September 11th/12th 2001

If my calculations and the time difference is right, the attacks on The World Trade Centre that occurred on September 11th 2001 actually occurred on 12th September in my part of the world, Wellington, New Zealand.

I remember my wife at the time waking me up with the radio playing, to say something about a plane crashing into The World Trade Centre in New York. The news had little effect on me. I was waking up to another day as a nurse aide at Wellington hospital, general ward 14.

As we didn't have a television, we weren't privy to the visceral images of the planes plunging into the buildings against that clear blue sky the buildings collapsing or the ghostly looking people coated in fine dust or the plumes of wreckage pouring down the New York streets and avenues, so the news that came over the radio was tame compared to what was being witnessed all around the globe.

I was on an early shift, 8AM to 3.30PM. I got up, showered, ate breakfast and went to work. Once there it was straight into the never ending list of things to be done. As per usual there were nurses busy changing shift, meetings, briefings, patient reports, laundry, new admissions, releases, beds to be stripped and made, breakfast to hand out, tea and coffee to be made, shit to clean up.

Slowly the news would filter through in snippets. What started as an occasional remark built, as the day progressed and more and more became thee topic of the day. Still, it had little effect on me, I barely gave it a second thought, something else bad was happening in another part of the world, I had work to do, always too much work to do.

My lasting memories of the talk during that normal working day are two separate statements made by people who had seen the news footage and were following the updates on the television situated in the visitor room. I remember an English nurse describing it as "a work of art" which left me bemused, and a patient saying that "They (presumably the American people) had it coming".

I finished work, tired as usual, but by now the talk was off little else. Thousands dead, buildings collapsing, the Pentagon bombed, America under attack from the air, all kinds of rumour and speculation. I signed my time sheet and left work, not once thinking about the fact that I had spent the day on the top floor of the highest building in Wellington Hospital.

When I got home, my wife asked me if I had heard any more news and I probably said something along the lines of yes, but thinking no. I imagine we talked about it. I hadn't seen any footage so it's impact on me was lessened than that of the millions watching from around the globe.

I tuned into The World Service and the talk was off what had unfolded. I was shocked to discover that yes, it had been an deliberate terrorist attack, and that another hijacked plane had crashed in a field and that the bombing off The Pentagon was in fact yet another hijacked plane, but soon I grew weary of the barrage of opinion and rhetoric, and turned the radio off, turned on some music, ate, read and went to sleep without thinking much more about it. That was September 12th. 2001, Wellington, New Zealand.

I had been in New York only two years earlier. Had seen the 'twin towers' from all angles, but they had left no lasting impression on me, unlike say, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chrysler building, the Guggenheim or the Dakota Buildings where John Lennon had been murdered...no, the twin towers didn't really fit with my overall memory of that great city, not until much later. Not in fact until I saw the space left from where they once stood, the void remaining. It was the lack of them that made more of an impression than the buildings themselves.

The next day I bought a paper, a "commemorative" issue of The Wellington Post, and I thought about other commemoratives, and I imagine these things came to mind...the 1977 Queen's Silver Jubilee, the Northern Ireland hunger strikers, the first space shuttle blast off, the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London, the Hillsborough disaster, the Enniskillen remembrance Sunday bombing. On reading, the enormity of what had occurred on that day started to sink in. "Would the world ever be the same again"? "New York's Pearl Harbour", the headlines read.

Some time later I found a tourist map of Manhattan, a keep sake from my time in New York, and there on the cover, shot from an amateurish angle were those huge towers. Looking at a photograph of me and my wife taken on the Brooklyn bridge, there they were again. A shot from the Staten Island ferry and they're dead centre. In movies and documentaries with scenes shot in New York, they always featuerd.

I've watched only two related documentaries since that time. Jules Naudet's film "9/11", shot by him and his brother who by chance, happened to be making a documentary at the time about a New York Firehouse...what ogreish serendipity. The other was a poetic film by Henry Singer and Richard Numeroff called "The Falling Man" about the identity of a man who jumped or fell from one of the towers, caught in a series off still images by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew. That for me was enough. I have no need to see any associated images or footage again. They are seared into my memory.

What happened in the aftermath is history. The invasion of Iraq, the overthrow and demise of Saddam Hussein, the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan and of course most recently the killing of the man widely blamed as the mastermind and financial backer of the attacks ten years ago, Osama Bin Laden.

But that's not what this is about. September 11th. 2001 will forever be a, "where were you when you heard" day, this is simply my memory and my experience of that day. Run of the mill, unremarkable, mundane, tiring, work a day, ordinary and safe, in my own part off the world and my own place in the world.

Apocalypse Over Hiroshima...

Hiroshima Watch stopped at the moment of the atomic bomb blast

66 years ago, on the 6th. August 1945 at 8:15 AM, America exploded the first Atomic bomb, the first recorded use of a weapon of mass destruction, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Those nearest the blast vanished instantly, vaporized or turned to carbon. The estimated death toll from the original blast was 70,000 men women and children, 30% of the cities population. Hiroshima city itself was mostly annihilated. Turned to dust, disappeared. The only buildings that survived were those that had been reinforced against earthquake.

Those further away from the epicenter of the blast reported a noiseless flash off pure white  light. The flash was so intense, the pattern of women's summer dresses where burned onto their skin, macabre tattoos. The burns sustained were horrifying beyond belief, skin burned black and sloughed off. People reported seeing dead butterflies floating to earth in flames and the outlines of bodies scorched onto paving stones.

After the initial blast a second wave of destruction spread from the epicenter destroying almost everything in it's path, this was followed by a devastating fire storm. Black rain fell from the sky, composed of ash and smoke sucked up into the huge mushroom cloud. People, desperate for water drank this radioactive rain. Days later many died as a direct result of drinking this poison rain.

Soon after the initial bombing, people started to display symptoms of radiation sickness; hair loss, vomiting, massive internal hemorrhaging, necrosis, profuse bleeding from wounds, that could not be abated and eventually death.

The American's chose Hiroshima for a reason. It had been left intact, unlike 67 other Japanese cities that had been fire bombed into ashes, and so would serve as a living laboratory, a chance to study the effects of the Atom bomb on buildings  and people. The people of Hiroshima would serve as the guinea pigs in this experiment in mass destruction. Even the American scientists were not prepared for the utter devastation not only of the blast itself but of the radiation sickness that followed. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists that worked on the A - Bomb project was quoted as saying later, "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds". He would go on to campaign against the use of Atomic weapons and against the post war escalation of nuclear weapons.

The reasons given for the use of the Atomic bomb were said to avoid an inevitable invasion of the Japanese mainland by the allied forces. True, the Japanese leaders seemed hell bent on self sacrifice rather than surrender, expecting every man woman and child to die defending the honour of the Japanese nation. But would this really have happened? Japan was a nation on the brink of starvation, some reported not having had white rive in over a year. It's people were tired and and broken by an un-winnable war. Germany, Japan's main ally had already surrendered, Russia had declared war on Japan and were preparing for an invasion. It's impossible to say what the outcome of an invasion of the Japanese would have wrought, but the estimate at the time of millions of allied troops being killed in hindsight sounds like an over exaggeration, and so the debate continues on the reason for the use of the A-Bomb. After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese high command refused to the terms of surrender proposed by the allies, and on August the 9th. a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Although the devastation was nothing like that off the Hiroshima bombing, 50,000 people still lost their lives.

The final death total is estimated in the region of a quarter of a million people, most of them civilians. For this alone, the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a reminder of the real cost of war. Memorials remind us of the suffering and inevitable futility of war in all it's guises, for in war there are no victors.

For further reading, go to John Hersey's book "Hiroshima"

14 Days in May...BBC Documentary

This documentary released in 1987 is a look at the last fourteen days in the life of Edward Earl Johnson while he awaits execution on death row in a Mississippi, USA prison. We watch as the days tick by and his public defender and lawyer, English born Clive Stafford Smith desperately tries every avenue to appeal and over turn the sentence of death by gas chamber. Johnson fought and lost an eight year appeal against a conviction for murder. We hear how the confession was extracted and signed under duress.

By the end of the film no one, guards and inmates alike are left in doubt of his innocence and it gradually becomes obvious that it's a near certainty that an innocent man ends up dying as a result of this state sanctioned murder.

The film is unique in it's intimacy. We not only get a look at the Mississippi justice and penal system in all it's appalling rawness, but we watch the effect of the wait for news of Jones's appeal on his family, his jailers, his fellow inmates, his lawyer and finally the man himself.

Clive Stafford Smith is seen receiving the news that all appeals have failed and the camera follows him as he walks to tell his client that all hope is gone. It is chilling to watch as Smith puts his arm around Jones, head bowed and delivers the verdict.

Jones exhibits remarkable bravery and composure in the face of this nightmare unfolding around him. The tragedy of watching him, surrounded by his family as he eats his last meal, still believing that a reprieve is at hand is almost unbearable. It doesn't bear to think about this young man's last moments, killed for a crime he denied committing right up to the very end of his life.

A harrowing document of a gross miscarriage of justice. Witness the prison warden more or less admit that he is not sure of Jone's guilt. We witness too the effect of the cyanide gas as it is tested on a live rabbit, and can only imagine the agony Jones went through after all hope is gone and he is put to death. It takes him twelve minutes to die we are told by the warden, at a press conference on a typically steamy Mississippi May night.