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

by Garrett M. Graff

Lt. Joseph Torrillo, director of fire education safety, FDNY: The action figure Billy Blazes became the biggest-selling toy of the year. Because of September 11th, it became a collector’s item.

Mary Matalin, aide to Vice President Dick Cheney: One of the strange things that didn’t occur to me until the first anniversary was how much I didn’t know was going on. I did not have the perspective seeing what the American public was seeing. When I watched the coverage on the first anniversary, I couldn’t stop crying. I was shocked. We weren’t watching TV. We weren’t watching people jumping out of buildings. We didn’t see all the chaos that the American people were seeing. It frightens me to the core to think what America must have been feeling watching that. We weren’t exposed to it.

Ultimately, the toll of 9/11 has manifested itself in ways far beyond the initial casualty list. In New York, 9/11-related ailments bedevil the first responders who spent days, weeks, and months cleaning up the wreckage at Ground Zero. All told, more than 7,000 firefighters and EMTs in New York were treated for 9/11-related injuries. New York estimates that 20 percent of those first responders also suffer from PTSD. The toll was great at the Pentagon as well: nearly 10 percent of the Arlington County Fire Department resigned due to post-traumatic stress. First responders, including FBI agents, also struggled with physical illnesses linked to 9/11.

Capt. Mike Smith, Arlington County Fire Department: 9/11 tore through the department like a bowling ball.

Everything since 9/11, I count it as one more day on Earth than I ever thought I would have.

In January 2011, the firefighters of Ladder 6 served as the pallbearers at the funeral of Josephine Harris, who had died at 69, nearly 10 years after all of them had been trapped together in Stairwell B. The survivors called Harris their guardian angel, believing that had they not stopped to rescue her, they would have been killed in the collapse. The interior of her coffin was custom-embroidered with the image of a firefighter walking hand in hand with an angel.

The terrorist leader behind the 9/11 plot was killed on May 2, 2011, as U.S. Navy SEALs raided the compound where he’d been hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan. So that his gravesite would never become a shrine, the navy buried his body at sea.

As thousands of people lined piers trying to escape, ferries and private boats were commandeered as shuttles, resulting in the largest maritime evacuation since World War II.

The Pentagon Memorial, comprised of 184 benches—one for each victim—opened in 2008.

When the terrorist attacks happened, trivial decisions spared people’s lives—or sealed their fate.

In all those published accounts and audio clips, and in the interviews I conducted, one theme never ceases to amaze me: the sheer randomness of how the day unfolded, who lived, who died, who was touched, and who escaped. One thousand times a day, we all make arbitrary decisions—which flight to book, which elevator to board, whether to run an errand or stop for coffee before work—never realizing the possibilities that an alternate choice might have meant. In the 18 years since 9/11, each of us must have made literally 1 million such decisions, creating a multitude of alternate outcomes we’ll never know.

Yet it’s hard to come away from the stories of 9/11 with a sense of anything other than an appreciation for the role randomness plays in our daily existence—There but for the grace of God go I, as the 16th-century clergyman John Bradford is said to have phrased it—and how it can change the course of history.

“If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short, and there is no time for hate.”

A similar lesson emerges from a remarkable piece of environmental art made the night of September 10, when the artist Monika Bravo filmed a giant thunderstorm that rolled through New York City from the 91st floor of the North Tower. As part of a creative-residency program, she had studio space in the building, and her video shows the storm sweeping south from New Jersey into the city as day turns to night. It is the last visual record of nighttime from within the World Trade Center. Bravo happened to take the raw video home that night, and later turned it into a work of art called September 10, 2001, Uno Nunca Muere la Víspera. As she explains, “It is a saying in Spanish: ‘It’s impossible for you to die on the eve of your death.’ You only die when you have to die.