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Heroes quite literally emerged from the ashes, and the hours and decisions that followed defined not just a generation but our modern era.
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.”
That really grabs you by the collar, when you hear the vice president giving the order to shoot down an unidentified aircraft flying toward the national capital. That stands out as one of the most frightening moments of the day, partly because it highlighted the sense of continuing danger. There was also the realization of the enormous dilemmas that faced decision makers at that moment with very little time and imperfect information.
I can sometimes begin a day and go through a day, but not realize that everything that happens—every single thing that happens—is somehow within the divine plan. Friar Michael Duffy: Priests and firemen both enter people’s lives at a point of crisis. They
Everything was gray—a color world went monochromatic from all the soot and the ash. In this monochromatic world, the first bit of color came in the form of a guy named Tibor Kerekes, who was on the mayor’s security detail. He came into the building and was completely gray except for the blood.
He was a different Vladimir Putin in 2001.
People on the ground get to see the future before everyone.
We were underway—wearing life vests that the ferrymen kept saying we didn’t need. That may have been the funniest thing I heard all day. Try telling someone who is fleeing a crumbling building that they don’t need a life vest—what, like we’re having a good-luck day?
I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.
Throughout the day, injured office workers, Manhattan residents, and first responders did seek treatment, but the arriving patients only ever amounted to a trickle, not a flood. Doctors and nurses were left with the sinking realization that no patients meant no survivors.
‘Religion is outraged when outrage is done in its name’—Gandhi.”
The whole tenor of the presidency changed immediately at that moment.
fires at Ground Zero would burn for another 99 days, until they were finally extinguished for good on December 19.
These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.
Life changed.
The sad part was the cars left in the train parking lot that were never reclaimed.
I had learned with practice that to process very deep emotions, you have to transform them into something—that’s why I’m an artist—
That was more redefining normal than getting back to normal.
The trauma, drama, and tragedy of 9/11 forever affected those it touched, altering the course of the country, launching the United States into two wars that continue to this day. The children of those who first invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 are now eligible to serve and be deployed to continue fighting the same war more than 17 years later.
this day, when people go through trauma, I recommend that they get mental health care. You may not think that you need care, but what you’ll learn is that if you don’t deal with the stress, the mental stress, professionally, within five years it will manifest itself in a physical ailment.
