# Al-Qaeda Is Still Killing Americans. Ask Eric Shawn.
Twenty-five years on, we talk about September 11 the way we talk about Antietam — solemnly, in the past tense, with a wreath and a moment of silence and then back to business. That is a mistake. The casualty list from that morning is not closed. It is still being written, one diagnosis at a time, in oncology offices from Staten Island to Long Island.
Fox News anchor Eric Shawn is the newest name on it.
Shawn was at Ground Zero the night of the attacks and kept coming back for at least a month after, working twelve-hour shifts in the ruins. He has covered wars. He says nothing in a war zone prepared him for what he walked into downtown that first night. Photographs don’t carry it. Television doesn’t carry it. You had to stand in it.
“I went to the doctor in November and he said, ‘Oh, you’ve got the World Trade Center cough.’ That’s what we called it at the time.” he related. “I thought, ‘I know — it’s a cough from all that dust and smoke. It’ll go away.’ No. The World Trade Center cough actually turned into acute chronic bronchitis…and I suffered from it for years.”
Shawn was given heavy doses of prednisone, and was also diagnosed with GERD: gastroesophageal reflux disease.
“It felt like I had a golf ball in my throat on and off for years,” he recalled.
And standing in it is exactly the problem. The air at that site was a chemical soup — pulverized concrete, asbestos, benzene, jet fuel, incinerated everything. Shawn was exposed to more than 350 chemical, physical, and biological hazards while doing his job. He says he remembers thinking that first night that the dust could not possibly be healthy, and wondering what it would do to people twenty or thirty years down the road.
Well. Here we are. This is the twenty or thirty years down the road.
By that November he had a cough that wouldn’t quit. His doctor gave it the name everyone downtown was using at the time — the World Trade Center cough — and Shawn assumed it would clear. It didn’t. It hardened into chronic bronchitis that dogged him for years, treated with heavy rounds of prednisone. Then came GERD, which he describes as feeling like something lodged permanently in his throat. Then skin cancer. Then bloodwork showing PSA levels flagged at the highest probability tier for prostate cancer. He is now under active surveillance, tested every three months, and certified for cancer under the World Trade Center Health Program.
He is one of the lucky ones. His colleague Mike Sheehan died of 9/11-linked prostate cancer. Steven Edwards of the National Post died of kidney cancer. Shawn’s own accounting of his situation is blunt and worth sitting with: if a 9/11 cancer takes him, he will consider himself “killed by al-Qaeda.”
That is the correct framing, and it is the one our political class has spent a quarter century sanding down. These are not unfortunate medical outcomes. They are delayed-fuse murders. The men who flew those planes intended to kill as many Americans as physically possible, and thanks to the toxic wreckage they left behind, they are still managing it — long after the towers came down, long after the last soldier came home, long after the country decided it was tired of the subject.
Give Shawn credit for the humility, too. He is emphatic that he wasn’t a first responder and doesn’t want the label. He went downtown because that’s where the story was. Reporters, he says, don’t tend to think of themselves as part of the community they cover — but they are, and the dust didn’t check press credentials before it went into anyone’s lungs. There is something bracing about a member of a profession currently drowning in self-regard declining a hero’s medal he’d actually have some claim to.
The practical takeaway is not complicated. The World Trade Center Health Program is not charity and it is not a line item to be haggled over by staffers who were in grade school when it happened. It is the bill for a war casualty, and Congress should treat funding it as non-negotiable rather than as leverage rediscovered every few years when a reauthorization deadline sneaks up.
The cultural takeaway is harder, and more urgent. “Never forget” was supposed to be a vow, not a hashtag. It has been drifting toward the latter for years, and you can see the consequences most vividly in New York City itself, where the politics of the moment suggest a good many people have decided the whole thing is ancient history best left unmentioned.
Eric Shawn doesn’t have the option of forgetting. He gets a reminder every three months. The rest of us should manage at least once a year.
