BY KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock
Editor’s note: The Los Alamos Reporter is honored to publish writer Kathleene Parker’s journaling from September 11, 2001, which will perhaps sharpen our ownmemories of where we were and what we were doing on that awful morning. For those who are too young to remember, expecially those who grew up in Los Alamos, this piece will give you a real idea of how it felt. We hold all those affected by the events of that day in our hearts.
On September 11, 2001, very much as my way of coping with what I had witnessed that day, I journaled the events of 9-11 from a Los Alamos perspective. It all began—the knowledge that “something” was happening or “something” was wrong—as a neighbor, who lived around the corner from our Sherwood Boulevard house, Los Alamos’ police chief, tore passed at about 7 a.m. from his Barcelona Street home. He was driving, sirens blaring, at speeds—with Pinon Elementary School nearby—I had never seen him drive, even in emergencies. Soon, another more distant neighbor, Los Alamos’ fire chief, who lived in La Senda to the south of us, also tore passed, also with sirens blaring, with the sound carrying far up their journey on West Jemez Road toward the lab.
In Los Alamos, with our national security mission, sirens might indicate some local emergency, but so too might they indicate a national emergency. Today, 25 years after that horrible day, we all know that, on September 11, 2001, those sirens were about a national emergency that put Los Alamos National Laboratory on high alert and that was to shape life in Los Alamos for weeks—year—to come. For weeks after 9-11, National Guard troops and a tank were staged in the Smith’s parking lot in White Rock, a reminder that, in Los Alamos, though we may sometimes forget, life is different here, because—though we might look it on the surface—we’re not like most other towns.
It was also about American flags everywhere: on our fire trucks, on pickup trucks, on porches, lining streets.
And it was also about a special sadness and kindness that we all seemed to feel. We were, after all, all grieving. Was it my imagination or were people slower, more courteous driving, more eager to help with whatever problem? We were Americans, and we were unified—although not universally in our nation’s response to 9-11 with the invasion of Afghanistan.
Much of what I wrote on 9-11 is now well-known and well-understood, with questions answered and misconceptions clarified. But on that beautiful, sunny autumn day, there was no understanding or explanations about anything we were seeing on T.V., just questions, apprehension, fear, confusion, grief with even national news agencies able to do little more than piece together snatches of information and to speculate and to—as we all did—ask what next.
I am sharing portions of that journal to help those not in Los Alamos in 2001 or not alive in 2001, to understand what 9-11 brought to our town. While we were not in New York City; Shanksville, Pennsylvania, or Washington D.C. we were closer to those places, particularly the Pentagon, than most. At the time, I didn’t journal those events for other than my own attempts to come to grips with what I had witnessed or to, perhaps, be able to speak through time to my descendants to let them someday understand a family member’s observations of a day of grim history. But I think it is appropriate to share segments of those writings on this, the 25th anniversary of 9-11.)
September 11, 2001
Los Alamos, New Mexico
What is the saying? “May you not be destined to live in interesting times”? Is all of what we saw today what that means?
I think of all those times I watched INDEPENDENCE DAY, and those scenes of buildings being vaporized by space aliens, and I wonder what we were thinking. How could that be viewed as entertainment, when real buildings being vaporized before our eyes—and people dying—is so horrific?
Now, outside, in an eerie reality I never thought I would see, there is not a single plane, not a single jet contrail, anywhere in the sky, when normally, here, under the route traveled by many transcontinental aircraft, there should be a half-dozen or more aircraft visible, far above, at any given moment. And the silence. It could only be compared with the silence of the town during its total evacuation for last year’s massive Cerro Grande Fire. Eerie, strange, frightening, appalling, horrifying, unreal—the adjectives are endless and inadequate.
I did hear, a few minutes ago—as the sun was setting—the sound of a lone, small aircraft flying northward from Santa Fe or Albuquerque, the sound of its engines standing out like the sound of a roaring train engine in the silence. I assume it is heading to the Los Alamos airport and, I also assume, it is carrying Los Alamos National Laboratory director John Brown, who was, I was told by my daughter who attends Los Alamos High School with his daughter, in Washington, D.C. this morning.
Why the silence of a sky devoid of aircraft? Because our planes—our own planes have been used against us, the most innocuous of passenger planes, our beautiful huge passenger planes—turned into weapons and used against us by terrorists.
At just before 9 a.m. EST, a plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. As we only just began to comprehend what had happened—with a vague realization that such huge planes don’t just accidentally fly into huge skyscrapers—another plane slammed into the South Tower as the nation and the world watched, live, on television. It was a bizarre—so many times today, events were called “surreal”—event, captured by many cameras in crowded Manhattan, each showing a different angle, each showing another bit of the horror, as a huge 767 passenger jet slide with cold, unforgiving determination mid-level into the second tower.
An enormous ball of flame and rubble shot out the far side of the building, and both the 110-story structures then stood, black smoke spewing forth against the Manhattan skyline, while other photos showed an endless shower of paper (from banking institutions inside the towers) floating silently to the ground around them. And often too, there were people falling to their deaths from windows left broken and gaping or from walls that simply no longer existed—or worse, because they had chosen death by falling rather than death by fire.
But then, a news correspondent at the Pentagon reported a loud explosion—with no explanations, just an explosion and the building shaking. A plane had plowed into it too.
And then, while still early morning—the bright autumn sun pouring down on the Sangre de Cristos as though a world of horror was simply not possible, the worst of the horror.
Weakened by massive structural damage— caused by the impacts of huge aircraft, by prolonged fire against steel, by unimaginable fireballs as the planes crashed into them—first the South Tower (the most seriously damaged of the two and the one hit second) began to, for want of any other words, vaporize from top to bottom, with each story disappearing down onto the one below in endless succession all accompanied by the dying roar of 110-stories of steel and concrete disappearing.
About half an hour later, the North Tower, too, collapsed, like the first tower, dumping 110 stories of rubble and dust onto the streets below and burying God alone knows how many people who were in or near the buildings. One of the more horrific sights was that of onlookers, most already trying to flee, realizing—vaguely—what was happening, and rushing to flee hideous clouds of dust. Once, on television, I saw a shop door open suddenly, hands reached out. They grabbed a couple of fleeing people, pulled them in and then shut quickly against huge, rolling clouds of dust.
Part of the unknown, the simple challenge of wrapping human minds around events of such ghastly proportions, happened as ABC News anchor Peter Jennings talked, by phone, to a reporter on the scene. Jennings—unlike his viewers—was apparently not able to see his network’s own live coverage. The reporter told Jennings that one of the towers had collapsed. Jennings, not comprehending, asked how much of it had fallen, to which the reporter replied (paraphrasing), “No, Peter, you don’t understand, the building is gone!” Jennings, for a moment, sat stunned, clearly trying to wrap his head around events—as were we all.
As the hours immediately after the buildings’ collapse ticked by, we all tried to understand the numbers. Upwards of ten thousand people and thousands of visitors might be in the buildings on any given day. The only hope is that some people had time to stream out before the buildings collapsed, although their escape was surely slowed by darkness, smoke, terror, no elevators, and stairways slick with water and the jam of people trying to leave the building hitting the flow of firefighters trying to rush in. (Hospitals were preparing for a mass-casualty event that never happened because few survived.)
Somewhere during this sequence, my daughter called from the high school, frightened, crying. Classes had not yet begun, and I was angered that students weren’t directed immediately to the auditorium for “together time” as a national emergency—and history—played out, especially since there surely was no possibility of effective classroom instruction today.
She was frightened because other students were saying Los Alamos could be a target too. I reassured her that, while yes, we were the type of place that could be a target, what was happening today illustrated horrible people wanting to do horrible deeds largely for the benefit of live television coverage, and I explained, Los Alamos just wasn’t that kind of place.
Her apprehension was clearly increased when LANL director John Brown called his daughter and my daughter’s classmate, Courtney, to tell her he was at the Pentagon, that it had been hit by an aircraft, but he was fine. He told her not to worry and that he was going to stay to see if he could help others who were injured. That call brought events in Washington, D.C. very close to home.
On 9-11, all non-essential LANL personnel were sent home, and schools, finally, let out at midday. My daughter returned home, okay at first, but then came tears and emotions unfamiliar to all of us, but especially to the young, who should never have to witness the horrors we have seen today.
Tonight, the talk is that the nation is at war. The only problem is, we don’t yet know with whom, as we don’t know which of many terrorists were involved.
Today is being called the worst day in American history since Pearl Harbor, which is certainly true. This evening, our future is as unclear as a Manhattan skyline, obscured by darkness and the smoke of fires caused by the worst humans can do to one another.
I just stepped outside again and stood on our back deck. It’s still silent outside, there under a joyous starlit New Mexico sky still devoid of aircraft or answers.
Postscript: September 10, 2026
As I see pictures of the new Manhattan skyline, and that magnificent, towering-above-all other-buildings new World Trade Center, I can’t help but feel a bit of an “up yours” moment. We took an unimaginable disaster and turned the lost buildings into something bigger, better—and certainly safer if it’s ever attacked—then the first World Trade Center. To those who know only to destroy, it says, “Okay. We are Americans, and we’ll just be back, with strength, determination and our towering new building on the Manhattan skyline as our answer to what you did.”