All week people have been asking each other — and themselves — if they remember what they were doing on 9/11, ten years ago. What did we think, and how did we feel?

I remember clearly what I did, because I didn’t get to do anything I had planned. I just watched unbelievingly, not knowing what to think. I was too emotionally numb to know how I felt.

I’ve written a daily journal for more than fifty years, and I have this record. Yet, as I read it again, I don’t think it says it all. Added to the confusion of the day is ten years of accumulated confusion. This, for what it’s worth, is what I wrote then:

“… Ann came rushing in to turn on the television. She had heard on radio there were dramatic pictures of a fire in the World Trade Center in New York. At this point there was speculation that it would have had to be a plane that flew into the side of one of the two towers. Nothing else could have caused this explosion and fire. Yet, planes never fly within a mile of the building and no pilot could not have seen it. As speculation continued, there was another explosion on camera. When this was replayed slower, we could clearly see an airliner fly directly into the side of the other tower. Not long after this, a third airliner flew into the Pentagon. Not long after that a fourth crashed in western Pennsylvania.

“I could but recall my efforts in MDW [Military District of Washington] eleven years ago to get someone to pay attention to the lack of defensive plans against a terrorist attack, but most seemed to feel it couldn’t happen there. However, even those of us who believed it could never thought it would happen this way. We envisioned a force on the ground that could be engaged. …

“We had both televisions on for most of the day and evening. Allison phoned several times, and we phoned Mark and then Stephen. My mind went to Oklahoma City immediately, because this is so similar to their event. Stephen [living there] said people just exchanged looks without having to say anything.

“In a news conference by New York Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani, one of the reporters asked: ‘Do you expect further attacks?’ The mayor gave a very good answer to an understandable question about estimated casualties: ‘Whatever the number, it is more than we can tolerate.’

“I’m not sure what to make of Peter Jennings. He was strongly resisting all the suggestions of Arab involvement. It is difficult to tell if he was just trying to be professionally objective or if he has his own agenda. Most notably, he pulled up short ABC’s own military advisor. He said to John McCain: ‘What’s on your mind’ (emphasis on the pronoun). He almost demanded that Orin Hatch contact him so he could grill him on a statement he made to Barbara Walters. When he put Hatch on, he thanked him for calling and Hatch corrected him, ‘You called me.’ He had passed on a statement made by a top CIA official and Jennings weighed into him on this. He called Jennings up short: ‘Don’t pull that on me, Peter. I am just telling you what the CIA told me.’

“Jennings is correct in being cautious about jumping to the conclusion that this is the work of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi native hiding in the Afghan desert. Yet, people knowledgeable about what it takes to carry out something like this all agree he is the only one capable. I feel that the UN, or the US if it must do it alone, must hold Afghanistan directly responsible to deliver bin Laden up for interrogation. If they don’t, we should occupy the country and dig him out.”

In the sixteen weeks to the end of that year, I wrote here twelve columns on the startling event itself and the new concept of global terrorism thrust upon us. There had been no replication of 9/11, but the world has changed because of it—and not at all for the better. It doesn’t look as if we will ever be the same.

It seems to me we are more lucky than safer. We are still mired in the longest and most costly war in our history. Counter-terrorism has become an industry, and fear a way of life. Will this madness ever end?