The Only Plane in the Sky: The Oral History of 9/11

by Garrett M. Graff

this book intends to capture how Americans lived that day,

within about two orbits, all the contrails normally crisscrossing the United States had disappeared because they had grounded all the airplanes and there was nobody else flying in U.S. airspace

The drama of September 11th began not in New York but in the skies over Massachusetts.

While I was walking down, they were going up to their deaths. And I was walking down to live. I will never forget this.

You’ve got to look at the small gifts that we were given as a family. There’s a lot of families out there who didn’t get a last word or a last phone call. One of the other young ladies who lost her husband said it best. She said, “We were the lucky of the unlucky to have those last words.”

As a firefighter, you expect blackness inside a burning building. Outside in broad daylight, you don’t.

Anything in the United States was considered friendly by definition.

America could have had no better ally on September 11th than Russia and Putin.

To understand all this, it is important to understand what it means to be a firefighter. Firefighters do not run away. They do not leave if they think they can stay.

We had no broken bones. We have no scars.

Pentagon did end up on the front page, but I think it’s always been a secondary story to what happened in New York.

“Guys, there used to be 106 floors over our heads and now I can see sunshine.” I says, “This may not be as bad as we thought it was.”

That was the first time I realized that truly awful things could happen to people who didn’t deserve them.

I couldn’t help but feel ashamed and apologetic for something that had nothing to do with me.

It’s amazing how easy it was to lose that feeling of safety.

I kept an eye on the sky on that drive home, fearful of the outdoors.

We get used to the noise of the planes going over us. All at once, you noticed the silence.

By the time I saw sunlight again, the world was completely different.

He’s like, “Mike, this isn’t over, this will never be over for you. There will always be the six-month anniversary, the one-year anniversary, the five-year anniversary, the 10-year anniversary. You’ll be talking about this for the rest of your life.”

You don’t realize how many airplanes you hear and see. They’re such a part of the landscape. Sitting outside—the weather was beautiful for those next few days too—looking up in the sky, not seeing any airplanes at all.

There were 11 people in our town that died. It’s a commuter train town. The sad part was the cars left in the train parking lot that were never reclaimed.

I think of an observance, a time mark.