Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Above all they wanted children, but months of trying hadn’t worked. The sight of a father sharing a milkshake with his daughter gnawed at Carlos’s heart. He took a second job, partly to save for a pool their hoped-for children could use in their backyard. Sometimes his job took an especially heavy toll. In early September 2001, he answered a call from a drug-addicted mother whose baby had died. That night Carlos vented his frustration with Cecilia: “Kids having babies they don’t care for, and here we’re people who want to be moms and dads!”

  After a series of tests, Cecilia and Carlos made an appointment with a fertility doctor for September 26, 2001. In the meantime, they spoiled their nieces and nephews. After work on Monday, September 10, they visited Cecilia’s youngest sister and her three-year-old daughter, Casandra. While the sisters talked, Carlos and Casandra tossed balled-up pieces of paper at each other, squealing with laughter.

  Brian Clark and Stan Praimnath

  South Tower, World Trade Center

  Day after day, year after year, Brian Clark and Stan Praimnath11 kept the same hours in the same building. They rode the same elevators to offices three floors apart in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. They lived the same American dream, two immigrant strivers who arrived in New York City as young men, built careers in finance, and went home at night to happy suburban families.

  In a small town, they might have been friends. In teeming Lower Manhattan in September 2001, Brian and Stan were a matched set of perfect strangers.

  A Toronto native, Brian was fifty-four, with kind blue eyes, graying hair, and a poise that could be mistaken for detachment. An only child who’d longed for a sibling, Brian earned an engineering degree and an MBA, then became the tenth employee of Euro Brokers, a fledgling capital markets brokerage firm. In 1974, a year after hiring Brian, the firm relocated from Toronto to Manhattan. Brian and his wife, Dianne, who’d been his high school sweetheart, moved with their son and daughter to nearby New Jersey, where another son and daughter completed the family.

  At the time of the 1993 bombing, Euro Brokers was on the 31st floor of the North Tower, on the eve of a planned move to the 84th floor of the South Tower. Afterward, Brian became a civilian fire safety warden, trained in evacuation and entrusted with a red flashlight, a whistle, a reflective vest, and a red hat he kept in a credenza above his desk. Under no circumstances would he wear the hat, which he thought made him look foolish.

  Brian rose to executive vice president at Euro Brokers, making him one of several top company officials who managed a staff of more than 250 employees, including hotshot brokers and traders who turned knowledge into money. Amid shouting men in shirtsleeves12 and women in power skirts, their faces lit by computer screens, Brian remained the prototypical unflappable Canadian. A video of the trading floor captured him looking like a bemused math teacher watching raucous teens at recess.

  On Monday, September 10, Brian arrived at work before the markets opened. He dived into what promised to be a busy week in a privileged life: days spent wrangling Type A traders, nights with Dianne for dinner, a weekend of church and family events.

  Meanwhile, Stan Praimnath took September 10 off, an uncharacteristic indulgence for a man who’d worked his way up from nothing to the South Tower’s 81st floor.

  As a barefoot boy in a small village13 in Guyana, in South America, Stan grew up devouring books, pilfering mangoes from nearby groves, and dreaming of life in the United States. While still in his teens, Stan passed a test to become a high school teacher, but he saw little hope for advancement in an impoverished, socialist country. An uncle who’d emigrated years earlier to New York offered to sponsor Stan’s family, so in September 1982, Stan, his parents, and his five siblings landed in the borough of Queens.

  After six months of consistent effort and constant rejection, Stan found two jobs: as a shipping clerk in a New Jersey textile company and as a data entry clerk in a Manhattan bank, which together meant a sixteen-hour workday, not including commuting time. On cold days, he’d meet one of his brothers in a train station to hand off a winter coat they shared.

  On one of his endless subway rides, Stan met a fellow Guyanese immigrant, a shy minister’s daughter named Jenny whom Stan courted for years and married in 1989. The same year, Stan became a loan officer for Fuji Bank, coincidentally one of the same institutions served by Brian Clark’s company, Euro Brokers.

  Twelve years later, in the summer of 2001, Stan was forty-four, with neat black hair, soulful brown eyes, a high forehead, and a cleft chin. Nighttime karate classes kept him in fighting trim. He and Jenny had two daughters and a cozy home on Long Island. He’d risen to assistant vice president of Fuji Bank, where he worked long hours, collected friends, and routinely ate lunch at his desk, where between bites he’d read his Bible and stare out the windows at a priceless view of the Statue of Liberty.

  Anticipating a relaxing day ahead, at home on September 10 Stan fixed breakfast for his daughters before school. He shared a cup of tea with Jenny before she left for work in Brooklyn, in the legal department of the New York Stock Exchange. Later, he’d cook dinner, watch the news, and say a prayer of thanks for the bounty of his life.

  The next day, September 11, Stan would return to his routine. He’d stride through the South Tower lobby, perhaps alongside a fellow immigrant, a stranger named Brian.

  Alayne Gentul

  South Tower, World Trade Center

  As the summer of 2001 neared its end, Alayne Gentul14 and her husband, Jack, rode a pair of old Schwinn bicycles up and down the sand-splashed streets of Barnegat Light, a beach town named for a lighthouse on a narrow island along the New Jersey coastline.

  Beaches occupied an outsized place in Alayne and Jack’s life. Their romance began twenty-four years earlier with a moonlit kiss on another New Jersey beach, surrounded by an armada of amorous horseshoe crabs that had come ashore to spawn.

  In their early years together, Alayne and Jack scrimped for weekends at the shore and dreamed of pricey, weeklong summer rentals. Time passed, their careers thrived, and they shared their ocean love with their sons, Alex and Robbie, twelve and eight. Their late-summer bicycle tour was as much for the boys as it was for them. Maybe now they could afford to buy a seaside family retreat a hundred miles from their suburban home.

  Alayne and Jack appraised properties as they biked past scraggly trees and crushed-seashell driveways, turning around as each easterly block dead-ended at a winding dune path to the Atlantic. One house stood out, an abandoned ranch-style cottage four lots from the water. A teardown, to be sure, but in its place they could build something all their own. It wasn’t for sale, but maybe someday. They had time.

  At forty-four, Alayne still looked to Jack like the undergraduate he’d spotted at Rutgers University when he was a young residence hall director. Alayne had walked past him on campus, smiling and self-assured, with shiny brown hair, blue eyes, hoop earrings, and a model’s gait. Jack sighed to a friend: “If only I could find somebody like that.” When Alayne knocked on his dorm room door seeking a job, he’d found her. After keeping a respectful distance while she worked for him, they married in June 1978, a year to the day after their first beach kiss among the crabs.

  While Jack pursued a master’s degree in education, Alayne worked at a bank and waited tables at a Friendly’s restaurant. She noticed that a male waiter promoted to assistant manager wore a white shirt and tie, but her promotion carried only a new nametag for her polyester uniform. Alayne challenged the policy to her corporate bosses and won, in the process gaining momentum for a career in human resources.

  In 1982, Alayne went to work as a personnel assistant for Fiduciary Trust Company, an investment firm with New York offices in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Every day she rode elevators built by Otis Elevator Company, where her engineer father, Harry Friedenreich, had spent his career. During the towers’ construction, Harry rode to the top15 of one and withstood the elements, to see how his colleagues tackled the colos
sal vertical challenge. Harry didn’t like heights, so he didn’t stay long. Years later, when he visited Alayne in her 90th floor office, Harry felt a rush of pride.

  By the time of her parents’ visit, Alayne had earned a master’s degree at New York University and become Fiduciary Trust’s senior vice president of human resources. Jack treasured her ability to deftly balance work and home life. Alayne managed the family finances, cared for the boys, invited Jack’s widowed mother to live with them, and every Sunday, after teaching Bible classes, cooked a week’s worth of dinners.

  Occasionally, Jack caught glimpses of a steely side, as when Alayne shut down a home contractor who tried to overcharge them, or when she told Jack about reprimanding senior executives for acts of sexism. But with her family, Alayne was a font of good humor: helping Alex with homework, baking with Robbie, tending to Jack and their garden. She even tolerated Jack’s gentle pranks, laughing when he handed her a watermelon in the supermarket, balanced other fruits on top, then walked away.

  After their beach property bike tour, Alayne, Jack, and their sons returned to their busy lives. School started for the boys, Jack began a new job as dean of students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Alayne got wind of a possible promotion that would require them to move to California. A house at Barnegat Light might have to wait.

  On the second Sunday in September 2001, the Gentul family joined Jack’s new students at a minor league baseball game. Afterward, as the summer sun stretched the day, Alayne and Jack sat on their back porch with a bottle of wine and a tray of cheese. They talked about how much they loved their kids and how happy they made each other. They weren’t on a beach, but Alayne closed her eyes and leaned in for a kiss.

  Lieutenant Commander Dave Tarantino, MD

  The Pentagon

  Dave Tarantino plunged toward earth,16 spinning and swaying. He looked up to see his parachute dangerously creased by a nylon line draped over the canopy.

  The year was 1983. Dave was nearly eighteen, a lanky six-foot-four freshman at Stanford University with blue eyes and a place on the crew team. Born in Guantanamo, Cuba, the eldest of three sons of a U.S. Navy officer and a devoted mother, Dave lived all over the world before graduating at the top of his high school class in Michigan. Introverted but adventurous, Dave arrived at Stanford with plans to become a doctor. Only weeks later, he’d need a team of them—if he survived the fall.

  Dave and some dorm friends had talked themselves into a what-the-hell, you’re-not-scared-are-you road trip to a slipshod skydiving outfit in Antioch, California. The college kids simply had to pay a fee, nod their way through basic safety training, climb into a little plane, and clip on to a cable that would automatically pull their ripcords when they jumped. When they reached 3,500 feet, one by one they stepped out the open door and enjoyed what they expected would be an exhilarating four-minute fall. A bravery test, with training wheels. The problem was, their parachutes had been packed, or in Dave’s case mispacked, by a distracted jump school worker. Dave jumped last.

  Immediately, he knew he was in trouble. As he spun, Dave tugged at the chute’s steering lines but that didn’t help. He reached up and behind his head, hoping to disengage the cord bisecting his parachute, but the canopy twisted into a bow-tie shape. Gravity gained an edge. Dave’s mind raced through a risk-reward equation. He could deploy the emergency chute, but first he’d have to cut loose the main canopy, which was still partially slowing his descent. How could he trust that the backup would even open? He abandoned that idea. Gaining speed, Dave fought to calm his nerves. As he corkscrewed toward the ground, Dave focused on executing the tuck-and-roll landing technique he’d learned an hour earlier.

  Dave plowed into the field. He lay in a puddle of blood, a crumpled mess on the grass, his body tangled like the limp chute next to him. Stunned and afraid, Dave’s friends and the jump school staff hesitated before racing to him in a van, certain he was dead.

  Somehow youth, soft ground, luck, and his roll on impact onto his right side conspired to keep Dave breathing. His brain registered a symphony of pain from broken bones—foot, tibia, fibula, ribs, wrist, elbow, and jaw—plus a dislocated hip, a separated shoulder, a lacerated liver, and a punctured lung. On the brink of passing out, he moaned for help.

  Flash forward eighteen years to September 10, 2001. On a break for lunch, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Dr. David Tarantino sprinted across a soccer field as a midfielder on the Pentagon’s recreational team. After the parachute fall, he had endured multiple surgeries, ate weeks of blenderized meals delivered through a syringe, and spent months entombed in casts. He caught up on classes and refused to leave school, motivated by stubbornness and by Stanford crew coach Jim Farwell’s promise to save Dave’s place on the team. After months of work on the torture devices that turn rowers’ legs into muscular pistons, Dave earned the coach’s award as “Most Inspirational Oarsman.”

  After college, Dave backpacked around the world for a year, immersing himself in foreign cultures and finding himself in books. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim made an indelible impression. Dave was particularly affected by the title character’s shame at saving himself and failing to perform his duty as an officer on a sinking ship. The next year, Dave followed family tradition and accepted a Navy scholarship to attend Georgetown Medical School. He valued the financial support, but a bigger motivator was the Navy ethos of “honor, courage, and commitment.”

  After med school, Dave enjoyed more than two years as a flight surgeon with a squadron of F-18 fighters. He met his wife, Margie, a teacher of English as a second language, and switched his specialty to family medicine. Later, he deployed to Haiti for a humanitarian mission, then worked with the Indian Health Service in Nome, Alaska, where he helped to direct the rescue of more than a dozen survivors of a plane crash during a blizzard.

  A posting in Naples, Italy, led to missions in Africa and a focus on global health and disaster preparedness. In the summer of 2001, Dave was stationed at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, planning for humanitarian missions the American military might undertake in conflict regions. At thirty-five, he remained lean and fit, determined to keep his rebuilt body strong by playing soccer and competing in triathlons.

  On September 10, Dave felt at a crossroads, unsure whether to remain in the Navy. He and Margie were considering having kids, and he thought he might settle into private practice and leave globetrotting military medicine behind. As Dave chased a soccer ball in the shadow of the Pentagon, a decision loomed in his near future.

  Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills

  The Pentagon

  A light rain dappled the windows of her comfortable Maryland home as Marilyn Wills17 summoned her flock the morning of September 10. Before they rushed off to work and school, she and her husband, Kirk, joined hands with their two young daughters in a prayer circle.

  They opened with a Bible verse, then Kirk and the girls asked for wisdom, guidance, and support for good deeds and hard work. Marilyn ended with a flourish: “Lord God, please be with Portia, Percilla, mom, and dad, and see that we’re safe when we’re apart and that we come back home safely together.” Hugs all around, bag lunches in hand, and everyone out the door, a family ritual performed almost every day.

  Marilyn sang along to gospel music as she drove sixteen miles to the Pentagon’s vast north parking lot. She hustled along a crowded walkway, carrying a garment bag into the military monolith, to make a superwoman-like change from stylish suburban mom into no-nonsense Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills. Emerging from a ladies’ room, forty-year-old Marilyn looked crisp in her Class B uniform: dark green pants, light green shirt with silver oak leaves, and Army-issued black cardigan sweater, a necessary defense against an overachieving office air conditioner.

  Marilyn had moved several months earlier into a newly renovated section of the Pentagon in her role as a congressional liaison officer for the Army’s personnel department. It marked the latest stop in a nearly twenty-year car
eer that shaped her in every way and took her around the world.

  Marilyn Wills grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, the second of three daughters of a mother who taught school and a supportive stepfather. Her professional climb began at Southern University in Baton Rouge, where she found a work-study job in the school’s ROTC office. No one in her family had served in the military, and she had vowed not to be the first. But then an instructor invited her to a no-commitment summer program at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where she was paid and fed during a tryout for military life. The uniform fitted: Marilyn had a talent for leadership, and the Army prized leaders.

  Marilyn graduated with a criminal justice degree and was commissioned a second lieutenant. Sent to Fort McClellan in Alabama, she was the only African American woman in her basic military police officers’ class. Less than one hundred pounds soaking wet, she stuffed herself with potatoes at every meal to reach the minimum weight requirement and endure the physical training to become an MP. She felt targeted by white instructors who required only black soldiers to take remedial writing classes. She never complained except to her mother, who encouraged her to persevere.

  One morning, Marilyn was pleasantly shocked by the sight of a black female officer, the first one she’d ever seen. The captain became a role model and a mentor. When Marilyn completed training and reported to a base in Louisiana, the older woman asked a fellow captain named Kirk Wills, an old classmate stationed there, to keep an eye on Marilyn. Kirk did one better: he married her. Portia, now twelve, was born when Marilyn and Kirk were stationed in Germany. Percilla arrived six years later.