A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  ‘That’s no accident,’ he mused. ‘Those are terrorists.’

  At that moment the World Trade Center’s South Tower collapsed.

  To Stroman, the true horror of 9/11 lay not in the planes’ impact, or even the razing of the buildings: it was watching the jumpers. Death itself didn’t frighten him – it was the process of death, the suffering that preceded it.

  ‘Those people who fell from the towers, they suffered,’ he would later explain to a reporter from KDFW-TV. ‘Those people who tried to take back that plane over Pennsylvania, they suffered.’

  Perhaps it was the thought of this suffering that kept him glued to the screen all day. He didn’t return to work. He sat and watched TV. All the stations were the same: first came the real-time footage, then the replays, then back to the live feeds.

  Rummaging frantically for appropriate precedents, newscasters dredged up the same metaphor again and again: Pearl Harbor.

  There were similarities. An airborne operation, a sneak attack, many dead. At the same time, however, the attack was strangely redolent of the Cold War: sleeper cells in the United States, a faceless enemy, the President airborne, the Vice-President in a bunker. Even the term applied to the wreckage was pilfered from the Cold War period: ‘Ground Zero’, the core of a nuclear detonation. The attack was unprecedented, catastrophic. Nothing would ever be the same again. Not for Mark Stroman, anyway.

  Shortly after his arrest, in an attempt to explain his actions, Stroman circulated a handwritten manifesto to the Press. Titled ‘true American’, it gave an insight into his thinking at the time, regarding what was to become the key point of his legal defence: that he was a patriot, acting in self-defence during wartime. In the document he pulled out all the stops, describing the United States as ‘The land of the free, home of the brave, the land of the Pilgrims [sic] Pride, land for which my forefathers died.’ America was ‘the land of milk and honey’, ‘this great country’, ‘our country, my country’.

  Stroman was not alone in his predilection for saccharine, patriotic imagery. As the dust cloud settled over lower Manhattan, public figures called for ‘moral clarity’, then outdid each other in the search for increasingly eloquent ways to explain what had happened. Like the Press, the most apposite image the politicians could come up with was Pearl Harbor. Second World War metaphors proved strangely reassuring: back then, things were simpler. We knew who we were, and who our enemies were. Back then, the war was clearly someone else’s fault. We could fight the enemy abroad, then go home. Back then, we won.

  Commentators struggled to portray the magnitude of the attacks’ significance. 9/11 was not a mere historical event, it was ‘the day the world changed’. New York became ‘our city’, Rudolph Giuliani ‘America’s mayor’. ‘History began today’ proclaimed the newspapers. Biblical imagery was rolled out in force, as if it might vaccinate against the sense of insecurity that had gripped the nation. Casualties of the attack did not die tragically or pointlessly rather ‘made the ultimate sacrifice’ in the name of freedom. Firemen were heroes. Policemen were heroes. Victims were heroes. Everyone was a hero.

  This flood of patriotic imagery opened the way for escalation. 9/11 wasn’t about short-sighted foreign policy, globalization or aggrieved Arabs. It was about evil.

  ‘This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil,’ explained President George W. Bush on 12 September 2001. ‘But good will prevail.’

  A week later, he elaborated.

  ‘The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the hope of every time now depends on us,’ he told Congress. ‘We have found our mission.’

  The battle lines were drawn: freedom and fear were at war. This oversimplification – heroes and villains, good and evil – led unerringly to a false dichotomy.

  ‘Every nation in every region now has a decision to make,’ warned the President. ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’

  Like a poker player who has just lost big to a complete novice, the United States raised the stakes and bet the house. History had called. Civilization was at risk. With stakes this high, what else could we do but declare war?

  The result was a patriotic bonanza. On 11 September 2001, Walmart’s sales of US flags leapt 2,000 per cent. The next day the figure was up to 4,000 per cent. By early October, 80 per cent of Americans were flying the flag at home. Stroman certainly was: he went out and bought a new flag to fly from the back of his truck.

  A Presidential Prayer Team, launched in late September, boasted that by mid-December more than a million Americans were praying daily for their Commander-in-Chief.

  With the country at war, it now became impossible to question government policy without being labelled unpatriotic. Those who pointed out that the White House’s rhetoric was edging uncomfortably close to that of the Islamists who had perpetrated the attacks were shouted down. At one point, Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader, asked for clarification regarding the goals of the War on Terror.

  ‘How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our War on Terror!’ exclaimed Trent Lott, the Senate Minority Leader. ‘He should not be trying to divide our country while we are united!’

  Daschle’s impudence was branded as ‘disgusting’ and ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. He had, apparently, ‘chosen to align himself with the Axis of Evil’.

  Predictably, talk of retaliation was common. ‘revenge,’ crowed an editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News. ‘Hold on to that thought. Go to bed thinking it. Wake up chanting it. Because nothing less than revenge is called for today’

  Others were even more explicit. Columnist Ann Coulter delivered her verdict on 9/11 and what should be done about it in the National Review:

  This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack . . . We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

  Coulter later apologized for this rant, but followed it up with an acidic riposte to those who claimed that Americans might do well to consider the reasons they had been targeted on 9/11.

  ‘They hate us?’ she asked incredulously. ‘We hate them! America does not want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die.’

  The solution to the al-Qaeda problem was simple: the application of overwhelming firepower.

  ‘I say bomb the hell out of them,’ concluded Democrat Senator Zell Miller the day after 9/11. ‘If there’s collateral damage, so be it. They certainly found our civilians to be expendable.’

  Alongside the increase in rhetoric and flag-flying came more sinister forms of patriotism. On 12 September – the same day President Bush announced the ‘monumental struggle of good versus evil’ – Chicago’s largest predominantly Arab mosque was surrounded by an angry white mob chanting ‘Kill the Arabs!’

  Police advised Muslim schools to close for a week, and worshippers not to attend Friday prayers for their own safety. The impulse behind such protests was stated most bluntly in the graffiti (presumably scrawled by a member of the Boston Fire Department) at the World Trade Center site:

  Kill all Muslims

  9-11-01

  BFD

  At first people began spitting at foreign-looking individuals and pulling the veils from Muslim women in the street. Then things got worse. In Indianapolis, an Afghan man was set on fire. In New Jersey, a Pakistani was beaten unconscious. In Phoenix, vigilantes threw home-made bombs into the backyard of an Iraqi family. Salt Lake City’s Curry in a Hurry restaurant was burned to the ground.

  Ironically those most often in the firing line were Sikhs, not Muslims: they wore turbans, like Osama bin Laden. Opinion polls at the time indicated that the hostile mood was far more widespread than was ever admitted. Popular surveys held at the end of 2001 showed majority support for the assertion that Arabs in the United States should be forced to carry special identity cards, even if they were US citizens. One
poll asked whether all individuals of Middle Eastern appearance should be required to wear some form of visible identification indicating that they had been vetted by US authorities; half of those who responded agreed.

  Like most Americans, Stroman had not heard of al-Qaeda before September 2001. Even when he did, he wasn’t especially curious as to why the United States had been targeted. In his mind the organization was filed under the blanket term Ay-rabs’. This in turn was a subsection of another heading in his cognitive Rolodex: ‘Foreigners’. It was not a term of endearment. 9/11 confirmed all of Stroman’s worst suspicions. Not only were the sand niggers among us, not only were they taking advantage, but they were a threat. No doubt right at that moment there were cohorts of Ay-rabs around the United States booking themselves into out-of-the-way flying schools, learning how to pilot – but not to land – international jet airliners. Sitting and waiting for another strike was no longer an option. Now was not the time to err on the side of caution.

  Immediately after the attacks, Stroman started telling friends what he was going to do about al-Qaeda. Shy Galloway recalls a conversation in which he announced his intentions.

  ‘He’s gonna take care of all these Taliban, all these sand niggers. He said, “I’m gonna rob ’em, do whatever it takes.”’ Galloway thought this was pretty much par for the course: more Stroman tall tales. ‘I think he’s shooting the shit, you know? He said he was going around every convenience store . . . “Wherever there’s a sand nigger, I’m gonna take ’em down.”’

  Sometimes the tales drifted into the past tense. George Dodd, who employed Stroman at the time, remembers him alternating tales of what he planned to do with accounts of retaliatory derring-do that had apparently already taken place: ‘We were all talking about how we thought it was crap, you know, what happened, 9/11, and he said that he’d shot at some place or something. Front of a church or something like that.’ Like Galloway, Dodd put it down to bravado. ‘I never heard about it in the news. I just said, “You’re full of shit.”’

  But Stroman wasn’t full of shit. And he was about to prove it.

  Vasudev and Alka Patel were on the forecourt of the Shell station one evening at the start of October when they received their warning. A friend, Ranjid, showed up, having driven all the way from Arlington.

  ‘There’s a man going around Dallas after 9/11,’ he said. And he’s killing people.’ But he wasn’t just killing people. He was killing Asians.

  Vasudev didn’t believe it. It sounded highly unlikely: who would want to kill gas-station attendants? What did they have to do with 9/11? The Patels were from India! India had no connection to al-Qaeda. And he was a Hindu, not a Muslim. There was no reason why he should be targeted. Besides, the Patels had been in the neighbourhood for more than ten years; all of their customers knew them. They were regulars, friends. Beneath the 9/11 Remembrance Flag fluttering over his garage forecourt, Vasudev was adamant.

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ he assured his friend.

  Ranjid nodded. ‘Just be careful.’

  But Vasudev was always careful. That was why he kept a .22 semiautomatic under the cash register.

  * * *

  Stroman probably would have laughed had he known of the existence of Vasudev’s .22. Since childhood, he had maintained a strict meritocracy when it came to firearms, at the top of which lay ‘more’ and ‘more powerful’. For this reason, when he had moved in with the Templeton family in the summer of 2001, he was in his element. Bob Templeton was a gun collector; his father Billy, a licensed dealer. The house was crammed full of arms: for Stroman, moving in was like winning the lottery. Aside from the enjoyment he derived from handling the weapons, he was reassured by their presence.

  ‘I can sit there and lay back on the couch and look at all them guns,’ he told Bear Hartline when he moved in. ‘I just feel so safe.’

  He wasn’t alone. In the days after 9/11, domestic sales of arms and ammunition in the United States rose by 10 per cent. National Rifle Association membership enquiries leapt more than 100 per cent. In the six months after the attacks, the FBI handled 130,000 more applications for the right to carry a concealed weapon and 455,000 more checks for gun purchases.

  On the face of it, there was nothing wrong with this: the US Constitution guaranteed the right to bear arms as a means of self-defence. Post-9/11, however, Stroman’s understanding of‘self-defence’ shifted. If anyone thought that after 3,000 Americans were murdered so brutally he was going to hang around twiddling his thumbs until someone attacked him, they were sorely mistaken.

  Again, he was in tune with many Americans. According to the US government’s official line, it now became acceptable – necessary, even – to retaliate in advance of being attacked. Arabs in the United States were arrested. Phone lines and Internet hubs were tapped. American citizens were detained. This was war – with a difference.

  ‘The best defence against terrorism,’ explained Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on 16 September, ‘is offence.’

  History had restarted. The old rules were out of date. The gloves were coming off.

  ‘The only path to safety is the path of action,’ President Bush instructed cadets at West Point. ‘Our security . . . will require all Americans to be ready for pre-emptive action.’

  Stroman missed the speech on TV, but it didn’t matter. He was already on board.

  Every day since purchasing the Shell station in 1992, the Patels had followed a routine. Vasudev would start work at 5.30 a.m., cleaning up the station, turning on the radio and opening for business. At 6.30, he would ring Alka, so she could prepare breakfast for the children and take them to school.

  Alka was already up when Vasudev called on 4 October 2001. A good thing, too: his brother and his kids were staying, so, in addition to dropping off her two children at school, she had his children to deal with. Three different school-runs. She had just completed the first and returned home to collect the next child when the owner of the gas station across the street telephoned. Something was going on, he told her. It looked like there had been a robbery.

  ‘Is my husband OK?’ asked Alka.

  ‘He’s fine. But you need to come over.’

  Alka arrived at the station to find the forecourt ringed with crime-scene tape. When police refused to allow her in, she became concerned.

  ‘Where’s my husband?’ she asked an officer. ‘Is he all right?’

  He was fine, he replied, but had hurt his hand. He’d been taken to Mesquite Community Hospital. Not to worry, though: he’d walked into the ambulance and was talking at the time.

  Acting on this advice, Alka headed home to drop the other kids off at school. She then drove to the community hospital to see about Vasudev’s injured hand. Another police officer was waiting in the lobby.

  ‘Are you Mrs Patel?’ he asked. When she nodded, he directed her to the visiting room. A few moments later, a doctor ambled in, looked at Alka, then down at his clipboard.

  ‘You already know your husband’s dead, right?’ he asked.

  Alka was so shocked she didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘If I had known that,’ she said, ‘do you think I would even be able to come here?’

  While Alka was struggling to accept the fact that Vasudev was gone, Stroman was cruising around town in his Thunderbird. He was becoming increasingly agitated. He was itching to tell someone what he’d just done, but it was still early and no one was around. What was the point of having a secret if you couldn’t share it?

  At 10.30, he pulled into Garcia’s Garage at 11606 Garland, where he found the owner Jesse Garcia moving cars out of the shop for the day. Stroman was actually looking for Shy Galloway, but he hadn’t arrived yet, so the pair shot the breeze. After a couple of minutes, he looked at his watch. He hadn’t come to make idle conversation. He lit a cigarette and turned away.

  ‘If you see Shy,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘tell him I came by looking for him.’ Then, beside the car, he stopped. This was
just too good an opportunity to waste. ‘Hey’ he said, ‘c’m ’ere.’

  As Garcia approached the Thunderbird, Stroman opened the passenger door and lifted out a black bag full of weapons including an AK-47, a shotgun and a machine pistol.

  ‘It’s an Uzi,’ he told Garcia.

  The garage owner, a gun fan himself, was impressed, but concerned.

  ‘Mark,’ he warned, ‘if they pull you over and find this stuff, they’re going to take you to jail.’

  Stroman shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If they pull me over, they’re not gonna take me alive. You’re gonna see me on TV.’

  Garcia passed this off as run-of-the-mill Stroman banter.

  ‘That’s what he’d always tell us, me and Ronnie,’ he says, seven years later. ‘“You’re gonna see me on TV one day. You’re gonna hear about it in the news. I’m gonna be famous.”’

  Perhaps Stroman sensed that Garcia didn’t believe him. Perhaps he couldn’t resist it. It was time to spill the beans. He pulled out one more gun, a chrome-plated Smith & Wesson .44 with a long barrel, opened the cylinder and spun it.

  ‘Guess what?’ he said. ‘I just shot me a sand nigger.’

  When Tom Boston’s ice maker took a dump at the end of September, some might have thought it was fate. Boston wasn’t among them. He was just pissed. He bought a new one. Two days later, that took a dump, too. Now he was really pissed. Boston was heading home along Big Town Boulevard with a third ice maker in the back of his pickup when, approaching the junction, he noticed the crime tape.

  ‘Damn!’ he said, to no one in particular. ‘I wonder what happened there?’

  He pulled over and approached a news reporter, who told him that someone had been shot.

  ‘Who?’ asked Boston. The journalist didn’t know, but told him it was a young man, and that he was dead. Boston went home, unloaded the ice maker, then headed back along Big Town Boulevard to the body shop. On the way, he passed the Shell station again.