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<\/a><\/p>\nAt 9 a.m. on September 11, 2001, I was in a meeting at the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, where I was launching a talk radio program. The meeting adjourned, of course, as soon as we learned that planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. On the walk back to my hotel I passed hushed onlookers watching smoke from the attack rise above the Potomac, and watched as National Guard troops took up positions in Georgetown. A few days later, with return flights to the West Coast still grounded, I rented a big Buick and headed home, rolling across a stunned America understandably fixated on the devastation in New York and Washington. I raced across the country, stopping for talks with Americans living far from Manhattan and DC., capturing their Cartier-Bresson decisive moments. Via sharply focused interviews, I froze the time America acted out and worked through 9\/11 and the two decisive decades of trauma following the attacks on to the Afghan war and then Covid. These impassioned exchanges of conflicting beliefs and coherence that I experienced and document question trauma theory expectations that, over time, societies embrace common resolutions.<\/p>\n