You know.. as someone born after the event.. I feel as if I can't grasp the full magnitude of 9/11. Like. I can fully grasp the tragedy of so many lives being lost. But since I never lived in pre 9/11 times I can't grasp the idea of why it was so massive
I wasn’t alive either but I think it just shattered a lot of peoples world view. I assume there was an air of safety, or peace. From what I understand no one could have possibly imagined something like that was even possible. Nowadays it’s joked about and seems obviously like something terrorists could do, but before that, no one would have believed you if you said it was about to happen.
No human being would actually hijack a plane full of innocent lives and deliberately fly it into a building full of thousands more. Until they did.
It had been a scenario in fiction for years. The most directly similar is from Tom Clancy. Written in 1994, "Debt of Honor" is the story of a short war between America and Japan, with the climax being a pilot flying a 747 into the capital building during a joint session of Congress with the President attending.
The book that immediately follows that is Executive Orders - starts in the aftermath where nearly the entire Senate, Congress, cabinet, President, and senior staff were killed in that attack - how does a nearly empty government pickup and continue?
I really enjoy both books, and following that is Rainbow Six, and one of my favorites - The Bear and the Dragon.
Early Clancy was great, I grew up reading most of his Ryan saga. It is a whole narrative that feeds off the last few books, you can see the threads. 12 books in all.
Al-Qaeda planned it to be dramatic, just like those fictional stories. The 20 minute delay between the planes hitting was very purposeful. They wanted and expected people to be watching.
266
u/Norway643 14h ago
You know.. as someone born after the event.. I feel as if I can't grasp the full magnitude of 9/11. Like. I can fully grasp the tragedy of so many lives being lost. But since I never lived in pre 9/11 times I can't grasp the idea of why it was so massive