In a context which I will not go into here, my friend Doyce wrote, “No one ever talks about the Pentagon attack anymore. I wonder why that is. I wonder if it’s on purpose.”
I wonder why that is, too.
Do people feel that, somehow, the Pentagon was a legitimate target, and so it doesn’t have the horror of the WTC?
Is it that the death toll, and the visual drama of the destruction is so much less?
Is it that there were not so many rescue worker lives lost at the Pentagon?
Is it that there’s already reconstruction work underway at the Pentagon, but they’re still working on clearing the WTC site?
Is it that military lives somehow count for less?
I have to wonder … had only the Pentagon been hit, would the US (let alone its allies) have risen up in the way the did?
No answers, just uncomfortable suspicions on my part. I can only just keep referring to it as “9-11,” rather than “The WTC Attack” (which I hear people doing) or “All those dead people in New York” (which I also hear about).
It may be related to the notion that those in the military are expected to come together in tragedy, but grieve alone. The family members left behind may have a sense that the best way to honor the dead is to go on with their mission. To be honest, the amount of public grief expended on the marines (locally based) that have died in accidents in Afganistan seems to point at how we are not at war. If we were at war, would we have a public service for every member of the military that died?
Interesting.
Though I suspect it would take a much longer conflict, or one with significantly higher casualties, to keep each individual military death from being mourned with such foofoorah.
I was a Park Ranger at Glacier National Park on the 9/11 attacks. Imagine my surprise (and disgust) when my Supervisor at the Apgar Vistor Center told me that “The Pentagon was a legitimate target” for the terrorists. As you might guess, my response was VERY unprintable. I did, however, inform her that she ought to keep her remarks in her purview (biology) and to let those who know something about war determine what is Legitimate or not.
To the extent that someone could posit a “legitimate” target for an attack, a military HQ would seem to be it (as oppposed to civilian business buildings, or, for that matter, use of civilian aircraft with civilians aboard). Indeed, had the 9/11 attacks consisted only of large bombs placed at the Pentagon, or at similar DoD targets, I’m sure some folks would have been far less upset.
That wouldn’t have made the attacks any less worse, though, nor any less an act of war.