unlimited time on camera to explain things from their vantage points – including some things most of us may not have heard before.
The most recent image many of us have of the war in Afghanistan is that of a hasty, chaotic retreat from Kabul last month. As if the last day was somehow more tragic or important or newsworthy than so many other days that preceded it over twenty years. The doc explains in much greater detail what was happening on the ground, how Osama bin Laden was taken out, and why it was inevitable that the dreaded Taliban would come back to control the country known as the “Graveyard of Empires.”
I was working on TV that day, bringing whatever details we were getting in real time to a Washington DC area audience. My parents had retired from the Pentagon just 8 years earlier. I had previously taken that American Airlines flight from DC to Los Angeles. In other words, while I was/am grateful to not have known anyone hurt or killed that day, there were few enough degrees of separation to give me chills twenty years later.
I didn’t watch this series lightly, but I feel better informed, my memory has been refreshed. It was worthwhile and well done.
And to all those kids entering college: watch, read, learn, study. Keep the memory alive for another generation.
‘Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror’ is now streaming on Netflix.
