HOW SHE SEES IT The 9/11 story is still being written

By ALISON PIEPMEIER
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
Before the current war, and the Gulf War, before Vietnam and Korea, America was engaged in World War II. My grandfather fought in that war. He was in the SeaBees in Hawaii for three years, and when he came home he wrote a book about it. Among other things, he gave a vivid account of watching a ship full of his colleagues be blown up in port by a torpedo. Near his death, more than 50 years later, he told me that not a day went by that he didn't think about that scene.
The book documents his experiences: the men he knew and the men who died, the clothes he wore, the seasickness, the heartsickness. He had it bound and gave a copy to everyone in the family.
This is something we do in the aftermath of great horrors: We put our experiences to words. We tell stories. They stabilize our memories and give them recognizable contours so that we can manage the guilt, the flashbacks and the nightmares; they also allow us to share deeply interior moments with others.
Stories make our private memories public. This happens when we tell a story at the local coffee shop, or in a book or film, or when we hear it on the 6 o'clock news. We're hungry for this, as in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, when so many of us tuned in to endless hours of news broadcasts. We wanted to know what had happened; we wanted the story.
Getting inside the news
There is something of the same hunger for the public hearings of the 9/11 Commission, which recently focused on what happened in New York City on the day of the terrorist attacks. As the commission interviews officials, survivors and family members, these witnesses tell their stories.
But stories are more than just what happened; individually and cumulatively, they create the meaning of what happened. They tell us what we should notice and what's irrelevant. For my grandfather, the story of World War II was one of liberators, of a great nation's and his and other young men's sacrifices to save the world from power-hungry empires.
Someone else might tell a different story: of the internment of Japanese Americans, the firebombing of Dresden and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It might be the story of America itself becoming a power-hungry empire.
History and memory aren't the same thing. Memory is a personal story in the process of becoming public. History is the national story, written when one set of memories gets told and retold and becomes so familiar as to seem obvious.
Ultimately, the 9/11 Commission is writing history. It will fit people's stories into a larger narrative of the United States as a nation. This is no small responsibility, because the larger story will affect our future.
If we were attacked because we are a beacon of freedom, as one official version has it, then that story will lead us in a particular direction, perhaps toward vengeance and consolidation of power. If we were attacked because we are becoming, instead, a beacon of greed and entitlement, then that would lead us to a very different set of actions.
This is one reason our stories matter: They help us to know who we are and what to do next. In making sense of what happened, we shape our past and our future. We shape our identity as a nation.
This is the great burden on the shoulders of the 9/11 Commission. What kind of narrative will it write? What national story will it tell?
XPiepmeier, editor of "Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century," is Women's Studies' assistant director at Vanderbilt. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.