8 9/12
Try to remember the biggest family event you’ve ever been to—maybe a family reunion. How many people were there? Maybe 30, 50? Though all of them together comprise (组成) your family, you might not really have gotten the chance to know each and every individual member. Dunbar’s number*, the famous estimate of how many relationships one can meaningfully maintain in life, is just 150. Now think back to school. How many people were in your class in grade school, and in high school? How many of them were friends, and how many others did you just know as acquaintances, and how many still others did you simply recognize? If you went to school in the United States, let’s say it’s a thousand. It certainly stretches the boundaries of what you could say are all “your people,” but you may still have felt a bond with them.
Dunbar’s number 邓巴数，由英国人类学家罗宾·邓巴提出的理论假说，指人类能够维持稳定社交关系的人数上限约为150人。该数字源于对人类大脑新皮层大小的研究，推断出个体能有效管理与人际互动相关的社交信息（如亲疏程度、社会义务）的认知上限。邓巴数并非指一个人的全部相识者，而是特指在稳定社交圈中，彼此知晓、能维持互信与协作关系的规模限度。这一规律在人类学、社会学及组织管理（如企业规模、军事单位编制）中常被引为参考依据，解释为何超大规模群体需依赖规则而非人情维系。
Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they’re gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.
Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America’s response.
The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of (一连串的令人不快的事物) American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation (=announcement) of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence1—the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform (为...提供依据) the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude (规模) and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: “Stop resisting.”2
1 指secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars的存在本身。
2 然而，即便拥有这些认知，我仍难以接受变革的规模与速度：从一个试图以精心算计且表演性的对不同意见的尊重来定义自身的美国，演变为一个安全国家——其军事化的警察要求服从，拔枪下令全面屈服，那句“停止反抗”的命令如今在每个城市回响。
This is why whenever I try to understand how the last two decades happened, I return to that September—to that ground-zero day* and its immediate aftermath. To return to that fall means coming up against a truth darker than the lies that tied the Taliban to al-Qaeda and conjured up* Saddam Hussein’s illusory stockpile of WMDs*. It means, ultimately, confronting the fact that the carnage (屠杀) and abuses that marked my young adulthood were born not only in the executive branch (行政部门) and the intelligence agencies, but also in the hearts and minds of all Americans, myself included.3
Ground Zero 原为军事术语，指核爆炸的正中心投影点，即破坏最严重、最彻底的位置。在2001年9月11日之后， Ground Zero 特指世界贸易中心双子塔被摧毁后的遗址。
Conjured up 凭空想象出；无中生有地变出；像变魔术一样召唤出。
WMD = Weapons of Mass Destruction 大规模杀伤性武器
3 回望那个秋天，意味着要直面一个比“塔利班与基地组织勾结”或“萨达姆·侯赛因拥有大规模杀伤性武器库存”等谎言更为黑暗的真相。归根结底，它意味着必须承认这样一个事实：标记我青年时代的屠杀与暴行，不仅诞生于行政部门和情报机构，也孕育于所有美国人——包括我自己——的内心与思想中。
I remember escaping the panicked crush of the spies fleeing Fort Meade just as the North Tower came down. Once on the highway, I tried to steer with one hand while pressing buttons with the other, calling family indiscriminately (不加选择地，胡乱地) and never getting through. Finally I managed to get in touch with my mother, who at this point in her career had left the NSA and was working as a clerk for the federal courts in Baltimore. They, at least, weren’t evacuating.
Her voice scared me, and suddenly the only thing in the world that mattered to me was reassuring her.
“It’s okay. I’m headed off base,” I said. “Nobody’s in New York, right?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. I can’t get in touch with Gran.”
“Is Pop in Washington?”
“He could be in the Pentagon for all I know.”
The breath went out of me.(喘不过气) By 2001, Pop had retired from the Coast Guard and was now a senior official in the FBI, serving as one of the heads of its aviation section. This meant that he spent plenty of time in plenty of federal buildings throughout DC and its environs.
Before I could summon any words of comfort, my mother spoke again. “There’s someone on the other line. It might be Gran. I’ve got to go.”
When she didn’t call me back, I tried her number endlessly but couldn’t get through, so I went home to wait, sitting in front of the blaring TV while I kept reloading news sites. The new cable modem we had was quickly proving more resilient than all of the telecom satellites (通讯卫星) and cell towers, which were failing across the country.
My mother’s drive back from Baltimore was a slog (hard work) through crisis traffic. She arrived in tears, but we were among the lucky ones. Pop was safe.
The next time we saw Gran and Pop, there was a lot of talk—about Christmas plans, about New Year’s plans—but the Pentagon and the towers were never mentioned.
My father, by contrast, vividly recounted his 9/11 to me. He was at Coast Guard Headquarters when the towers were hit, and he and three of his fellow officers left their offices in the Operations Directorate (指挥部) to find a conference room with a screen so they could watch the news coverage. A young officer rushed past them down the hall and said, “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Met with expressions of disbelief, the young officer repeated, “I’m serious—they just bombed the Pentagon.” My father hustled over to a wall-length window that gave him a view across the Potomac of about two-fifths of the Pentagon and swirling clouds of thick black smoke.
The more that my father related this memory, the more intrigued I became by the line: “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Every time he said it, I recall thinking, “They”? Who were “They”?
America immediately divided the world into “Us” and “Them,” and everyone was either with “Us” or against “Us,” as President Bush so memorably remarked even while the rubble was still smoldering. People in my neighborhood put up new American flags, as if to show which side they’d chosen. People hoarded red, white, and blue Dixie cups (一次性纸杯品牌) and stuffed them through every chain-link fence on every overpass of every highway between my mother’s home and my father’s, to spell out phrases like UNITED WE STAND and STAND TOGETHER NEVER FORGET.
I sometimes used to go to a shooting range (射击场) and now alongside the old targets, the bull’s-eyes (靶心) and flat silhouettes (平面人像靶), were effigies (被憎恨的人的模拟像) of men in Arab headdress. Guns that had languished (沉寂) for years behind the dusty glass of the display cases were now marked SOLD. Americans also lined up to buy cell phones, hoping for advance warning of the next attack, or at least the ability to say good-bye from a hijacked flight.
Nearly a hundred thousand spies returned to work at the agencies with the knowledge that they’d failed at their primary job, which was protecting America. Think of the guilt they were feeling. They had the same anger as everybody else, but they also felt the guilt. An assessment of their mistakes could wait. What mattered most at that moment was that they redeem themselves (弥补过错). Meanwhile, their bosses got busy campaigning for extraordinary budgets and extraordinary powers, leveraging the threat of terror to expand their capabilities and mandates (= authority) beyond the imagination not just of the public but even of those who stamped the approvals.4
4 与此同时，他们的上司们忙于争取巨额预算和特殊权力，利用恐怖威胁将其能力与职权范围扩张到超乎公众想象——甚至连审批者们都难以预料的程度。
September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified resolve, strengthened by a revived sense of patriotism and the goodwill and sympathy of the world. In retrospect, my country could have done so much with this opportunity. It could have treated terror not as the theological (神学的) phenomenon it purported (宣称的) to be, but as the crime it was. It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and cultivate resilience in the now-connected global public.
Instead, it went to war.
The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive (本能反应的), unquestioning support for that decision. I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment. I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it. I wanted to be a liberator (解放者). I wanted to free the oppressed. I embraced the truth constructed for the good of the state, which in my passion I confused with the good of the country. It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed—the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical (不关心政治的) patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system—and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance.5 The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it.
5 我拥抱了为国家利益而建构的“真相”，并在激情中将之与人民的福祉混为一谈。仿佛我好不容易形成的个人政治观念——无论是网络上浸染的反体制黑客精神，还是从父母那里继承的不问政事的爱国心——瞬间系统崩溃，被重启为一具甘愿效力的复仇工具。
I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent (模棱两可的) about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring. Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001. In that span, which coincided with (与...同时发生) my youth, America lacked for enemies. The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online. The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.
My options dismayed (使灰心) me, however. I thought I could best serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe for this new world of asymmetrical (不对等的) conflict. I hoped I could do something like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes with walls of virus-warning blinken lights, tracking enemies and thwarting their schemes (阻挠他们的阴谋). Unfortunately for me, the primary agencies that did that—the NSA, the CIA—had their hiring requirements written a half century ago and often rigidly required a traditional college degree, meaning that though the tech industry considered my AACC credits and MCSE certification acceptable, the government wouldn’t. The more I read around online, however, the more I realized that the post-9/11 world was a world of exceptions. The agencies were growing so much and so quickly, especially on the technical side, that they’d sometimes waive the degree requirement for military veterans. It’s then that I decided to join up.
You might be thinking that my decision made sense, or was inevitable, given my family’s record of service. But it didn’t and it wasn’t. By enlisting, I was as much rebelling against that well-established legacy (根基深厚的传统) as I was conforming to (顺从) it—because after talking to recruiters from every branch, I decided to join the army (陆军), whose leadership some in my Coast Guard family had always considered the crazy uncles* of the US military.
the crazy uncle 在西方家庭文化中是一个常见的、带有调侃意味的比喻。他通常指代家庭中那个不按常理出牌、行为狂放不羁、想法与众不同、让其他家庭成员又爱又头疼的角色。
When I told my mother, she cried for days. I knew better than to tell my father, who’d already made it very clear during hypothetical discussions that I’d be wasting my technical talents there. I was twenty years old; I knew what I was doing.
The day I left, I wrote my father a letter—handwritten, not typed—that explained my decision, and slipped it under the front door of his apartment. It closed with a statement that still makes me wince*. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I wrote, “but this is vital for my personal growth.”
Wince（因疼痛、不适或强烈的负面情绪）本能地、轻微地退缩或咧嘴。可以将其理解为一种下意识的生理反应，它描述的不仅仅是心理上的“后悔”，而是一种几乎能从脸上看到的、瞬间的窘迫或痛楚。简单的中文翻译可以是“感到无地自容”、“不忍回想”或“心里一抽”。
