We admired the plainness of this story’s language. It is as if the horror of the event stripped Henninger’s voice of all pretense. He gives a blow-by-blow account, with summation in only one paragraph. The piece was published the day after the attacks, but this paragraph has a remarkable level of perspective and still resonates today:
It was impossible to think. It was perfectly obvious that identifiable Middle East terrorists had done all this and the United States and its new president would be obliged to respond on some very large scale. For all that, the depth of the evil and nihilism was numbing to behold, though in truth the beholding was over. The people in the airliners, the people coming off the top floors of the buildings, the bodies at the bottom beneath the rubble, all these souls evaporated in one clear morning in September.
Read “I Saw It All. Then I Saw Nothing.” by Daniel Henninger