The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11. Garrett M. Graff. New York, NY: Avid Reader Press, 2019.
Writing about 9/11 demands a lot from an author. This difficulty takes on a special hue after surviving the attacks and living with their aftermath for eighteen years. Writing about 9/11 is not, of course, precisely the same as the event itself, but it turns out that writing about, reading about, and remembering 9/11 has incredible power to shape and reshape a defining event.
9/11 demands that an author re-tell a story of sweeping geographic range; this is not only because three planes hit iconic buildings and a fourth was flown into U.S. soil, but because the story of the hijackers, the means that allowed them to board those planes, and all that came after they crashed are global by their very nature, which means engaging with the tricky dynamic of paying close attention to precise locations that are separated by vast distances. 9/11 demands that an author mark time. This can mean telling the story that led up to the attacks, or chronicling how the attacks unfolded on that Tuesday, or tracing the fallout from the attacks. 9/11 is also a story about people and the institutions that make them even as it is about how people make and remake institutions, which means a writer is under considerable pressure in choosing what to place in the foreground. Is it best to start with the fact that this person was a flight attendant on a plane that crashed into the north tower, or are their name and their individual history the things to emphasize first?
The narrative requirements of 9/11 to tell of people and places on that day and over time are particularly heavy eighteen years after the attacks. The events of 9/11 aren’t quite long enough ago to be obviously the stuff of history; they exist in living memory for many Americans. But they are far enough in the past that those who were born after the attacks are moving into new phases of their lives as they become adults and take on new responsibilities without ever having experienced first hand a world that wasn’t molded and remolded, made and remade, by the attacks.
Garrett Graff’s The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 is an important addition, at once panoramic and immediate, to the growing canon of books about 9/11. What I found especially remarkable is how Graff arranges the story of that day. Telling an oral history of 9/11 in 2019 means pulling in two different directions at once: creating the immediacy of the day itself and re-telling the story of that day through the distance of time. Graff meets this challenge, narrating the day and its implications across more than 500 pages. He uses a wide-angle lens to recreate the events of 9/11 from the perspective of some 480 people in their own words.
Previous nonfiction about 9/11 is an important backdrop to Graff’s work. Graff goes back in time to put the reader inside the day itself, but accounts by government actors and based on government documents are also central to understanding what happened that day because they tell the long and complicated stories of what led up to that Tuesday. Steven Coll’s Ghost Wars about the CIA’s activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the decades before 9/11, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower about fractures within and between the FBI and the CIA in the runup to the attacks, Graff’s own The Threat Matrix, a history of the post-Hoover FBI, and, of course, The 9/11 Commission Report are the touchstones of these kinds of accounts. And while individual people are vividly drawn, whether FBI agents John O’Neill and Ali Soufan in Wright’s book or the flight attendants, such as Betty Ong, in the Commission’s report, it is still clear that these are, at heart, accounts of the internal working of the U.S. government, often in response to the workings of other governments or non-state actors. The inner workings of bureaucratic systems are illuminated. Another account, Mitchell Zuckoff’s Fall and Rise, inverts these dynamics, foregrounding the experiences of people; the systems are illuminated, but not as sharply or brightly.
Individual experiences told by the people themselves of that Tuesday are the heart of The Only Plane in the Sky. The stories come from a variety of sources, including interviews Graff himself conducted, but they are also drawn from his work with Jenny Pachucki, listening to thousands of oral histories that were collected by institutions. Parts of the book appeared in Graff’s 2016 Politico Magazine article “We’re The Only Plane in the Sky,” a supremely compelling moment-by-moment chronicle of that Tuesday by the occupants of Air Force One in their own words. The book-length version is as absorbing as the article, but vastly expands the range of voices. Graff certainly still gives air to government officials, but also conveys the experiences of people in the towers and on the planes and those who received phone calls from people in the towers and on the planes.
As numerous voices fill the book, they are very often talking about places and locations. Graff’s book goes inside some of the places you’d expect: the planes themselves, the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the Capitol. But he also travels to less expected locations: from the International Space Station to submarines and surface vessels, and from the alternate location for the Pentagon at Raven Rock to the alternate congressional location at Mount Weather. I felt smoothly shuttled between these places through the tight organization of the book. Focusing intensely on one location for one period of time—Graff’s chapter on “Midmorning at the Capitol” is typical—before turning to focus on another location—shortly after the chapter on the Capitol, Graff joins Air Force One “At Barksdale Air Force Base.”
President George W. Bush listens as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informs him of a second plane hitting the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001. (Winn McNamee/Reuters)
The book is immediate and intense. Its 60-plus chapters often have titles that are about a specific event or timeframe of the day: “Tuesday Begins,” “The Military Gears Up,” “After the Collapse,” “Searching,” and “The Day Ends.” Within each chapter the order of events as described by the speakers pulls the narrative forward. “The Hijackings” shows this vividly as it moves from 8:09 a.m. to 8:44, the moment of impact when American Airlines Flight 11 hits the north tower. Graff works minute by minute, but also leaps ahead creating an accordion effect, stretching out short durations of time and compressing longer ones. The Only Plane in the Sky is immensely moving, capturing the entire day by lingering over defining events and actions. 9/11 is vividly presented; Graff stays in the moment and moves inexorably, relentlessly forward.
What’s more, tight focus on the day itself allows Graff to point out fissures that would only grow in the days after 9/11. I experienced this most powerfully in his chapter “The 9/11 Generation.” Hiba Elaasar from Louisiana recalls, “I was a pretty shy and quiet child, but I had made my first friend on my own. After that day, my friend came over and said, “We can’t be friends anymore, Hiba.”[1] And Manar Hussein from New Jersey remembers, “The words were foreign to these third-graders, but the word ‘Islamic’ they knew very well—it was the word I had used to introduce myself in the early days of school...I couldn’t help but feel ashamed and apologetic for something that had nothing to do with me.”[2]
To end the book Graff walks through each day of the week that followed the attacks, then he stretches to the weeks after the attacks and then the months and then years. The epilogue closes with people talking in the present about how 9/11 comes back to them. Sharon Miller says, “I’m like, ‘Oh, 9:11, again.’ It just happens, something so simple like that.”[3]
Reliving 9/11 in The Only Plane in the Sky, for all the virtues of its thorough, up-close immediacy, comes with drawbacks. Most notably, the immersion in the day itself prevents the book from measuring those fissures it mentions; today they even take the form of “send her back” chants led by public officials, or the aftermath of eighteen years of war. Sticking to the day itself cuts off meaningful discussion of what came after 9/11 even though it seemed to me that Graff was determined to grapple with that. In his public appearances on podcasts—including 1A, Intelligence Matters, The Stacks and History Hit—and in print—including in Wired, Time, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal—to promote the book, Graff is persuasive in saying that the intense focus on the day itself from the distance of eighteen years calls attention to the differences between then and now, yesterday and today.
Even so, the relative silence of the book itself on issues such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—although he does talk briefly about the killing of Bin Laden both in the original article and in the book—changes in the makeup of the armed forces, changes within the organization of the military itself, and more, is important in this respect. Graff’s achievement as articulated in his comments on the book itself are different than the achievement of the text of his book. The text recreates 9/11 in sweeping and intimate fashion. That immediacy, especially difficult to reconstruct after almost two decades, is a signal achievement.[4]
A man walks in the street near the World Trade Center towers in New York City, September 11, 2001. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
One feels the force of that accomplishment throughout the entire book. Early in the text Graff observes, “We need to tell our story. Someone will start saying, ‘I was such-and-such,’ and the other person will interrupt and talk over and say, ‘Well, I was so-and-so.’”[5] Spending time listening to 480 people tell their stories transported me back in time to my own experience on 9/11. As I slid in and out of the book’s text and my own 9/11, I interrupted other voices with my story, but then the text pulled me back so that someone spoke over and through and next to my story. Moving between then and now by spending time with one person’s story of the day and then another person’s story is an extraordinarily strong experience. A growing number of Americans, including my own teenager, were born after 9/11 and do not have their own memories of it, but they are making it their own as they ask those of us who were there what it was like, process how the day and what came after shapes their world, and find their own ways to mark the day. These young Americans are not yet in position to configure and reconfigure how they and their country will remember and memorialize 9/11, but they are beginning to take their place in the adult world and that world will change because of it. The sharing and listening and the talking over and through continues. And Graff’s magazine piece and book will be a uniquely powerful voices in that ongoing national dialogue.
How to end a tale about 9/11, especially one so dedicated to chronicling the day so exhaustively, is not easy or obvious? The day ended, but its close did not bring finality. Any single volume about 9/11 wraps up and comes to a close, but the story of 9/11 is long and winding and still without an end. In the face of this reality the shortcomings of any single volume matter less than the fact that multiple volumes about similar topics necessarily amplify, extend, complicate and complement one another. Through its very publication Graff’s book joins an already existing body of writing about 9/11, a corpus to which he is already a significant contributor as author of The Threat Matrix and “We’re the Only Plane in the Sky.” Accounts that dig into what came before 9/11, accounts that unfold the events of that day, accounts of what came after, all carry their own unique virtues and drawbacks, but I am grateful for them all and believe we need all of them because they talk over and next to and alongside one another. Graff’s volume is a crucial addition to writing about 9/11 because of its immersive power and its capacity to plunge the reader back into the day itself.
The second tower of the World Trade Center bursts into flames after being hit by a hijacked airplane in New York September 11, 2001. Sara K. Schwittek/Reuters)
Katherine Voyles holds a Ph.D. in English and lectures at the University of Washington. She writes on issues of national defense in culture and the cultures of national defense.
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Header Image: President Bush on 9/11 (Eric Draper/George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum)
Notes:
[1] Garrett M. Graff,The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2019), 334.
[2] Ibid., 335.
[3] Ibid., 424.
[4] Twitter was alive with people talking about how they couldn’t put the book down because it was so gripping, but Michael Morrell talks about having to set it aside momentarily because it was so immersive.
[5] Graff, The Only Plane in the Sky, xx.