Listen Now: 9/12 36:06

Hey, it's Dan Taberski. You were probably expecting this to be the next episode of Hysterical. Thanks for listening, by the way. Well, the next episode of Hysterical is going to come next week instead. This week, we figured since you got this far in the show that maybe you're thinking to yourself, hey, this Dan guy, he's okay. I wonder what other fun stuff he's been up to. It's

So this week, I wanted to share an episode of another series I made that you might want to check out. It's called 9-12. It's a series we made about post-9-11 America and what happened in the days, months, and years after 9-11, 2001, and how it changed us. Each episode is a different story from that time. And don't worry, it's not a drag. It's kind of warm and often really funny. And I made it with the same team that made Hysterical, so it's got a lot of the same DNA.

Anyway, here's the first episode of 912. And after that, you can follow 912 exclusively on the Wondery app. I hope you enjoy it. And thanks for listening. Follow 912 on the Wondery app or Amazon Music to binge all seven episodes right now. Episode one, The Strange Story.

In the year 2000, in Port Angeles, Washington, on the green, green tip of the Olympic Peninsula, Alan Block is capping off the workday with a pint. All right, a pitcher, of whatever they got on tap that night.

And I'm sitting there in the local Coast Guard bar, you know, right next to the Coast Guard station, a bunch of Coasties drinking in their uniforms. Allen is in his 20s. And at the time, he's living on a boat, running charters across the Strait to the San Juan Islands or Vancouver. He's been going through a rough patch, his own stormy waters. I had a falling out with my birth father. I had a horrible relationship go horribly wrong, you know, like it was all bad. Everything was bad.

So, Allen's nursing his drink and flipping through a sailor's magazine he bought off the rack at the local marine store. And he comes across a classified ad in the back. It was like an ad, like, I think it had a little picture of the Endeavor, which is like one of, you know, this very classic looking square rigged ship from the 1700s, you know? Looks like a little kid's idea of a ship, you know? And they had a little picture of that and it said, like, have you ever felt like you should have been in the 18th century?

And I'm just kind of sitting there reading and hanging out. And I penned a response to this call for essays, 500 words about why you should have been in the 1800s. And I got picked. Alan landed himself on a reality show called The Ship.

The idea behind this one was to recreate the voyage that English explorer Captain James Cook sailed in the 18th century when he, air quotes, discovered Australia and New Zealand. The whole thing was the brain baby of filmmaker and adventurer Chris Terrell.

We were aiming for six weeks, going to sea from Cairn in northwest Australia and heading for Jakarta en route through the Great Barrier Reef and then up into the Timor Sea and sailing just as Captain Cook would have done back in 1768, 1769, that sort of thing. And that's what we did.

The Ship was a co-production with the BBC and the History Channel here in America. And Chris's vision was not the kind of reality show that you're probably thinking of, where someone might get voted off the boat each episode and have to walk the gangplank or something during the credits, which is not a terrible idea.

First, the BBC said, oh, yes, you can go and dress up and put on the costumes and just act out. No, they did not. Oh, yeah. And I said, no, not interested. Please tell me you tried one on just to see what it would look like. Well, of course.

Chris isn't just a TV producer. He is also an anthropologist. And he wanted his show to explore how a crew from today would handle the storied voyage that Cook had taken, replicating it in as much detail as possible, especially the deep isolation of naval exploration at the time. We didn't have computers. We didn't have phones. We didn't have email. We're not in contact with anybody. We entertained ourselves. We sang. We told stories. But actually just worked bloody hard.

In late August of 2001, they set sail from Cairn, Australia, with 56 cast and crew aboard an almost exact replica of the Endeavour, Cook's original ship.

Melissa Holmes was a crew person on the show slash boat, the showboat. And if you don't have all 50 people walking around this thing pulling up the anchor, you don't go anywhere.

You've got like 60 people condensed into this just tiny little space. That is Mariel Hojaya, another crew member. Turns out it sucks being an 18th century sailor. When you're sleeping, you've got two sets of feet on either side of you and other hammocks. There is just no room. They were trying to recreate history. And in history, what they had is barrels of the worst food known to man.

And I'm not joking. Biscuits, hard biscuits, salt pork, salt beef. I got really good at eating a mostly rotten banana. It's hot as balls all the time. You're in the tropics, so you're sweating all day. There's no way to keep clean. You can dump saltwater buckets over yourself all the time, but you're dry in 30 minutes and now you're covered with salt crystals too. But it wasn't all bad being cut off from the rest of humanity. In its own way, it was wonderful.

What happens is when you're out of contact with the world completely, the rules of the world change completely. You can watch, they wake up on that third or fourth morning, depending on the person, and you see the eyes change. It's just like this acceptance. And the troubles of the world fade to nothing. And all the things that once consumed you, none of it matters. Like only the very basic social norms remain and everything else becomes subsumed by the experience.

And then there are all these little things that happen. Like colors get really intense because you're seeing the same colors all the time. Same color of water, same color of air, same color of sky, same color of ship. So anytime that a color does pop out, you know, they bring out some Coca-Cola's for a treat for us or something. Like the red is so rich, you know, we're in this very pattern driven life, patterns of the waves, patterns of the clouds, right?

Sound of the waves, you know, you go up one wave, you slap into the other wave. You go up one wave, you slap into the other wave. And but for one satellite phone that the captain had for emergencies, no contact, no news. Their own floating bubble. Go up on one wave, slap into the other wave.

One morning in September, about three weeks into the trip, they find themselves becalmed in the Timor Sea. The wind had died down hundreds of miles from land. The waters famously shark infested. Nine or 10 o'clock is the morning change of watch.

And that's the one where the captain, who is about five foot two with a tiny bald head and this gigantic loud voice. And usually the meeting is, thank you for gathering. We've got some weather coming in today, but likely continued good sailing conditions. For lunch is salted beef. For dinner is salted pork. That was the morning meeting. No big deal, right? Well, this day started differently.

We thought we were going to, we thought it was more of a public flogging. Mario and a shipmate had broken a bunch of safety rules on camera the day before while trying to catch a 30-pound barracuda. So when everyone was assembled on the quarterdeck, Mario thought that the captain was about to chew them out. And we were, you know, sort of our heads were right down waiting for the whip to come down on us in front of everybody. And then he just, then he just proceeded to tell us this story.

Strange story. Sorry to wake you up so alarmingly. What I'm going to tell you now is going to shock all of you. This morning, American time, 8:30, the 737 was flown into one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York. It was full of passengers. It was hijacked. 20 minutes later, another airplane flew into the other twin tower. That one was hijacked as well.

About two hours later, an aeroplane flew into the Pentagon full of passengers, another hijacked. And a fourth aeroplane was crashed in Pittsburgh with undisclosed number of people dead. Shortly after the one in New York, the Twin Towers collapsed. I didn't know... I was as shocked as anybody else and I didn't know whether to carry on filming or put my camera down.

And what did you decide to do? I carried on filming. So he gave you no more information than basically just the few sentences laying it out? Well, that's all he knew as well. That's all he knew as well. No images, no footage, no audio from 911 calls, no context, nothing. Just bare facts. Do you remember what you imagined? We couldn't figure out...

There are only three known recordings of that plane flying into the North Tower at 8.46 a.m.

But it caught the world's attention. So much so that millions of eyes would be watching live to see the second plane hit. By the time the towers actually fell, hundreds of millions would be watching. By the end of the day, some estimate about a third of the planet had seen it. The most spectacular of spectaculars. I would have thought it impossible to explain any of it with just words. Without hearing the sound of the impact in the city canyons. Or seeing the expressions on our faces in the streets.

If words were ever going to fail, it would have been when that captain opened his mouth to tell the people on that boat what had happened. But he did pretty good, just laying out the facts of it. And still, for the people on that boat, just words alone didn't make sense. I remember myself just going through my head like,

why would they fuck with this like this? Like, is this, are they just trying to see what our reaction is for the show? And they're going to edit, you know what I mean? Like, what are they looking for here? I truly, I didn't believe it because why would you believe it? You know, look afterwards, there's plenty of reasons to think something like that would happen. But at the time, you know, the idea of the, I think the idea, it wasn't the plane so much as the idea of them coming down, you know, and we couldn't, we couldn't put it together because

Just, you know, just like shock, just absolute, total and complete, utter shock. Like cannot process. This does not make sense. And then something really special happened. It disappeared because there was no frame of reference to hold it in our minds. Given nothing more with which to make sense of what was happening out there in the world, they didn't even try. Did anybody want to pull the plug? People were given that option.

If anybody needs to get off now. Did anybody go? No. It was perhaps the most universally shared event in human history. Minus 56 people on that boat. At first, accidentally, just by circumstance. But then, willfully, almost blissfully. I would say the vast majority of the boat, including me, by the end of the next day, by the end of the 12th, was like, what explosion? You know, what terrorist activity?

And I can't tell you, I can't tell you that no one thought about it again for the rest of the trip until we got to Bali and saw what was really going on. But, but it, it wasn't even an issue in our daily conversations. You know, we were more interested in what those dolphins up ahead mean to, to our chances of catching fish or what that, you know, what that wind line's going to do.

You know, we were effectively, we had gone back to the 18th century and we kind of felt safe in the 18th century of our making before we had to sail back into the 21st century. So let's get on with the job. They couldn't see it. They had distance. For the 56 people on that boat, 9-11 was an event they heard about and then put away, at least for a while.

But for the rest of us, 9-11 the day quickly became 9-11 the idea. This strange story that we began telling ourselves, a story that grew and grew and that has shaped everything since. Our politics, our sense of self, and our place in the world. 20 years, that is a long time. It's a generation. Now, we have distance too. Now that 9-11 and how we reacted is past, where do we put it?

How have we been telling that story? And how do we tell it going forward? From Pineapple Street Studios, Amazon Music, and Wondery, I'm Dan Taberski. This is 912. ♪

The posters begin going up by evening time in Manhattan. First just a few, then all of a sudden, thousands. On the sides of buildings, outside hospitals, inside subway stations, blooming in clusters like mushrooms.

Except in these missing posters, the last seen outline was never like last seen on Church Street in Chambers or last seen in Tribeca. It was last seen 79th floor, South Tower, or last seen North Tower, 103rd floor. Latitude and longitude were no help. It was elevation. How far they were from the ground. How many sets of stairs they would have had to have walked down. That was the clue.

The first missing sign that was posted was reported to have been for a man named Roger Mark Rossweiler. "One World Trade Center, 100th Floor." That's the text. Over a smiling executive in his 50s, graying hair, and a dark blazer.

But there's no such thing as selfies yet. So the shot of Rossweiler looks to have been cut out with scissors from a larger picture, from a wedding or an office party, and then run off on a photocopier. No matter how burned in the brain the day's visuals would become, it was still low-res, fuzzy around the edges, even in the moment, as it was happening.

If you had let your eyes float among that sea of missing posters at the time, you would have seen one with a picture of a young man, a black guy in his 40s, full beard, collared shirt, sweater. When did you start to think about, where's my brother? Immediately. Immediately. Because I knew that, damn, I mean, he frequented the World Trade Center and the surrounding areas, you know, like he could have got caught up in that.

Jonathan Sims had already spent a lot of time over the years wondering where his older brother George was. Growing up in Newark, Jonathan says, they always got along. He protected me, took up for me, looked out for me, got on my nerves, knocked me upside the head a few times. Typical brother. As they got older, Jonathan says that George began having mental health issues. Wandering away for a few days, disappearing.

So I was used to my brother being MIA. And if he was, Jonathan would just go look in George's usual Manhattan haunts. Up in Harlem on 125th Street or maybe around the Port Authority. And often down in the underground mall beneath the Twin Towers, where George would game free heat in the winter, free AC in the summer, shelter on a rainy day. Jonathan usually did this search alone.

But now it was communal. Now it's not just you looking for your brother. It's you and all these other people. Right. I mean, I was out there putting posters up for a friend myself that day, and it felt like everyone was looking. But it also felt a little bit like everyone kind of knew they weren't going to find them. It made me feel like there was some hope. I felt hopeful.

I really did. Because everybody was on a mission. You know, I was putting my brother's picture up and I'm looking at other people's picture. Because, you know, I wanted a snapshot of them in my mind. Suppose I ran across one of those folks looking for my brother. You know what I'm saying? According to some estimates, as many as 90,000 signs would be put up in Manhattan by loved ones looking for loved ones.

But of all those people on all those posters, you can count on one hand the number that were actually found alive. Two, three days later, I come home. My mother said, Jonathan. I said, what?

She said, a lady called from New York and she said that she saw the poster of George. She said she knows him because the picture looks just like him. The woman is calling from a shelter on 127th Street up in Harlem.

Jonathan and his mom rushed there as soon as they can. Drove over to New York, go inside the shelter, very nice shelter. And we meet the doctor, social worker, sweet people, very nice people. And he sit down and he talked to me and my mother and my niece. He said, be prepared if he don't recognize you or don't know you.

So I said to him, I said, what do you mean by that? He said, well, his legal name is George Vincent Sims. He said, but he's using the alias David Green. That's who he goes by. Had you ever heard the name David Green before this? No.

They don't quite understand what's going on yet. But the doctor at the shelter, he asks them to just go along with what George is saying, at least at first, that he is not George Sims, that he is a man named David Green. So my brother comes out. He looks good. He showed no emotion whatsoever. He sits down. So my mother looked at him and she said, I'm looking for my son and you look just like him.

And he says to my mother, oh,

I do? She said, yeah. She said, you look just like him. So now I'm sitting there and I'm like, this guy's faking it. At the time, Jonathan was actually working in mental health, by the way. He's dealt with all sorts of situations. All that education and studying about schizophrenia, depression, bipolar, all that went out the window. Because I refused to call him David Green. I'm sorry. I said, George.

And he don't respond. I said, George, and he does not respond. Then I said, hey, hey, hey. He looks at me. I said, you don't remember me. I'm Jonathan, your brother. And he says, no, no, no, no. He said, I'm sorry. I don't know you. He wasn't faking. He wasn't faking. No way you could fake that. The doctor says it appears to be a delusion, a break from reality.

George Sims was in Manhattan on the 11th. They're pretty sure of that, that he had lived through it. But David Green? David Green didn't live through that day. David Green wasn't there. And he doesn't have any idea who the Sims family is. And so for the moment, there's nothing the doctors or the people at the shelter or Jonathan and his mother can do for David Green except let him be. So my mother says to him,

Do you mind if I write you sometime or can we call to check on how you're doing? Because you remind me so much of my son. This is my mother, 83-year-old now. And he says to her, sure, no problem, ma'am. So he gets up. He looks at my mother and says, I hope you find your son and walked out the room. And they get back in the car and they leave. I looked at my mother and I said, are you all right?

Know what my mother said? She said, Jonathan, she said, I don't care if he believe he's Peter Pan. She said, he alive. She said, I don't care if he believe he Peter Pan. That's the last time we physically seen my brother. Never forget. That became the catchphrase almost immediately. Already packed with meaning. Borrowed from the Holocaust. If you had any doubt as to how colossal it all felt. Everywhere. Never forget.

Screen printed on t-shirts, digitized in cable news chyrons, grease penciled on windshields, stitched to flags. A rush to not just experience that moment, but to freeze its meaning. Maybe that's why the missing posters remained so long after they made any practical sense. Drawing more candles every night, more bodega flowers, more pictures and frames.

When the weather turned to crap, the staff at Bellevue covered the posters outside their hospital with plastic sheeting, kind of making it official. What we had been taping to the walls wasn't search and rescue after all. It was memorial this whole time. We started locking in the memory of it before the smoke had even cleared, literally, before we really even understood what had happened and why.

Even the 56 people on that ship in the Timor Sea, completely out of touch with what the world was experiencing, bobbing up and down with just the knowledge that something bad had happened. Before they chose to put that knowledge away and retreat to their 18th century lives for a little bit longer, even they were moved to memorialize. The very same day they got the news.

Mario Hojaya is an indigenous New Zealander, a Maori on the ship. He and another Maori crew member sang a song. So the song was a song sung by the Maori Battalion, but it's a Maori, it's a hymny. It's a hymn. Some strange comfort and some strange language in some strange part of the world. At that time, we thought it was really fitting. ♪

Now, with a little distance, the irony is almost too much to take. The descendants of the people who suffered the most from Cook's journey, from imperialism, comforting the ones who got the most out of it, whose urge to worldwide domination was now coming home to roost. But that kind of talk would be for other days.

When Captain Cook and his crew returned to England on the Endeavour in 1771, after a three-year journey to the other side of the world and back, they brought with them more than just expansionism. More than just the news that the world was much bigger than many had realized. They also brought back a lot of science. The Endeavour was a research ship.

And they brought back with them new discoveries about the stars and navigation. A whole new world of flora and fauna. They brought back the first scientific drawings of kangaroos. They also brought back one of the most complete observational records to date of a certain phenomenon that they were observing in their crew. Nostalgia.

defining as illness, as a medical problem, the homesickness that many of them felt, have always felt, since the bravest of us began wandering away from the fire to see what was out there in the dark. When Cook and his men finally did make it back home, though, it wasn't what they remembered.

In the three years that they were gone, out of touch with their world, family members had died, borders were redrawn, and with the colonies in America preparing to break away, even the idea of imperialism itself was shifting. It was perhaps the final discovery on the voyage. Not scientific, really, but maybe the hardest to accept. Home changes. The stories we anchor ourselves to can unmoor in an instant. The plot can change completely, nonsensically.

And in the end, Cook's men had spent the whole trip pining for a place that no longer existed. In 2001, the cast and crew reenacting Cook's journey had chosen to stay at sea. To stay out of contact with a world that was heaving. No phones, no internet, no images. Opting for the bliss of ignorance for a little while longer.

Four weeks after September 11th, they drop anchor in Bali, unnerved to think about what they were about to come back to. This is Chris Terrell, the director. We were very frightened, all of us, about seeing images of 9-11. In particular, the images. Yeah, yeah. But also just excited for home, to get off that damn boat and back to the comforts of the world that they had left behind.

So we're all there at anchor cleaning up the boat. Boat's clean. Now we're shaving. Alan Block, who had come to that boat in the first place, looking for a fresh start. And it's just like you'd think, you know, there's there's 30 guys sitting around with a cup and a razor and there's 20 girls with a cup and a razor and everyone's shaving and laughing and everyone's trying to find the one piece of clothes that doesn't have things growing on it. We went straight to the bar.

And we ordered all the food and all the booze. And in a half hour, we were already completely lit and in very good spirits. Half of us were in the pool drunk. Half of us were out of the pool drunk. And then someone looked up at the TV. Within a second, everyone in the place looked up and everyone had shut up. And the bartender had turned off the music. We still hadn't seen a TV at this point.

And they showed the whole sequence and they showed it over and over again. They were analyzing it. So they were like running it backward and forward. Do you remember a difference between how you imagined it and then what you saw? Yes, absolutely. I remember being amazed at the slow motion and seeing how deep the planes went in. How they just sort of like went in like an arrow, you know, where they just were gone basically, you know.

You know, because you look at it fast, it just looks like a bomb exploding. But you look at it slow and it's like a straw going into a cup, you know? It's that gut punch, you know, that like, how does this, how can that happen? Like, that can't happen. There's no way. Like, that's my city that I grew up in, you know? Chris, the director, wasn't at the pool that day. In fact, he avoided TVs altogether. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't, I refused, I didn't want to see anything.

I didn't see anything there. I don't want to watch the sound bites. Those will come in due course, but I want to experience it as it happened.

Only a few weeks had passed, but the world was light years ahead of the people on that ship and how the idea of 9/11 had evolved, its shape still shifting. Revenge had been promised. Bombings had begun. America had declared itself both the innocent victim and the God-chosen victor. The story had new heroes to exalt and a new villain to hate.

An entire country had wrapped its trauma inside the flag and was now dragging the rest of the world with it. So for Chris Terrell, understanding the world that he was returning to meant going back in time and starting from the same place as everyone else. It wasn't until I got back to London much, much later that I eventually realized

myself to look at everything. I came back to my flat and I got from the BBC, I got the news broadcast of the day, the live news broadcast. And I just sat down from the beginning to the end and watched every angle. You know, the impact of the aircraft into the one tower and then the next tower, the dust and the people's faces and the shock and

and the horror and the courage and the bravery and all of that. It was so much to take in. It was too much for the imagination. Chris Terrell caught himself up on that story. But his shipmate, Alan Block... You know, I'm going to tell you the honest truth. I got home. I saw what was going on. It was what I expected. I expected a giant overreaction. Alan walked into the movie of 9-11 about 10 minutes late. And so the story didn't make any sense.

Without seeing the dramatic beginning, the holes in the plot were impossible to ignore. And I spent maybe two months, maybe, visiting with my family after that. And then I went back to sea for two years. So that was how I handled it. I didn't want to deal with it. I didn't want to be around with a militarized state and a president who couldn't say the word nuclear. It just all drove me a little crazy. And so I left again.

I didn't really want to be American for a while. I was embarrassed to be American for a while. Our reaction was so ridiculous. Whether it was 1700 or 2001 or 2021, there is no better place than the sea to escape the horrors of our earthly lives. 9-11 was made to be used. An art curator named Peter Ely wrote that.

Ten years after 9/11, mind you, to have said it in the moment would have been impossibly cold. But now, Made to be Used captures it perfectly. How 9/11 the day so quickly became 9/11 the idea. A resource to be marshaled. A force that could make things happen. This morning, less than 24 hours later, the heart of commerce and the signature of the New York skyline is no more. So from here on out, you won't hear any more audio from 9/11 the day.

This is about what happened after. "One year ago today, we remember what the terrorists wrought." How 9/11 became a tool. "Five years ago, America was a nation of peace." And a joke.

Folks, these terrorists attacked us. How it became a conspiracy to be solved, a horror franchise to scare ourselves silly. It's been 10 years since radical Islamists carried out the worst... How it became an old, stale grudge and a beautiful, sad story to cling to. 15 years later, the wreckage of the Twin Towers has long since been cleared.

What was real? What was mythology? Not even a global pandemic could keep this city from commemorating September 11th. How did the idea of 9-11 evolve on 9-12 and all the days after that? Coming up...

On 9-12. Everything that's happening now is bananas. Sandy Hook is bananas. Flat Earth is bananas. QAnon is bananas. And I realize there's some people that are probably like listening and rolling their eyes like, oh, yeah, how convenient that you think all those other conspiracy theories are bananas, but you don't think your own pet theory is bananas. First of all, I don't fucking know what happened on 9-11. How long have you been thinking about enlisting before you actually did it?

I hadn't. I hadn't thought about it at all. Like, it is that immediate. Yeah, somewhere in those first hour, plane crashes. I say I'm going to join the military. Another plane crashes. For me, American life wasn't anything like it was being promoted by our president. I mean, it was really easy to say, you know what? Fuck this. I'm with the terrorists. I just started making phone calls. I just went everywhere, you know? Yeah, my name is Moe Rosby. It's not Mohammed.

Because every time I say Mohammed, it was like another brick wall. This hope that if the disaster is big enough, if the tragedy is big enough, we will snap out of it. Whatever it is for each of us, we will snap out of it. What a difference a day made.

912 is produced by Courtney Harrell. Our associate producer is Natalie Brennan. Our researcher is Jessica Lussenhop. Our senior producer is Henry Malofsky. Joel Lovell and Maddie Sprung-Kaiser are our editors. Production assistance and research by Marie-Alexa Kavanaugh. Fact-checking by Sarah Ivry. Original music by Daniel Herskedal with Espen Berg on piano and Jakob Janssen on drums.

912 is written and executive produced by me. I'm Dan Taberski. Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky are the executive producers at Pineapple Street. For Amazon Music, our executive producer is Morgan Jones. Marshall Louie is the executive producer from Wondery. Special thank you to Jonathan Lamb for conversations that helped us shape this episode. Music licensing by Dan Konishkowi. The next episode of 912 is available right now. Or you can binge all seven episodes on Amazon Music or with Wondery+.

You can binge all episodes of 912 on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.