On March 31, 2004, four Americans working as guards for the private security company Blackwater were ambushed and killed by insurgents in the Iraqi city of Falluja, the charred remains of two of them dragged away by a mob and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The incident, which led to a monthlong battle between the Marines and insurgents, marked the start of Iraq’s descent into nationwide chaos, and added an iconic image of horror to the gallery that has been created in the decade since September 11, 2001: the collapse of the burning Twin Towers; the shipping containers in Mazar-i-Sharif crammed with hundreds of dead Taliban fighters; the videotaped beheadings of the journalist Daniel Pearl and the contractor Nick Berg; the demented eyes of the “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, after his arrest; the dental exam performed on the mouth of a captured Saddam Hussein; the digitally recorded humiliations of prisoners at Abu Ghraib; and the bloody corpse of Osama bin Laden, a photograph of which has not been released, obliging the public to use its battered imagination.

No national consensus formed around 9/11. Indeed, the decade since has destroyed the very possibility of a common narrative. Illustration by GUY BILLOUT

Chris Berman, a former Navy SEAL and an out-of-work commercial diver from Southern California, was hired by Blackwater a month before the ambush. Three days before the attack, he volunteered to take the doomed trip from Kuwait to Baghdad and on to Falluja—it was a food-escort detail—but at the last minute his place was taken by one of his friends, Scott Helvenston. A few hours later, Berman learned that television networks were broadcasting footage of the car Helvenston had ridden in, a Mitsubishi Pajero, riddled with bullets and engulfed in flames. Berman decided to accompany his friend’s body back to the house of Helvenston’s mother, in Florida, and for two days he waited for the coffin to arrive at the military airport in Kuwait; during that time, he began drawing designs on napkins—ideas for armoring the Pajero, so that his colleagues might have survived the attack. That June, Berman quit Blackwater, and within a few months he had opened a factory in Kuwait that produced a sinister-looking black armored vehicle, called the Rock, for security companies working in Iraq. His timing was perfect—the most violent phase of the war was just beginning. The Rock was so successful that Berman decided to move into the much larger, more competitive, and more lucrative field of armoring military vehicles.

In 2005, four years after the overthrow of the Taliban, in Afghanistan, and more than two years into the Iraq War, U.S. troops were still scavenging “hillbilly armor”—scrap metal and bulletproof glass—to reinforce the lightly armored Humvees provided by the Pentagon. More and more American soldiers were being killed by powerful roadside bombs that had been planted by sophisticated fighters; the Pentagon, however, was mesmerized by its doctrine of high-technology warfare and initially refused to call the campaign an insurgency. No sooner was the word allowed than Vice-President Dick Cheney announced that the insurgency had entered its “last throes.” The scandal of using shoddy equipment infuriated Berman, and he saw a business opportunity to do what the government was failing to do: protect troops. Military contracting, because of its classified nature, is one of the few industries that haven’t departed American shores, and in 2006 Berman moved his operation to the United States. He chose to situate his company, Granite Tactical Vehicles, amid the fallow tobacco farms and abandoned textile mills of Surry County, North Carolina.

The company’s factory is near the Virginia state line, in Mount Airy, North Carolina—the home town of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for Mayberry, R.F.D. The shopwindows on Main Street are crammed with goofy memorabilia from “The Andy Griffith Show,” and there’s still an old movie house across the street from Floyd’s City Barber Shop. But the picture of small-town nostalgia crumbles in the surrounding streets, where dozens of factories—some the size of a small house, others several blocks long—are boarded up. Surry County, which has a population of seventy-two thousand, has lost ten thousand jobs in the decade since 9/11.

The events of September 11th, as grim as they were, offered the prospect of employment to a generation of working-class Americans who were born too late for good factory jobs. If the Bush Administration’s “global war on terror” had gone the way of the Second World War, mass mobilization in the armed forces, combined with mass production in the factories, would have revitalized a stagnant national economy and produced a postwar boom. This didn’t happen. Without a draft, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought by less than one per cent of the population. The Pentagon, which wanted to keep those wars limited and short, avoided planning for large-scale manufacturing, even after its necessity became obvious. In 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was questioned by a scout from the Tennessee National Guard about the lack of quality armor for his unit’s trucks. “You go to war with the army you have,” Rumsfeld replied. Even after this remark became infamous, the production of armor proceeded slowly, almost grudgingly, and troops and vehicles remained dangerously exposed for years. Most new defense jobs at home turned out to be in data collection and intelligence, which required college degrees and specialized knowledge, or in the low-paying realm of airport and building security.

But the main reason that 9/11 didn’t become a source of jobs, or of ideas for revitalizing the economy, was that the country wasn’t thinking about its own weaknesses. President George W. Bush defined his era in terms of war, and the public largely saw it the same way. September 11th was a tragedy that, in the years that followed, tragically consumed the nation’s attention.

The attacks were supposed to have signalled one of the great transformations in the country’s history. Bush talked about ridding the world of evil, columnists wrote of “World War Three,” and almost all Americans felt that, in their private lives and in the national life, nothing would ever be the same. But the decade that followed did not live up to expectations. In most of the ways that mattered, 9/11 changed nothing.

The prevailing conditions on that crystalline morning were unfavorable. Politically, the country was entrenched in two bitterly opposed camps. A few moderate Republicans, like Senator Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island, and Southern Democrats, like Senator Max Cleland, of Georgia, still survived in Congress, but their extinction was foreseeable. In a two-year period, the House’s impeachment of Bill Clinton and the Florida recount that was stopped by a similarly divided Supreme Court, handing the Presidency to Bush, had suddenly made America’s great democratic institutions seem flimsy and entirely partisan. During the 2000 election campaign, the news media came up with a new, color-coded way of dividing the country—into red and blue. On the economic front, America was in a recession, the dot-com bubble having already burst. A culture of speculation and debt on Wall Street was beginning to suffer from its own lopsidedness, with unprecedented fortunes in technology and finance accumulating at the top, and incomes in the middle flattening out, as blue-collar jobs moved offshore. The problem of income inequality was worsening, thanks to enormous tax cuts that had been passed into law that spring. The budget surplus of the Clinton years was vanishing. Around Surry County, the smaller textile mills were closing down.

When Chris Berman arrived in Mount Airy five years after 9/11, county officials were so desperate for manufacturing work that they gave him a one-dollar lease on a former textile factory where Kentucky Derby Hosiery had once employed four hundred people—a pair of empty metal buildings, totalling a hundred and eighty thousand square feet, on a quiet street near a housing project. Berman said that he wanted to hire veterans. Surry County is full of them, and Larry Calloway, an ex-serviceman who helps veterans find work through the local unemployment office, filled up boxes with their applications.

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For several years, the Pentagon has had plans to rebuild Humvees used in the war, and improve their armor, instead of buying new ones. Berman was determined to win such a contract, and in 2007 he began developing a model design that would remake the entire vehicle except for its chassis, strengthening the Humvee’s ability to survive a blast. He would employ at least three hundred workers rebuilding sixty vehicles a month, with Textron, a partner company in Louisiana, producing the rest. Berman is an intense, square-jawed man in his fifties, with a scarred body and a quick temper. “You will not burn in our vehicle,” he said one day in late July, as he strode across the factory floor in cargo shorts and running shoes. Desert-tan pieces of Humvee cabs lay scattered about, some of them dented by 20-mm. test bullets. Overhead, a grid of conduit pipes followed the old floor plan, where hundreds of knitting machines had once stood. “With our design, you are totally isolated from the fuel cell,” Berman said. “You will not collapse if you turn over. Look at it from a practical point of view—forget the morality. What does it cost to support a guy who loses his limbs for life? What does it cost to care for a guy who’s paralyzed for life? What does it take to pay out a death benefit?” The thought that anyone—a competitor corporation, a government bureaucrat—would be indifferent to such issues drove him crazy. “Sometimes I want to take these guys in suits by their lapels and tell them, ‘I’m going to take you somewhere you don’t want to go and see how this Humvee does.’ We put more money on T.S.A. people at the airport who are screaming at you like it’s the Third Reich than we do protecting the people who are truly protecting us.”

People who knew the business said that Berman’s design was among the best. There was one problem: the government kept putting off requests for bids, in part because the main Humvee manufacturer, a large corporation in Indiana called AM General, appeared to have enough clout in Congress to get the process delayed, staving off competition. In March, at a hearing of the House defense-appropriations subcommittee, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, “We should not put American lives at risk to protect specific programs or contractors.” The public seemed unaware or unconcerned, because most Americans were no longer thinking much about the wars.

With the Humvee contract in limbo, Granite Tactical Vehicles was stuck in the research-and-development phase—at this point, it amounted to tinkering while the company waited on Washington. Berman’s operation, which had looked poised to revitalize Mount Airy, had a workforce of barely two dozen people. And there was no guarantee that the contract, when it was finally issued—the rumored date for accepting bids is now this fall—would go to the best design. Berman’s company was too small to employ an army of lobbyists working on its behalf in Washington. After five years, officials in Surry County were muttering that they might have to take their lease back.