The Only Plane in the Sky

by Garrett M Graff

  Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, senior military assistant, Office of the Secretary of Defense: We started planning on the 12th of September. We knew we would get into some kind of global war on terrorism. At that time, the casualty estimates coming in from New York City were that we had lost 6,000 people in the World Trade Center—more than we had lost anywhere at any time in the history of this country on any one day.

  Robert Hunor, contractor, Radian, Inc., Pentagon: It was about 10:00 a.m., and they were towing cars away from South Parking. There wasn’t a lot—maybe 60 of them. None of them had moved since the previous day. It dawned on me that this guy was parking next to me yesterday, and he was never going to get in that car again. He was never going to drive home.

  Scott Kocher, contractor, SAIC, Pentagon: The corridors smelled horrible, especially the upper levels. It wasn’t too bad once we got back down into the basement. The Army Operations Center, where I worked, ironically was in danger of flooding, because they were pouring so much water onto the fire.

  Chuck Cake, firefighter and EMT, Arlington County Fire Department: I remember working on the roof all day—tactic after tactic after tactic. It was a poured cement building, but it’s got a wooden sheathed roof on top, and the fire was under the roof. You’d do a trench cut to put it here, then turn around, and it had gotten under you while you were doing the trench cut. We chased it for half the day, and finally, we got it at about 2:30 in the afternoon.

  * * *

  Across the country, those whose lives had intersected with the attacks experienced a wide mix of emotions as they came to understand the full impact—both personal and global—of what had occurred.

  Lyzbeth Glick, wife of United Flight 93 passenger Jeremy Glick: The morning after Jeremy had died, I remember looking down at our daughter, Emerson—she was sleeping—and just crying because she would never know her father. I thought she would only know a sad mom. We had trouble having her—took us two and a half years—and then to have everything taken away. We had dreams for our family. Then something just kind of clicked in my head, and I said, “You know, I have a choice. I’m not going to ruin her life. I’m not going to ruin my own life.”

  The ticket agent at Washington Dulles Airport who had checked in the 9/11 hijackers there and made sure they made it safely aboard American Airlines Flight 77 arrived at work the following day, oblivious to his role.

  Vaughn Allex, ticket agent, Washington Dulles International Airport, Virginia: I didn’t know what I had done. I came to work and people wouldn’t look at me in the eye. They handed me the manifest for the flight. I stared at it for a second, then I looked up, and said, “I did it.” I had checked in a family—it was a retiree and his wife. I had time to talk to them. There was a student group—I checked in a lot of those kids, parents, teachers. They were all gone. Once it became known, people didn’t talk to me.

  For Susannah Herrada, whose baby, Dillon, had been born in Arlington on 9/11, amid the chaos and the injured from the Pentagon, the happiness of her own time in the hospital contrasted with the experience of everyone around her.

  Susannah Herrada, resident, Arlington, Virginia: Neighbors kept on coming by—and some of them I didn’t know well enough to have them see me half-naked trying to nurse a baby and in pain. They said “Oh, we wanted to see something good.” It’s wonderful how this birth was able to be a blessing to so many people, but to me, it was like, Get these people out of here. One neighbor came by when the nurse was trying to get me out of bed and, oh my gosh, I was sobbing. The neighbors were so excited to see Dillon and to have something great happen.

  Mary Dettloff, communications staff, Michigan legislature: My partner and I made an effort to patronize our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant a day after the attack because we feared people would retaliate against it. They had put a sign on their front door saying how sorry they were about the terrorist attack and that they didn’t support it. I remember thinking how sad that they felt the need to do that.

  Gabriella Daya-Dominguez, resident, Chatham, New Jersey: My father is Arabic. I remember feeling a sense of dread that week. I couldn’t eat at all. Food tasted like paper. It was hard to put something in my mouth. I felt that there was going to be a backlash against Arabs. I remember being terrified.

  Stacey Taylor Parham, air traffic control specialist, Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center: I remember sitting outside with my kids and how quiet it was. You don’t realize how many airplanes you hear and see. They’re such a part of the landscape. Sitting outside—the weather was beautiful for those next few days too—looking up in the sky, not seeing any airplanes at all. It was so quiet.

  Susannah Herrada: At night, I would sit there and Dillon would wake up, and as I’d feed him I’d listen to the sound of the jets circling and protecting the airspace. I would lay awake and listen to that sound of the fighter planes overhead.

  * * *

  In New York, at what workers and rescuers called “The Pile,” teams searched for the dead and the living, and bucket brigades began sorting and clearing debris, a process that would ultimately encompass 1.8 million tons of wreckage and stretch until May 30, 2002. Early on the second day, rescuers stumbled upon Pasquale Buzzelli’s coworker, Genelle Guzman.

  Paul Somin, firefighter, Rescue 2, FDNY: That morning we came back and we were under the command of a Lt. Larry Gray, a really senior veteran of the New York City Fire Department—someone we would call a salty guy. We went back down to the site. The decision was made: we were going to go where Jay Jonas, his guys, and Mickey Kross survived. We said, “Maybe somebody else survived there.”

  Genelle Guzman, office assistant, Port Authority, North Tower, 64th floor: Everybody in my family was in mourning already. They were up all night. They didn’t even entertain the thought that I had made it after the collapse. They went through a moment of thinking I was dead and they were not going to see me again. And, as the Bible says, sadness comes at night, but joy comes in the morning. That’s what happened to my family. They were sad at night, and the joy waited until the morning.

  Paul Somin: We started climbing up. It was a crazy climb. Everything was on fire, the steel was all hot. We got to about the 15th floor of the building, where we knew that Jonas and those guys survived, and we started to search. First, we found a couple of firemen dead. We did not take the time at that point to try to extricate them because we were looking for people who were alive. There was an elevator shaft up there and at that point I started yelling in the elevator shaft, and I heard someone answer me back. I yelled again. I realized that we found somebody.

  Genelle Guzman: They came up to that area on the heap of rubble because they saw a reflector jacket there, thinking it could be one of theirs. That’s when I called out, because I heard them.

  Paul Somin: We got everybody quiet. We tried to pinpoint her voice. Billy Esposito and I climbed down two more floors and realized her voice was getting fainter. We couldn’t hear it anymore. We started to climb up and up and up. Suddenly I could hear her a lot better. She said, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” I assured her, “I’m not going to leave you.” At that point, I said, “Tell me your name.” She said, “My name is Genelle.” We were literally standing on top of her, but we couldn’t find her. I said to her, “Can you stick your hand or anything out?” Out of the rubble came her hand. Immediately I grabbed it—now we had her. Everyone was fired up. This was what we were waiting for. Everybody was exhilarated.

  Genelle Guzman: Someone grabbed my hand, they called me by my name, and said, “Genelle, I got you. My name is Paul.” The person had my hand, and I knew I was not dreaming.

  Paul Somin: I basically held her hand. We started talking back and forth. The guys went underneath her, they went over the top of her. It took about 45 minutes, and they got her out.

  Genelle Guzman: I got into the ambulance with a guy, and he said, “We’re going to take you to the hospital now, OK? You’re going to be fine.” I made it to the hospital. I asked the nu
rse, “Am I going to go home now?” She said, “Oh no, honey, you’re going to be here for a while.” Then someone said, “Do you know how long you’ve been there?” I said, “I don’t.” They said, “You’ve been buried for 27 hours.” She said, “Do you know that you were the last survivor that they pulled out?”

  Paul Somin: Away she went. In our minds we’re thinking, Now we’re going to start finding other people. We started to climb out onto the pile, and we started finding more dead firemen. As it would turn out, she was the last survivor of the World Trade Center.

  Genelle Guzman: I was praying for 27 hours. Being the last survivor—it was a huge thing. I felt totally different. When I came out of that rubble, I felt a total conviction. From there I knew that the Holy Spirit was working in me and had changed my life. Since that day, I’ve been serving the Lord. After I came out of the hospital in November, I went to the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church. I got baptized. I got married to my boyfriend. I’ve been living the Christian life since. I had two kids after that marriage and the Lord has been good to me.

  Paul Somin: I guess it was a miracle—you think about that site that she was found, it is a miracle. It’s a miracle that we climbed up there.

  * * *

  For the families and friends of those who were lost, 9/12 began an often long, always heartsick search for word of the missing. By Wednesday’s end, the official death toll at the World Trade Center would stand at 82, but officials warned, “The death toll from the nation’s deadliest terrorism attack is expected to rise considerably.” Not knowing the true number, New York City asked the federal government for 5,000 body bags.

  Herb Ouida, World Trade Centers Association, North Tower, 77th floor, and father of Todd Ouida, Cantor Fitzgerald, North Tower, 105th floor: We took his picture, I went to the hospitals. It was so terrible, all of us putting up pictures. None of us could accept the scope of the tragedy. The next day my wife said to me, “There’s no hope.” I said, “You’re wrong.” We went to a meeting of all the Cantor families. I remember Howard [Lutnick], the head of Cantor, telling us there was no hope. People were so angry at him for saying that. He was telling us the truth. We waited. We prayed. Eventually, we accepted it.

  Heather Ordover, English teacher, HSLPS: The hardest was the next day. The rumors had been flying that my principal’s sister was at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 105th floor. She was missing, presumed dead. But all the children were home and accounted for.

  John Napolitano, father of FDNY firefighter John P. Napolitano: We went back to the site every day. I knew a lot of the firemen down there—they had all grown up with my son—so we had no problem getting in. He was never found. Every day I’d go home and wish I could tell my wife something good. Never happened. I had no good news for them.

  Lt. Joseph Torrillo, director of fire education safety, FDNY: Firefighters from the Jersey City Fire Department came to the Jersey City Trauma Center, where I was, and they actually took me back to Brooklyn, to my house. When they got me home, they gave me a list of all the missing firefighters. I was reading the list, and I couldn’t believe it. Timmy Stackpole—I was with him when the building came down, but he went to the left, I went to the right. Timmy is gone.

  Dan Potter, firefighter, Ladder 10, FDNY: At the end of the day, 60 friends of mine were killed. So were three very, very close friends—Mike Warchola, Vinny Giammona, and Brian Hickey.

  Sal Cassano, assistant chief, FDNY: We lost 343 members. That was 4,400 years of combined experience. We had to rebuild the department from the ground up. We lost our chief of department. We lost our first deputy fire commissioner. We lost two of our most knowledgeable staff chiefs, dozens and dozens of officers. So how do we rebuild? We had promotions. The next day, I was the chief of operations. Other people were promoted to lieutenant much more quickly than they would have been—captain, battalion chief, deputy chief. We had to rebuild the department really from the ground up.

  Constance Labetti, accountant, Aon Corporation, South Tower, 99th floor: I had assumed that my boss, Ron Fazio, had gone down ahead of me, being that he was the one that opened the door and hollered to people to hurry. By eight o’clock in the morning, the phone started ringing. It was my boss Ron’s son, and I immediately started to tell him how much of a hero I thought his dad was, and he was amazing, and he got us all to the staircase. And he said, “Connie, Connie. Where did you see my dad last?” I said, “He didn’t come home?” His son said, “No, Dad hasn’t come home.” I felt doom at that moment.

  Aon lost almost 200 employees. The last that was heard of Ron was that he was out of the building. He lent somebody his cell phone as the Tower came down. So they think that he might have been hit by the falling debris. He’s the reason I’m here. There’s no question about it. There’s absolutely no question that most of us survived that day because of him.

  Lisa Lefler, employee, Aon Corporation, South Tower, 103rd Floor: I called the 800 number posted on the news to advise that I was OK and so were [my coworkers] Hon, Frank, and Karen. Aon already had information posted on the website and someone started a message board on Yahoo for employees. As more people logged on, you started to know more people were OK or not. There were people posting messages at all hours. I guess no one else could sleep, either.

  That night, we received a very strange phone call at around 11:30, which I answered. The caller expressed surprise and relief to hear it was me. He said his name was Boyd Harden and he was a rescue worker working at Ground Zero and that he had found my briefcase. I was stunned. So was he when he asked where I dropped it and I told him I hadn’t dropped it, it was at my desk on 103. For proof that it was mine, he called the number on my résumé, which was in the side pocket.

  Philip Smith, branch chief, U.S. Army, Pentagon: On that day, in our division, we had 20 people. We had seven killed and three injured. We suffered about a 50 percent loss rate in one day.

  Gabriella Daya-Dominguez, resident, Chatham, New Jersey: There were 11 people in our town that died. It’s a commuter train town. The sad part was the cars left in the train parking lot that were never reclaimed.

  Charles Christophe, attorney, Broadway: The next day I brought Gretchen to the daycare, went into the city, and started looking for Kirsten, from hospital to hospital, because there was no centralized information where you could see the victims. I had to wait in line. The first hospital—every hospital—they gave me a list of various hospitals where she might be, and I was checking. For almost two weeks, every day, that was my routine.

  Michael Lomonaco, executive chef, Windows on the World, North Tower, 106th floor: It took days and days to compile the list of the missing—they weren’t gone, they were unaccounted for. Someone had to have gotten down those stairs. They were going to pull people out of the rubble—like in devastating earthquakes how people get pulled out five days later. I believed that until the end of the week, until Sunday or Monday. We lost 72 people that worked at WOW.

  Joe Asher, Cantor Fitzgerald, North Tower: I remember the day of the death certificates. People needed them to begin taking care of their spouse’s estate. The city set up a system where a death certificate could be obtained with an affidavit from the next of kin and an affidavit from the employer. The employer’s affidavit said essentially: name, Social Security number, date of birth, etc., worked for Cantor Fitzgerald at One World Trade Center and to the best of our knowledge was in the building on September 11. We did individual affidavits. The stack was a foot high. Each was two pages. Stephen [Merkel] our general counsel, sits down to start signing, and for each one, he would look at it, and if he knew the person, he would say something about the person. This went on for hours. It was just awful.

  Dr. Charles Hirsch, chief medical examiner, City of New York: We were ready to start receiving the dead on 9/11. It went pretty much as we had planned. The only major difference from the standpoint of our agency is that in spite of all the planning, we had never conceived of a situation in which hundreds or thousands of people would b
e fragmented. We had no specific contingency plan for a mass disaster in which DNA would be the major source of identification.

  Donna Pearce, resident, Manhattan: The city was plastered with missing persons flyers. No one wanted to be alone.

  Katie Couric, anchor, The Today Show, NBC News: The most emotionally searing time was the days following, with all the signs and the Xeroxed pictures affixed to the chain-link fences. There was so much desperation to find people.

  * * *

  On Capitol Hill, legislators and staff began to plan the nation’s response and recovery efforts, even as they now realized their own offices might be a future terrorist target.

  Sen. Tom Daschle (D–South Dakota), Senate Majority Leader: I look back on September 12th as, in some ways, the best and the worst of our country. The best part was how resilient our country can be in the tragedies of this magnitude. The worst had to do with the vulnerability and loss of so many lives and the knowledge that there was agony and so much pain.

  Brian Gunderson, chief of staff for House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-Texas): As we came back to work to the Capitol on the morning of the 12th, there were a lot of changes. There were new security barriers that were thrown up, there were military Humvees with .50-caliber machine guns on top, with soldiers manning them. At a glance, it looked like there’d been a coup.

  Tish Schwartz, chief clerk, House Judiciary Committee: It was really somber. The staff, everybody had a story. Everybody had a friend who was affected by the attack, somebody who knew somebody that died either in New York or the Pentagon.

  Brian Gunderson: During that week, there were occasional new security alarms. There was one moment—think it was that first week—where the Capitol had to be evacuated again. It happened by surprise, no warning. All of a sudden the alarms went off, people had to get out. It was a very jittery environment.

  Steve Elmendorf, chief of staff for House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri): This had never been a place you had come to work before that you had to worry.