I took the red-eye out of San Francisco to Baltimore/Washington International Airport on Thursday, July 23, 1970. As we made our final approach early on Friday morning, we flew straight into a thunderstorm. Wind buffeted the plane, lightning flashed, and just as we reached the runway I watched the right wing outside my window dip sickeningly toward the ground. "Great," I thought, "Ive survived two tours in Vietnam and I'm gonna crash here in front of my wife."

This was mid-October 2001. I’d gone to Pakistan for New York magazine to cover the Taliban. I was flying from Islamabad to Peshawar, on the Afghan border, to Dubai. It was right after 9/11, so everyone was paranoid about air travel. I was sitting in first class on a big Airbus, and everyone was chain-smoking Marlboros. There were clouds of cigarette smoke, but no alcohol was allowed. We stop in Peshawar, and all these randoms file in and sit on the floor of the cockpit and smoke cigarettes. It made me nervous. This was not a First World thing to do. So we took off again, and because of the bombings in Afghanistan, we had to fly the long way around, over Iran. It ended up being a four-hour flight. Around two in the morning, we’re starting to descend. All of a sudden, bam, the plane just stops . . . And then the plane starts to drop. The engines rev and the plane turns sideways. It’s clear we’re crashing, no doubt about it. People are screaming. We finally touch down and bounce right off the runway. The right wing snaps off and all these sparks are coming up. Everyone knows we’re going to die . . . You’d think in the face of imminent death you’d be like, This is happening, it’s inevitable, and I’m peaceful about it. I was not peaceful at all. So the plane goes into a sand dune and ends up on its side. I was the first person off. I kicked open the door, the slide came down, I ran into the darkness and immediately got picked up by guards. I was brought to a room, locked in there and then put on a British Airways flight eight hours later.

The ritual of immigration and baggage claim at Kennedy Airport went by so quickly that I wondered if I'd missed it. Where were the armed soldiers? The dogs? The long lines? The body searches? Where were the tables where your luggage was laid open and a knife taken to the lining?

William always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing the last vestiges of a summer tan. William himself was a little brown guy, so the other travelers were always sniffing around him, but he smelled only of Dove soap, Mennen deoderant, and sarcasm.

If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I’ve been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meal. Funny, isn’t it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner toll you could kill a musk ox with.

Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.