Life

TV review: Story of 9/11 children shows how we live in a connected world

Billy Foley

Billy Foley

Billy has almost 30 years’ experience in journalism after leaving DCU with a BAJ. He has worked at the Irish Independent, Evening Herald and Sunday Independent in Dublin, the Cork-based Evening Echo and the New Zealand Herald. He joined the Irish News in 2000, working as a reporter and then Deputy News Editor. He has been News Editor since 2007

Ronald Milam Jnr's father, also Ronald, died in the Twin Towers attack before he was born
Ronald Milam Jnr's father, also Ronald, died in the Twin Towers attack before he was born Ronald Milam Jnr's father, also Ronald, died in the Twin Towers attack before he was born

Children of 9/11: Our Story, Channel 4, Monday

When the Twin Towers were attacked and collapsed in 2001, 105 expectant fathers were killed in the al-Qaeda onslaught.

This feature length film was the story of six of the children, never known to their fathers, and now reaching their 20th birthdays.

It was a hugely effective way of detailing the generational grief of such a significant loss of life.

When two hijacked airliners were deliberately flown into the New York skyscrapers almost 3,000 people were killed, the world’s then sole hyperpower was deeply wounded and its retaliation set off a chain of events which we continue to see this week.

The Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan in the last few days brings us full circle back to the late 1990s when Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network was given protection in the mountainous kingdom and allowed to plan his attack on a symbol of US power and freedom.

Afghanistan, its geography and the involvement of the superpowers in its sad and terrible history, is extremely complicated and leaves a just-about nation state where doing the right thing is never straightforward.

For the children in America it’s a little simpler – they lost their fathers in circumstances they still struggle to understand.

And it was striking how only one of the six felt any real anger at the loss of a parent.

Megan Fehling, who was born in October 2001, says she “doesn’t think she’s owed an explanation” about the death of her father Lee, a fireman, and tells of how she has mixed emotions when she gets messages on the anniversary.

“I wasn’t really thinking about it until you flooded my inbox … I’m not reliving the day, I wasn’t there yet.”

It’s a feeling shared by some of the other children, who say the anniversary is a time more for their mothers than them.

Ronald Milam Jnr, who was named after his army father when he was born in January 2002, said “life is fine.”

“I’ve never felt a hugely emotional reaction. I know the basics of what happened, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

Claudia Szurkowski, whose dad was a contractor working in the Twin Towers, was the only child who was openly emotional when talking about her dad and was angry that he was taken from her before she got a chance to meet him.

However, the most damaged young person appeared to be Fares Malahi, whose lost his father Abdu, a manager at the Marriott Hotel who went into the towers to try to help.

Not in any way to diminish the loss of his father, but Fares’s central source of trauma seemed to be what he witnessed in the war in Yemen, where he returned to live with his mother and brother after the Twin Towers attack.

He came back to live in the US in 2017 after a missile exploded in the building beside his school while he was sitting a test.

“I’ve seen corpses, I’ve held corpses, it’s hard for me to forget it,” he says, pain etched on his face.

It was impossible to watch this moving documentary without thinking of the pictures, playing on news channels at that very time, of desperate people clinging to the outside of a US Army jet leaving Kabul.

And also reflect on the remarkable Susan Retik, whose husband was on board one of the planes sitting beside Mohammad Atta, who put her own grief aside to raise money in a charity cycle from New York to Boston to raise money for the Afghan widows of the war on terror.

For better and worse, we truly live in a connected world.