Hard Candy & Soft Tissue: 9/11 Twenty Years Later

It was another great American exceptionalism that foreign terrorism had never struck such a soft target on US soil before, at least not in the way we thought of terrorism then. Trains and markets were bombed and wars were fought elsewhere, but not here. Two years before, I had been traveling across Eastern Europe, where stores still held half empty shelves, and train tracks were cratered by mortars. I huddled in the dark next to steel-drum fires, waiting for a bus that might take me west again.