Terrorism, an Open Phone Line, and Communications

The past couple of weeks have forced all of us to re-examine our own personal connections to the post-9/11 decade, and the people who defined its headlines.  I am thinking a lot about the young people who rushed to the White House on that Sunday night.  I knew a lot of those men and women.  I am trying to understand better what I know about their approach to the issues of security, their global outlook, and what these last 10 years have meant to them.  People around the world are taking a moment to evaluate the impact of a strange relationship in their lives…one between them and a terrorist.

Two examples of the news coverage and commentary have inspired me to think about who I have become since 9/11 and what it has meant for our world.  Nancy Gibbs’ article in TIME is a must-read, and points out both the challenges and opportunities for youth who have lived with the specter of Bin-Laden as a reality in their lives.   The Washington Post has also been following the young people whose special classroom visit by President Bush was interrupted by the horrible news on September 11, and TIME has an interesting piece on that, as well.

It wasn’t until I was in an airport this weekend, waiting for a plane and watching coverage on CNN.com about these young people, that I realized I had not yet conveyed to some of the people in my life when it was that I “met” the destruction of Osama bin Laden for the first time, what it taught me about communication, and how it changed my worldview.  It wasn’t on 9/11.  I suppose this relationship started with a phone call.

I was completing my Foreign Service training when the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania rattled our world.  Filled with optimism and determination at the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Training Center, I learned quickly about the devastating toll of terrorism in the lives of people whose ranks I was about to enter.  Our trainers, their families, and our new friends in the Foreign Service all had some connection to those who were killed by terrorist acts at those Embassies.  Drained of resources and emotion, we were called in to help man the telephone lines at 24-hour response centers at the Department of State.  As one of the very newest members of this order, I was amazed by the resilience and devotion of our U.S. diplomats, and was equally inspired by the outpouring of emotion from their diplomatic counterparts around the world.    CNN came to interview us about this new reality, and what it meant for us.

On one of the first nights following the bombing, I was on a midnight shift at the Operations Center and was asked to fill-in on manning the phone line with Dar es Salaam.  The task seemed simple enough:  stay on the line and talk to the person on the other end, who would recount details of movements, the whereabouts of remains, and how the Embassy community was coping with the crisis and communicating with the world.  A hurried, simple print-out was taped to the telephone, reminding everyone in the busy hive of the task force room that it was the dedicated open line, not to be terminated for any reason, and to be manned at all times.  I can remember looking at the words Dar es Salaam, realizing I had no idea about this place, or what was on the other part of the line, but all that was about to change.

The voice on the other end of the line  was calm and friendly.  At first I was nervous to reveal to him that I’d been on the job just a number of days, worrying that it might shake his confidence in my ability to fulfill my duties.  He instead thanked me, and we quickly got to work, passing along data and locations in a pre-Google-maps era, and to some degree connecting people in real-time in a way that new media would take care of in milliseconds just a few years later.

He was clearly shaken by the horror around him, and made it clear as he spoke that he knew these people he was talking about.  This was the real lesson of that phone call, and I have never forgotten it.  At one point he went through the names of those people, both Tanzanian and American, whose whereabouts where unknown.  During one of the spats of time when there was not info to convey, he told me about some of them.  He explained to me how he was linked to them.  I knew then, as I know now, that the reality of loss moves everyone to make that link.  Sometimes people communicate about it openly, sometimes they count on you to help them make the link.  Names and numbers and casualties are never just names and numbers.  They mean something to someone, as they did to that man on the other end of the phone line.

Years later I would meet that man on the phone line.  Far removed from Africa or the Operations Center in Washington, D.C., we realized one morning during a breakfast meeting in Eurasia that we had first met during that midnight shift in August 1998.  Even though we’d known each other a few weeks, we embraced.  It solidified a friendship that had already begun to grow.  Our families know and respect one another, and my affection for his devotion to his country continues to inspire me.

It was the terrible destruction of Bin-Laden that brought us together, and that taught me that communicating about the devastation of terrorism, and what it does to our fears, our perspectives and our lives, must always be calibrated carefully against the reality that these are not data points, these are people’s lives, perceptions, and feelings.  It would be reinforced when I was sitting with colleagues on the National Mall, huddling when we heard planes fly overhead after our evacuation and when we did not know where our colleagues at the Pentagon were.  It would be solidified when we consoled a friend who lost her husband that day, or when talking with friends in New York or in a moment of silence in New York at the United Nations General Assembly that year.  What did the last decade teach me?  I, like you, am just starting to figure it out.