Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man’s mightiest structures collapses into an immense white blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven. The demise of the World Trade Center gave us an image as newborn to the world of sight as the mushroom cloud must have appeared to those who first cast eyes on it. I recall vividly the seconds flowing by as I sat gaping at the screen, uncomprehending and unbelieving, while Peter Jennings’s urbane, perfectly modulated voice murmured calmly on about flights being grounded, leaving unacknowledged and unexplained — unconfirmed — the incomprehensible scene unfolding in real time before our eyes. ‘‘Hang on there a second,’’ the famously unflappable Jennings finally stammered — the South Tower had by now vanished into a boiling caldron of white smoke — ‘‘I just want to check one thing . . . because . . . we now have. . . . What do we have? We don’t . . . ?’’…

Read the full text of this article in Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War.