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A single scrap from the South Tower, tossed like a bottled message from a sinking ship, captured the day’s horror. In a scrawled hand, next to a bloody fingerprint, the note read: 84th floor west office 12 People trapped3 After the paper came the people. After the people came the buildings.
“If you didn’t go through it, there are no words that can adequately describe it; if you were there, then no words are necessary.” Even if words might fail, they’re the best hope to delay the descent of 9/11 into the well of history. That is the purpose of this book.
I have not included unfounded allegations or pseudoscience from the cottage industry of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Facts are stubborn and powerful: this is a true story.
Readers inclined toward further pursuit of “why” should seek out additional works. Three worth reading are Steve Coll’s excellent Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001; Terry McDermott’s Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It; and Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. . . . Anger, resentment, and humiliation
acknowledgment: The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, distills how government and military officials served (and misled) the public;
and 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn of the New York Times, lives up to its subtitle: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive inside the Twin Towers.
In the pages ahead, my goal is to fulfill the promise I made in 2001 with “Six Lives”: to create a memorial to all those who were killed and to provide a record for all who survived. Plus one more: to build understanding among those who follow.
Susan’s husband, Doug, was an FAA air traffic controller. He’d switched his schedule to an early shift that day so he could attend a nighttime school event for their eight-year-old daughter and make dinner for their thirteen-year-old son. When he got to work, Doug planned to radio American Flight 11’s cockpit to ask Captain John Ogonowski to surprise Susan by saying hi for him.22
The Hansons didn’t know it, but that morning’s flight path2 for United Flight 175 crossed the sky directly northwest of their property. If they had stepped away from breakfast, walked outside to their wooden back deck, and looked above the trees on their three sylvan acres, they might have spotted a tiny dot in the morning sky that was their family’s plane. Lee and Eunice could have waved goodbye.
The technology allowed only eight outgoing calls29 at a time, and poor reception caused twenty Airfone calls to drop immediately or within seconds. The calls that connected formed a spoken tapestry of grace, warning, bravery, resolve, and love.
Almost as soon as telephone calls began to flow from Flight 93, passengers and crew members learned that their crisis wasn’t unique. They also learned how the earlier hijackings had ended. That knowledge became a powerful motivator. It transformed them from victimized hostages into resistance fighters.
Because the crash occurred close to the 9 a.m. shift change, many firehouses had double their usual complement of firefighters. Few if any of “New York’s Bravest” wanted to avoid the fight. Trucks that normally carried six men zoomed toward the trade center with twice that number, “riding heavy” in firefighter parlance.
At a melted desk beside the elevators sat the charred remains23 of a security guard, his badge still visible on his burned jacket, his body fused to his chair. Other firefighters stepped over piles of debris in the lobby that they only later realized were human remains.
On the way, he spotted a body next to a bandstand set up for a scheduled concert on the Austin J. Tobin Plaza. As he radioed a report to dispatch, another person landed fifty feet from him on the plaza’s pink granite. On impact, the body disintegrated into a puddle of flesh, bone, and blood. Dave kept moving, into the North Tower.
At that moment, a New York Police helicopter circled the Twin Towers, some 1,700 feet above where Jay stood. Officer Timothy Hayes, a pilot for the police aviation unit, had already despaired that thick smoke made rooftop rescues impossible. Now he spotted a large aircraft speeding toward his copter. “Jesus Christ!” he told his partner. “There’s a second plane46 crashing.” They pulled up and United Flight 175 flew beneath them. Seconds later, at 9:03 a.m., Jay Jonas heard a thunderous explosion.
At the far side of the tunnel, five miles from the World Trade Center, the ambulance barreled south down Second Avenue at the relatively breakneck speed of 50 miles per hour. The whole city seemed to be heading the opposite direction, away from danger. Only fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, journalists, and intrepid volunteers were headed toward Lower Manhattan.
Upon their arrival, they found a mass casualty scene no manual or exercise could have prepared them for.
Among all the pieces, amid all the gruesome human wreckage, one image locked into the minds of several emergency responders who saw it: a girl’s foot, inside a pink sneaker.5 One EMT immediately thought of his own daughter, whose foot was the same size. He looked away, up to the sky to clear his mind, only to see people jumping from the North Tower.
Ten coworkers of accountant John Abruzzo,15 a quadriplegic who relied on a wheelchair, banded together to save him. They carried him from the 69th floor using an evacuation chair that worked like a sled on stairs. When they crossed paths with firefighters, the men declined help. They’d get their friend John out on their own.
The white beam, strong and bright enough to cut through the smoke and haze, bobbed oddly up and down. Behind it was a man with a white beard and long hair. Moose wondered if he was already dead. He choked out a question through his tears: “Are you Jesus Christ?” “No,” said the bearded man. “I’m not Jesus. I’m a cameraman.” Moose looked more closely: the bobbing light sat atop a shoulder television camera. “I’m going to die,” Moose said. “No, you’re not,” the cameraman said. “Damn, you saved my life.” They hugged, and the cameraman began to cry, too. “I’ve had enough of this job,” he said as he
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Rather than go outside with the secretary, Oliver handed her off to another officer. He returned to help a janitor who’d curled into the fetal position and sobbed in fear. Oliver knew the man had a severe hearing impairment; every day when the janitor came to empty the trash, Oliver rose from his chair, shook his hand, and chatted with him. Days earlier, the man told Oliver that he’d lost a hearing aid. Now he was confused and frightened, unable to follow shouted instructions from other officers. As the office filled with smoke, Oliver put the man on his back and again climbed over the two
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Within minutes, Father McGraw saw medics and military volunteers carrying injured people to the soft green grass surrounding the Pentagon. To his surprise, everyone treated him like a frontline chaplain, as though it would have been odd if a priest hadn’t been waiting for them. Responders pointed and shouted: “Father, there’s someone over there who needs you!”
Father McGraw rushed to a woman and fell to his knees—to pray, but also because he buckled at the sight of her injuries.
As he reflected on all that he’d seen and done, Dave noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats away. She studied his scrapes and bruises, the burns on his hands. Her gaze worked its way down his torn, stained uniform to his ruined shoes. The woman looked up, into Dave’s bloodshot eyes, and burst into tears.
At the base of a hemlock tree they’d find a SunTrust bank card belonging to terrorist pilot Ziad Jarrah that would help investigators trace the flow of money that financed the attackers and the attacks.
All the remains would require DNA matching, dental records, or other means of positive identification. Somewhere near where Terry stood was a napkin-sized piece of skin, charred at the edges, whose source was never in doubt: the intact Superman logo tattoo25 on the flesh of Joey Nacke’s shoulder.
Exhausted, haunted, and changed by what he’d seen, vaguely aware that their little community would never be the same, Terry swept Kathie into a bear hug.
Not including the hijackers, 2,977 men, women, and children were known to have been killed on the four planes and at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Among the dead were 1,462 people in the North Tower, 630 in the South Tower, 421 emergency responders in New York, 246 passengers and crew members on the planes, and 125 men and women in the Pentagon. No one died on the ground at Shanksville.
Authorities estimated that by the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, more people will have died5 of an illness related to Ground Zero than in the attacks.
Roughly three thousand children6 under age eighteen lost a parent on 9/11, including 108 babies born in the months after their father’s death. Each one needed some kind of explanation.
The boy had inherited his mother’s oversized smile, but it was nowhere in sight. John led him upstairs. Father and son lay down on John and Tara’s king-sized bed, atop the wedding quilt with interlocking rings made by Tara’s aunt. “I need to talk to you about something,”8 John told Colin. John opened a pack of crayons, laid out two sheets of paper, and drew an image of a brown-haired woman with angel wings. Then he helped Colin to sketch his own picture of a “mommy angel.” “There was an accident,” John said, fighting sobs. “Your mommy is in heaven and she won’t be coming back. She’s up in
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