American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Still, most people at the site understood that the loss the firemen felt was real. One morning in the late fall, I accompanied Ken Holden into the expanding valley at the center of the pile, where a temporary access road of ground-asphalt millings was being built. A fire chief came up and said, “You gotta give us time. You gotta get these guys to stop covering up the debris, burying us with dirt.”

  Before Holden could answer, another fireman, an older man in filthy clothes and a scarred helmet, rushed up and said, “You stop these guys from pushing dirt in here!” He had a weathered face, and heavy sweat on his upper lip. His eyes were wild. He said, “I’ve got two friends out there. And I’ve got my son buried right in here.” Holden put a calming hand on his shoulder, to no effect. The fireman wandered off with his shovel, a short entrenching tool bent 90 degrees, and climbed down into a hole in the rubble.

  The chief repeated almost apologetically, “He lost his son in there.”

  Holden said, “How much time do you need? A day? Two days?”

  The chief swept his hand wide. “They’re buried all through.”

  Holden went off to find Burton and tell him to stop the road for now. When he came back, the old fireman was down on his knees, probing loose debris and sniffing shovelfuls for the scent of death.

  For most of the men on the pile, the loss was less acute. Even if these were fellow firemen who had died, and even if they were close friends and even if people used the word “brother” to describe them, it was not the same as losing a son. Still, over the first few months there was a lot of sadness at the site. Away from the photographers and TV cameras, the depth of it was not always obvious. The Fire Department search parties operated on a regularized schedule in small groups beside the diesel excavators, and they sifted through the fresh debris with workmanlike efficiency. But they also took risks for no obvious reasons—jumping suddenly into newly opened debris holes, climbing on the unstable cliffs, and, especially, standing for hours in the heaviest smoke and dust, refusing as a matter of pride to wear the respirators that dangled around their necks. They seemed to have surrendered to an attitude of reckless self-abandonment. To varying degrees the police and construction workers had surrendered to it too. In one of the Salvation Army feeding tents I talked to a psychologist who blamed the risk-taking on “survivor guilt,” which he called a common reaction to disaster. To me, however, it looked like a simpler form of grief.

  But the risk-taking was also the expression of a more creative and courageous impulse, linked to the need for action and improvisation, and part of the personal freedom that was unexpectedly emerging at the Trade Center site. It was a response as well to the sheer magnitude of this calamity, the hijackings, the killings, the collapses—events so extreme that they required extreme actions in return. Despite all the divisions at the site, this was the fundamental understanding that people shared—and, indeed, that the culture at the site demanded.

  And then, of course, there was the pile, always the pile. It had been the focus of ferocious energy during the collapse, and now again was the focus during the unbuilding. The pile was an extreme in itself. It was not just the ruins of seven big buildings but a terrain of tangled steel on an unimaginable scale, with mountainous slopes breathing smoke and flame, roamed by diesel dinosaurs and filled with the human dead. The pile heaved and groaned and constantly changed, and was capable at any moment of killing again. People did not merely work to clear it out but went there day and night to fling themselves against it. The pile was the enemy, the objective, the obsession, the hard-won ground.

  THE RUSH TO RECOVER

  The dread that Americans felt during the weeks following the September 11 attacks stemmed less from the fear of death than from a collective loss of control—a sense of being dragged headlong into an apocalyptic future for which society seemed unprepared. That future was first delivered at a precise place and time—inside American Airlines Flight 11, a twin-aisle Boeing 767 that had departed Boston and was westbound for Los Angeles at 29,000 feet, near Albany, New York. This was the airplane that would hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Both pilots were at their accustomed positions in the cockpit. At 8:13:29 the en route air-traffic controller at Boston Center said, “American 11, turn twenty degrees right.” One of the pilots answered, “Twenty right, American 11.” It was the flight’s last routine transmission. Sixteen seconds later the controller issued instructions for a climb, and received no response, presumably because in that brief interval the hijackers had burst into the cockpit and with brutal efficiency had assumed command.

  The controller did not suspect it at the time. Indeed, neither he nor others on the ground could have guessed that anything about the morning was extraordinary. In New York City, Sam Melisi was sitting in the familiar engine room of the fireboat where he worked, studying for a ship’s engineer exam that he was scheduled to take at the end of the week. Ken Holden was in his Queens office preparing to leave for a regular meeting in Lower Manhattan, at City Hall. Mike Burton was headed to the same meeting, and was weaving impatiently as usual through traffic on the drive from his house in suburban Westchester County. At the same time, tens of thousands of office workers were streaming from the subways and commuter trains, and grabbing their customary coffees, or riding the elevators straight up to their offices in the World Trade Center towers. Workers all through the city were doing similar things. There were perhaps 18 million people in the vicinity of New York that morning, and later it seemed every one had a story that started with a routine.

  The routine held at Boston Center for eleven long minutes after the hijacking began. The weather was known to be bright, smooth, and clear. Air traffic was light. For the controller who had lost radio contact with American 11 there really wasn’t much to do. The airplane tracked steadily westward across the radar screen. The controller assumed that its continuing silence amounted to a simple communication failure—a relatively common occurrence—and he tried to re-establish radio contact, but without undue concern. He mentioned the problem to another controller, in charge of the adjoining airspace, and he continued to work the other flights in his piece of the New England sky—a Continental, a couple of Deltas, and two business jets that cruised by.

  Then came the next step in the sequence of what would become a strange aerial ballet: at 8:23 the second 767 destined to hit the Trade Center came flying into the controller’s sector and as expected checked onto the frequency. It was United Flight 175, running fifteen minutes behind American 11, and also bound from Boston to Los Angeles. This was the same airplane that would soon flow in a stream of molten aluminum down the South Tower’s side, but there was no hint of that now. The pilot sounded particularly relaxed. He said, “Boston, morning. United 175 out of nineteen for two-three-zero.”

  With a confirming glance at the altitude readout on the radar screen, the controller said, “United 175, Boston, ah, Center, roger.” The frequency was silent for nearly a minute and a half. Then the controller heard something in his headset, possibly just the hollowness of an empty “carrier” signal—a raw transmission without the modulation of spoken words. He radioed, “Is that American 11 trying to call?”

  This time there was a voice, heavily accented. On the public air-traffic control frequency, for all who were tuned in to hear, it said, “We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay. We are returning to the airport.”

  Little is known about the scene in American 11’s cockpit at that point, since the airplane’s cockpit voice recorder was never found. No “black box” recorder survived in the Trade Center’s ruins. It is possible, as was reported afterward, that one of the pilots had surreptitiously keyed his microphone to pick up the threats and warn air-traffic control. But given the design of aviation microphones, which require close proximity to the mouth, it seems more likely that the pilots were already dead or disabled, and that one of the hijackers had strapped himself into the seat behind the controls and was misusing an audio selection switch
, unintentionally transmitting a message meant only for the cabin’s public-address system.

  It had been fourteen years since the last airline hijacking in the United States. Understandably, the controller was taken aback. He radioed, “And, uh, who’s trying to call me here?”

  Silence.

  He radioed, “American 11, are you trying to call?”

  Again the hijacker was heard. He said, “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

  The controller caught on, and did not radio American 11 again. He notified his superiors that a hijacking was in progress. The United pilots must have overheard all this and understood it too. Like the other crews on the frequency, they maintained radio discipline. Not a word of comment went out over the air. Two minutes later the controller handed off the United flight to another sector within Boston Center’s airspace.

  It was 8:28. American 11’s transponder beacon had been switched off, degrading its display on the radar screens and extinguishing its altitude readout. As an unenhanced “primary” blip, it turned sharply and began to move at high speed down the Hudson Valley toward metropolitan New York. As it busted through the various sectors and into the airspace belonging to New York Center, the Boston controllers continued to monitor the last frequency—now cleared of other traffic. The flight downriver lasted eighteen minutes. A third of the way through it the frequency came alive with another unintentional transmission: “Nobody move, please. We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.” It sounded almost polite. People took the words at face value. The destination appeared to be New York. Newark and Kennedy Airports prepared for an emergency landing.

  Then United 175 got involved again. The pilots had checked onto a new Boston Center frequency, and were level at 31,000 feet, when the hijacked airplane flew nearby. The controller wanted to verify its altitude, and he asked United 175 for help. He said, “Do you have traffic? Look at, ah, your twelve to one o’clock position at about, uh, ten miles southbound, to see if you can see an American 767 out there, please.”

  Having heard the transmissions on the previous frequency, the United pilots must have known what this was about, but again they maintained the expected calm. The view from their cockpit was superb. Looking downsun, they spotted the airplane ahead and several thousand feet below, crossing fast from right to left. “Affirmative. We have him, ah, he looks, ah, about twenty, yeah, about twenty-nine, twenty-eight thousand.”

  Reflexively the controller directed them into the airspace above and behind American 11’s tail. He said, “United 175, turn five . . . turn thirty degrees right. I want to keep you away from this traffic.” The encounter was later reported as a near collision between the two airliners—a gross if typical exaggeration. Ultimately, of course, the turn did neither airplane any good.

  The scene inside American 11 was very rough. There were five hijackers aboard, Islamic militants armed with box cutters and small blades. They were led by the now notorious Egyptian named Mohamed Atta, the chief conspirator behind all four of the attacks that day. The cabin of American 11 was less than half full, with seventy-six hapless passengers and nine flight attendants.

  One of the flight attendants, a forty-five-year-old woman named Betty Ong, dialed a seatback flight phone and reached a reservation agent on the ground in North Carolina. Ong reported the hijacking to the agent, who in turn established a communications link with American Airlines’ national operations center, in Fort Worth, Texas. The manager on duty there, an airline veteran named Craig Marquis, pulled up her records and, concerned that the call might be a hoax, verified her employee number and nickname. Ong said that two of the flight attendants had been stabbed, one so severely that she was on oxygen, and that a business-class passenger had been killed by having his throat cut. She counted four of the hijackers, and reported their seat numbers. She said they had used a chemical spray that burned her eyes and made breathing difficult. Marquis asked if there was a doctor on board. “No, no doctor,” Ong said.

  As the airplane approached New York, Marquis asked if it was descending. Ong said, “We’re starting to descend! We’re starting to descend!” By then she may have felt more hope than horror. It was natural to assume that they were descending to land.

  Apparently Ong could not see into the cockpit, which was just as well if the pilots inside it had been killed. Mohamed Atta was at the controls. Descending along the Hudson River, he pushed American 11 to over 500 mph, nearly twice the normal low-altitude speed, and hardly what you would expect from a 767 setting up for a landing. Still, no one yet guessed his purpose. At 8:40 he was six minutes out from the North Tower.

  The pilots of United 175 had lost sight of him in the vastness behind their left wing. They checked onto a new frequency, now in New York Center’s jurisdiction, with an abbreviated call: “United 175, at Flight Level 310.”

  The controller answered, “United 175, roger,” but his mind, too, was on the airspace behind them. He radioed to another crew who had been asked, like the United pilots, to spot American 11 to estimate its altitude. “USAir 583, do me a favor. Were you asked to look for an aircraft, an American flight about eight or nine o’clock, ten miles, southbound, last altitude two-nine-zero? No one is sure where he is.”

  USAir answered, “Yeah, we talked about him on the last frequency. We spotted him when he was at our three o’clock position.

  He did appear to us to be at twenty-nine thousand feet. We’re not picking him up on TCAS.”

  The controller said, “No. It looks like they shut off their transponder. That’s why the question about it.” This was by then so obviously an inadequate explanation that the controller seemed to be talking in code—signaling that something very serious was occurring here. The frequency was quiet for a full minute, during which the United pilots apparently decided to drop any pretense that American 11’s problem was merely a communication failure. Even so, when they radioed again their expression was tightly controlled. “New York, United 175 Heavy.”

  “United 175, go ahead.”

  “We figured we’d wait to go to your center. We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure from Boston. Sounds like someone keyed the mike and said, ‘Everyone stay in your seats.’ ” He was referring, of course, to American 11’s unintentional transmissions.

  The controller said, “Okay, I’ll pass that along.”

  The pilot said, “It cut out.”

  That was United 175’s final call. The time was 8:42. Just afterward a team led by a twenty-three-year-old citizen of the United Arab Emirates named Marwan al-Shehhi invaded the cockpit. It is obvious that, as in American 11, they busted through the door. The attack was so sudden that the pilots had no chance to alert the world. Nonetheless these 767s were big things with hidden spaces and lots of telephones, and word quickly got out: a mechanic on duty at United’s San Francisco center for in-flight complaints got a call from a flight attendant on board who, before the line went dead, blurted, “Oh, my God! The crew’s been killed, and a flight attendant has been stabbed! We’ve been hijacked!” The airplane held five hijackers, two dead pilots, seven flight attendants, and fifty-one passengers. United 175 turned and dove toward New York.

  At about the same time, American 11 passed low over the George Washington Bridge. As best the last moments inside the cabin can be reconstructed, few passengers if any were looking through the windows, or were aware of the airplane’s ominous flight profile—the combination of ultra-low altitude and high speed that characterized its final bombing run. The mood aboard must have been fearful but quieter now. In the back of the airplane another flight attendant was on the phone. Her name was Madeline Amy Sweeney. She had gotten through to an American flight-service manager in Boston, and with exceptional cool had given him a running account of the hijacking, fingering the terrorists and confirming much of Betty Ong’s account, including the slaughter of the passenger in business c
lass. It is likely that she added important details about the terrorists’ techniques—for instance, how exactly they got into the cockpit or controlled the passengers—which for security reasons have not been made public. Seconds before 8:46 and the impact she looked through a window to give a position report, and to her surprise saw the city flashing by. She said, “I see water and buildings!” She may have been the first person to understand the hijackers’ intentions. At the last instant she said, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”