The Only Plane in the Sky

by Garrett M Graff

  Lenny and I went to a Brooklyn precinct, and they bent every rule in the book to get us over the bridge. We went and parked near Rescue 1 downtown. We saw guys from Hazmat. Lenny and I went up to them and asked about John Crisci, if they knew anything about Rescue 2 and the guys. They said, “No, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

  Susan Baer, general manager, Newark International Airport: One of the things that someone started doing early on was keeping a list of everyone we’d heard from, which made people feel better, on a blackboard in the conference room. Everybody could see it. So if someone said, “I heard from so-and-so! She didn’t go to work today, or she was out at LaGuardia today,” we’d write that name down. That day was fraught with that very raw emotion about who survived and who hadn’t.

  Sunny Mindel, communications director for the mayor of the City of New York, Rudy Giuliani: At some point, we announced where the victims’ families should go: the Armory. The Armory was turned into the victim focal point, where they should gather. We headed over there as well. There were lines around the block. People clamoring for information. It was a warm day, people were out on the street. They were hot, they were frightened, they were heartbroken.

  Kimberly Archie, resident, California: My brother was a pilot for United at the time. He normally flew Flights 92 and 93. His wife had surgery on September 10th, so he was not the copilot that day, but I will never forget seeing the news, and how I froze for what felt like hours in shock thinking my brother was on that plane. Even when I realized he couldn’t be, it was so hard after that to not feel for the families of the victims as if it were us.

  Linda Krouner, senior vice president, Fiduciary Trust, South Tower: Your survival was such a big degree of luck. There are so many points of luck that make you realize how random life is. People say, “Oh, you were so smart to leave.” Who knows? The way it turned out, I was smart to leave, but I would have been smarter taking the elevator. There’s so much luck involved in this, in who lived and who died.

  Mark DeMarco, officer, Emergency Service Unit, Truck 1, NYPD: Why did we get out? In the beginning I had this guilty feeling. If I had made a right instead of a left, if I had been five minutes or two minutes slower, if I had gone to a different team. There were so many variables. Everybody who was there says the same thing: it was luck, nothing more than luck.

  Stephen Blihar, officer, Emergency Service Unit, Truck 10, NYPD: It was a day of lefts and rights.

  Norma Hardy, officer, PATH Command, PAPD: As it got later into the night, then you realized that a lot of our guys were still missing or unaccounted for. We started talking amongst ourselves—the Port Authority police—Where did you last see this one? Who went this way? Who went that way? We started to realize that they were in a lot of trouble.

  Det. David Brink, Emergency Service Unit, Truck 3, NYPD: Out of the Emergency Service response from the NYPD that morning, 50 percent were lost. We lost 14 of the 23 guys.

  Bill Spade, firefighter, Rescue 5, FDNY: My brother-in-law, who was in Rescue 5, called me up, and he said, “Bill, everybody’s missing.” I said, “What do you mean ‘everybody’?” I named every guy I had breakfast with that morning. I kept naming names—Mike and this guy and that guy—he said, “No, Bill. They’re all missing.” Then my wife called me later that evening also. She said, “Did you get the bad news?” I said, “Yeah, everybody’s missing.” She said, “No, your uncle was on Flight 93.” I remember I said, “All right.” I said, “Give me all the bad news now you want. This is the worst day of my life.”

  * * *

  At 5:20 p.m., the 48-story building known as Seven World Trade Center, which had been burning furiously after being struck by the wreckage and debris from the adjacent Twin Towers, collapsed into itself. Overwhelmed by its losses, the magnitude of the day’s tragedy, and the lack of water pressure in Lower Manhattan following the Twin Towers’ collapse, the New York Fire Department had decided to let the building burn.

  Jeff Johnson, firefighter, Engine 74, FDNY: My eyes were really in bad shape. I had taken a piece of cardboard and cut a slit in it, so I could put it over my eyes to cut down on the amount of light. We got to Stuyvesant High School and they had a triage center set up inside. They gave me water and flushed out my eyes. I got up to go back out onto West Street, and as I was stepping down the stairs out to exit the high school, people were running again. I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on. A huge plume of smoke came up West Street. Building Seven had collapsed.

  Det. David Brink, Emergency Service Unit, Truck 3, NYPD: I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me! How many more buildings are going to fall?”

  Dan Nigro, chief of operations, FDNY: It would have been the largest collapse in the history of firefighting of a high-rise building if it had not been for WTC 1 and 2. We had another 48-story building came down in a matter of seconds, but thankfully, not one additional person was injured when that building came down.

  William Jimeno, officer, PAPD: We heard a huge explosion, which sounded like the same thing that happened the first two times, but it was further away. We believe this was Building Seven coming down.

  Scott Strauss, officer, Emergency Service Unit, Truck 1, NYPD: Building Seven comes down about 5:30, and they take the organized rescue effort off the pile. “Hey, guys! We’re getting off. The buildings are coming down everywhere. Let’s get off the pile. Let’s regroup.” It wasn’t a “pile” until days later. We called it the Trade Center, and then the terminology evolved into “The Pile,” and then it became “Ground Zero.”

  Jeff Johnson: At that point, I lost it. I broke down. A friend of mine, Eddie Callahan, saw me—he said he thought I was dead. There were a couple of these Chevy Suburbans, chief cars. Eddie had one, and he goes, “We’re getting you out of here.” They put a bunch of guys, as many guys as they could fit, into the rig that had been pretty beaten up. It was funny. We tried putting the air-conditioning on to cool us off—it was blowing so much dust we couldn’t see to drive. We had to open the windows to let the dust out. He brought me back to my firehouse.

  * * *

  At Ground Zero, an impromptu bucket brigade had begun work, trying to sift through the acres of burning wreckage in hopes of finding survivors and recovering the dead. The fires at Ground Zero would burn for another 99 days, until they were finally extinguished for good on December 19.

  Paul McFadden, firefighter, Rescue 2, FDNY: The rubble, the field was so large that you’re saying, “Where could you actually start?”

  Omar Olayan, officer, NYPD: Once you got to the top of the rubble pile, there was all this smoke and the buildings on the side were on fire. At some point, you would get smoke inhalation and your eyes were burning out of your head and you couldn’t do it anymore. So you would go over to One Liberty, the building, they would nebulize you a little bit, wash your eyes out a little, and then you’d get back on the line and do it again. They had little paper masks, but at some point we took them off because they would get black in about two minutes and it was worthless.

  John Napolitano, father of FDNY firefighter John P. Napolitano: When we came onto West Street and saw the debris field, I didn’t even know that was a street. It was steel all over the place, and smoke rising, and it was chaos. It was a movie set that some deranged director thought of. It was the most horrific thing that I ever saw in my life. Where do we start? Where do we begin? I saw the lines of rescue workers moving debris a bucket at a time. Lenny went over to the wall, and he started to write, “John Crisci, call home,” on the ash. I was getting so overwhelmed, saying to myself, “I want to believe my son’s here. I want to believe he’s alive, but it don’t look good.” I walked over to the wall and with my finger I wrote a big message in the ash. I wrote, “Rescue 2, John Napolitano, I’m here and I love you. Dad.”

  Denise McFadden, wife of FDNY firefighter Paul McFadden: Paul called, and he was up on the pile. I didn’t understand what he was saying because he was naming name after name that we kn
ew, then saying, “Dead.” I said, “Stop it. What are you doing?” I said, “Is this some sick joke?” He couldn’t stop. He kept rattling off name and “dead.” He couldn’t say anything else.

  Capt. Jay Jonas, Ladder 6, FDNY: I’m sitting at the ambulance, still with Tommy Falco, and he looks at me and he says, “Hey, Cap.” He says, “How many guys do you think we lost here today?” I look out across the field and I says, “Oh, man! I don’t know—maybe a couple hundred.” I caught myself when I said it. I said, “What the heck did I say—a couple hundred?” Prior to that day our biggest life-loss fire we had was 12, and I’m saying a couple hundred. As it turns out I was off by almost a half. The numbers are staggering.

  John Napolitano: At one point I joined the bucket brigade and I was moving the dirt. They would give me the buckets. I remember somebody saying, “This is a piece of the plane. You got to give it to a Fed.” The guy pointed at me, because I was in civilian clothes, and I had dress pants on. They gave me this piece of metal—thin metal—and I was holding it. I walked off the mound, and I looked at a guy and he does look like a Fed. I went up to him and I said, “Listen. They said, ‘Give this to a Fed.’ ” I said, “They gave it to me, but I’m an ex-cop, not a Fed.” I said, “Are you a Fed?” He nodded his head, and he stood there watching everybody and everything, and he took it.

  Paul McFadden: When everything settled, I lost 46 friends. They were either my friends or they were sons of my friends.

  Capt. Jay Jonas: From the time we walked into that building till the time we got out late that afternoon, the world changed. By the time I saw sunlight again, the world was completely different. When we were trapped we couldn’t fathom what it looked like outside. It was beyond our wildest imagination, how bad it truly was.

  “How drastically the world had changed”

  * * *

  9/11 at Sea

  Far from America’s shores on September 11th, the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN-65) was beginning its return voyage from an April deployment to the Persian Gulf. But as TV broadcasts brought word of the attacks at home, the ship changed course.

  Capt. James “Sandy” Winnefeld Jr., commander, USS Enterprise : There had been a lot of noise on the intelligence nets over the summer—some terrorist plot going on out there. We didn’t know what it was, but we thought it could very easily be targeting our high-profile ship. We took exceptional precautions on our Suez Canal transit, from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea, because we were just worried. Obviously nothing happened, so we entered the Persian Gulf and spent three months there supporting operations in Iraq—this was enforcing the no-fly zone in Iraq, OPERATION SOUTHERN WATCH. We had just finished an extremely successful strike against an Iraqi surface-to-air missile battery, and we were finished with the operational part of our deployment and had exited the Arabian Gulf, on our way to a port visit in South Africa on the way home.

  On the afternoon of 9/11—the morning back on the East Coast—I was in my sea cabin reading and got a phone call from my safety officer to turn on the TV. He said, “There’s something going on in New York.” It was only a minute or so after I turned the TV on that I watched the airplane hit the second tower. Right there, it seemed pretty clear to me that we weren’t going home. We weren’t going anywhere because there was a good chance this attack originated from somewhere in Afghanistan. We knew all about al-Qaeda.

  It was hard to describe the feeling of the Pentagon being hit—wondering if any of my friends were a victim of that attack, wondering exactly how bad the damage was, because it was hard to tell from the TV, and then this feeling that they struck right at the center of who the military is, who we are, what we believe, how we try to defend our country. Watching those two World Trade Center towers come down, that was probably the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen. That was like, Oh my God, the world has changed. Everybody on board was really angry, really shocked.

  But we knew we would probably be part of the answer. Over the course of the afternoon, we had a number of meetings. Ultimately the decision was mutually made that we would turn north toward Afghanistan. Our goal was to be off the coast by the very next morning, ready to conduct strike operations if we were asked to do so. When I announced the change of course, I told the crew something like, “I know none of you are disappointed our port visit to South Africa has been canceled. We’re out here on the front lines, and there’s every possibility that sooner rather than later we’ll be asked to answer for this heinous act that’s been committed against our country.”

  You can imagine how helpless we felt at sea watching this all unfold on TV. Everybody was worried about what the terrorists were going to do next. It was the first time in my life that I felt safer at sea than my family was at home.

  Weeks later, the USS Enterprise would launch the first U.S. airstrikes on Afghanistan.

  * * *

  Word of the attacks continued to spread throughout that Tuesday, finally reaching the U.S. Navy’s fast-attack submarine USS Norfolk (SSN-714) at dinnertime, when the stealthy submarine came to the surface to collect the day’s news.

  Matt Dooley, crewman, USS Norfolk: We were at sea the week of September 11, 2001, for routine operations and training. When we left Norfolk Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, there were fishing boats and pleasure craft in the bay, and it seemed like a quiet day to be on the water. We cleared our communications broadcast early that morning and submerged for our daily tasking. When a submarine is underwater, it is out of communication with the outside world and therefore is required to clear communications broadcasts every 12 hours or so.

  When we cleared our broadcast the evening of September 11th, we quickly learned how drastically the world had changed in the 12 hours since our morning broadcast. A sailor that worked in our communications room interrupted our captain as he was eating dinner and told him he was needed in the communications room. Moments later, the captain addressed the crew and read the initial reports over the ship’s intercom system. I remember his first words and they still echo in my ears: “The United States has been attacked.” We thought this had to be some type of government or military exercise. It all sounded like something from a movie. Since we couldn’t see images of the news, we only had the images playing in our heads.

  We stayed at periscope depth—just below the surface of the water where our antennas could come up and download communications—for the next few days to get information as it became available. None of us knew what we might be asked to do. It was about a week before we were allowed to come home and we got to see the images of the attacks for the first time. For a week, we only had text on paper and each of us in the submarine hoped it wasn’t real. Finally seeing the footage for the first time is a feeling none of us can forget.

  “We still continue to fight this war”

  * * *

  Afternoon at the Pentagon

  By late afternoon, the scene at the Pentagon had settled down; across northern Virginia and Washington, injured personnel sought treatment, rescuers and firefighters settled in for a long siege at the crash site.

  Capt. Gary Tobias, Arlington County Fire Department: They took a load of us on a bus down to the Pentagon to start relieving the people there who had been there all day.

  Chuck Cake, firefighter and EMT, Arlington County Fire Department: Long about 4:30, the call came through that anybody that hadn’t been to the Pentagon yet, “Get on the bus, you’re going, it’s your turn.” I was sent to the interior. We were deployed to the C Ring to look for survivors, and to take care of spot fires. There was wreckage everywhere, and little spot fires all over the place, except there were bodies thrown in with it, too. There were still many, many victims in the building, most of them uniformed. That particular office must have been air force, because I saw a lot of air force uniforms. A lot of the people were burnt beyond recognition. But somehow or other the insignias all survived, and on some of the uniforms, you could still see the patchwork and stuff. We went and got body bags and sh
eets to put over people, even if for no other reason than to make us feel better.

  Philip Smith, branch chief, U.S. Army, Pentagon: One arm is scarred up to about my shirt sleeve, and all of that turns black. While I was at the hospital, they trimmed all the dead skin off. My face was like one big scab.

  Lt. Col. Rob Grunewald, information management officer, U.S. Army, Pentagon: It was getting later in the day, and I was becoming sick. I’m coughing up all kinds of black phlegm and stuff. An air force lieutenant colonel comes up and says, “Come on. Let me help you. We’ll get you over to the medical tent.” They asked, “What hospital do you want to go to?” I go into an ambulance. I am the only one on the highway. The highways were shut down. The siren was going. I was looking out, and I was the only game in town.

  Philip Smith: One of my coworkers, a lady by the name of Martha Cardin, was also released. We weren’t able to reach anybody by cell phone. All of the communications were down. I walk out of the hospital—and Arlington Hospital is a big hospital. The door that I walk out of, I run into one of my neighbors from a prior assignment, a friend, who had driven to Arlington Hospital to come and find me. I literally bump into him at the door. It was Maj. Rex Harrison. I said, “Rex! What are you doing here?” He said, “Well, I came to pick you up.” I said, “Well, that’s great! Thank you so much. Can we take Martha home?”

  Lt. Col. Rob Grunewald: I got a Purple Heart for my injuries, and I got a Soldier’s Medal for my actions that day. There were only maybe 11 or 13 people that got both medals. The Soldier’s Medal is the highest medal you can get for bravery not in a combat environment. Somebody obviously thought I did something good—probably Martha.