Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  In the years that followed, Marilyn rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. She commanded a military police company in Germany, served in Honduras, acted as a force protection officer at President Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, and spent four years on staff at West Point, among other postings. In 1999, she traded commanding soldiers for representing the Army on Capitol Hill.

  Marilyn thrived in the new role with help from a civilian Pentagon employee, a native New Yorker named Marian Serva. Generous with her expertise, Marian trained Marilyn in the delicate art of managing relations between the Army and Congress on personnel matters. Marian’s daughter, Christina, was eighteen, a college freshman, so the two women bonded and swapped stories and advice from adjacent cubicles about the challenges of raising successful girls.

  When her workday ended on September 10, Marilyn stepped through a little-used exit door and found three olive-skinned men in civilian clothes standing outside the Pentagon, apparently trying to get inside. “You can’t go in this door,” she told them. “This is ‘exit only.’ You have to go around.” The men nodded and walked away.

  The exchange left her queasy, as her mind raced to the bombing of the USS Cole and other attacks on American facilities. That night, after fixing dinner, supervising homework, and getting the girls to sleep, Marilyn told Kirk she felt horrible about having leapt to assumptions about the men’s intent. Before she went to sleep, Marilyn vowed she’d never do anything like that again.

  Captain Jack Punches, U.S. Navy, Retired

  The Pentagon

  Jack Punches18 had waited long enough. Two weeks had passed since his daughter Jennifer’s twenty-fourth birthday. After a business trip, she’d returned to her apartment ten minutes from her parents’ suburban Virginia home. The night of September 10, Jennifer told her father by phone that she wanted to go for a run and hang out with her boyfriend. Jack had other ideas.

  “We’re coming over,” he told her.

  Armed with the carrot cake for which his wife, Janice, was famous in the family, Jack burst through Jennifer’s door. He sang “Happy Birthday” in his rich baritone and collected his spoils: a hearty slice washed down with milk, followed by a kiss from Jennifer. Satisfied, Jack rounded up Janice and marched out, bellowing the theme song from Monday Night Football. The Denver Broncos would soon play the New York Giants, and Jack planned to watch with his son, Jennifer’s twenty-year-old brother, Jeremy.

  Jack was fifty years old, solidly built, dark-haired and hazel-eyed. He stood five foot eight in his socks, five foot eleven in his mind. Jack regaled his children with stories of his boyhood in rural Illinois, where he was a standout athlete and homecoming king. He laughed when Jennifer and Jeremy eventually discovered that his stardom resulted largely from the fact that he had been the only boy in his high school class, and that his bighearted mother had ordered him to take all eleven of his classmates to the prom.

  Janice grew up in the next town over. She knew she was in love with Jack by their second date, on a summer night when Jack was home from college. They married at twenty-two, after he graduated from the University of Missouri on a Navy ROTC scholarship. A waterskiing accident a year later cost Jack the ring finger on his left hand, but the amputation gave him a lifetime of comedy material. He’d joke that he cut off the finger to avoid wearing a wedding band; later he perfected a sight gag in which he’d pretend that the phantom finger was jammed up his nose. And whenever Jennifer or Jeremy did something great, Jack held up his outstretched hands and shouted, “A perfect nine!”

  During more than twenty-six years in the Navy, Jack accumulated a chest full of ribbons and more than seven thousand flight hours, many of them piloting a submarine-hunting aircraft called the P-3 Orion. On his rise to the rank of captain, Jack commanded hundreds of sailors at a U.S. base in Sigonella, Italy, then took command of a logistics and supply squadron in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, supporting battle groups during the Gulf War in 1990–91. Along the way, he earned a reputation as the best kind of officer: one who puts his sailors first. Off duty, Jack oversaw cookouts, March Madness basketball pools, and crossword puzzle contests. He presided over slip-and-slide antics, using a garden hose to snag sliding sailors like jets landing on an aircraft carrier. Near the end of his service career, he worked at the Pentagon running the Navy’s efforts to counter drug smuggling.

  At a ceremony when Jack retired in July 2000, the lights dimmed, and a screen filled with a scene from the 1955 movie Mister Roberts. As the title character, Henry Fonda plays a junior Navy officer on a World War II cargo ship who shields his men from a tyrannical skipper. After suffering one too many abuses, Mr. Roberts tosses the skipper’s prized palm tree overboard. Before leaving for combat, Mr. Roberts is honored by his men with a brass medal shaped like a palm tree as they induct him into the fictitious Order of the Palm, for actions beyond the call of duty against “the enemy.”

  The lights in the auditorium rose, and a young officer called Jack to the stage: “Thanks for your patience, your understanding, and most of all, your wisdom. This is from the heart.” He gave Jack a perfect replica of Mr. Roberts’s palm tree medal. Clenched with emotion, Jack told his family, his comrades, his friends: “I want all of you to know and understand that I’ve loved this uniform, the Navy, the nation. And there has not been a single day that I was not proud to put this uniform on and serve with the best and brightest this nation has to offer.”

  After a few months in the private sector, Jack knew where he belonged. He returned to the Pentagon in a civilian role, as the top deputy in the Navy antidrug office he formerly ran. He worked under a friend and fellow civilian, a retired Vietnam War aviator whom Jack had once supervised named Jerry Henson.

  On the night of September 10, his belly full of carrot cake and milk, Jack watched with Jeremy as the Broncos beat the Giants. Jeremy went to sleep, then roused himself when he realized that he hadn’t kissed his father good night. His cheeks fresh with kisses from both of his grown children, Jack climbed the stairs to join Janice in bed.

  Terry and Kathie Shaffer

  Shanksville, Pennsylvania

  Terry Shaffer was in trouble.19 A blue-eyed bear of a man, Terry buried evidence of his offense deep in the pocket of his worn jeans to hide it from his wife, Kathie, petite and normally placid, and the love of Terry’s life since they met as teenagers at a church camp.

  Approaching their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, blessed with three children and good health, Terry and Kathie lived what they considered an ordinary, happy life, built on family, faith, and their rural community of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But money was tight, as they had just sent their eldest, Adam, to college, with their daughter Rebecca and son Ben not far behind. Plus, they were struggling through a home renovation to rebuild a big stone fireplace, a costly project that had wrecked the kids’ bedrooms and forced them to sleep in the living room.

  The proverbial straw that broke Kathie’s calm announced itself with an annoying chime. “Who do you think you are,” Kathie demanded, “that you are so important that you need a cellphone?” Nobody they knew had one. Kathie considered it a frivolous expense, an accessory for people in cities like New York, a five-hour drive east that neither of them had ever made.

  Terry scrambled to justify his cellular commitment, explaining that the phone would help him to devote more time to family while juggling his occupation, forklift driver at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, and his calling, chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department. Pepsi paid the bills, but the camaraderie and mission of the fire service satisfied something deeper.

  With their marital row still simmering, Terry woke early on September 10 for his 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift. Kathie would rise later, to watch their two youngest cross the street to school, before going to work as a registered nurse for a family medical practice. A fire radio with him, as always, his new cellphone charged and ready, Terry pulled the family’s Dodge minivan out of his driveway and into the sleeping community he dedicated himself to protec
t.

  The Shaffers were among Shanksville’s 245 residents. Some traced deep roots to founder Christian Shank,20 a German immigrant who arrived in 1791 with his wife, seven sons, and plans for a gristmill. Shank laid out three parallel streets, and so they remained: North, South, and Main. Doomed to isolation when railroad planners turned elsewhere, Shanksville didn’t even appear on many maps. In the summer of 2001, the little working-class borough had three churches, a fire hall that was Terry’s home away from home, a brick post office, a service station with no gas pumps, the school, and a general store where the owner’s wife made $1.99 egg salad sandwiches. The store’s owner, Rick King, was Terry’s friend and assistant fire chief. As Terry drove out of town, he navigated winding country roads lined by tilting fences and houses needing paint. He passed old barns and covered bridges, abandoned coal mines and busy scrap yards.

  After a day of loading trucks with cases of Pepsi, Dr Pepper, and Hawaiian Punch, Terry returned to Shanksville and dropped by the fire station, where he and two dozen other volunteers answered some two hundred calls a year. Major fires were rare. More common were vehicle crashes, water rescues, and medical emergencies. They still talked about the time a horse on an Amish farm fell into a manure pit. Between calls, Terry spent countless hours preparing and strategizing for the worst he could imagine in their sixty-two-square-mile territory, which included settlements smaller than Shanksville and a fourteen-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That’s where he worried they’d someday be tested to their limits or beyond.

  Occasionally, tragedy called. Sometimes, Terry knew the victims well, such as the time one of his volunteer EMTs lost control of his car on a bridge and was flung to his death. Or when a local man on a weekend leave from the Navy wrapped his car around a tree, killing himself and two others. Terry took an ax to the tree to spare the families the sight of hair embedded in the bark. On those dreadful days, when no rescue was possible, Terry turned over control of the scene to Wally Miller, the county coroner. Wally was a second-generation funeral home director who lived by a simple creed: “You’ve got to remember21 that everybody that dies, that’s somebody’s favorite guy, whether it’s a prisoner or the richest guy in town or somebody else.”

  Even on quiet days, Terry dived into work at the fire station, doing paperwork, planning a barbecue fundraiser for a new tanker truck, mapping water sources in an area with no hydrants or municipal lines. Eventually dinner beckoned, so Terry went home the night of September 10 to Kathie and the kids.

  Chapter 12

  “How Lucky Am I?”

  Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center

  September 11, 2001

  Up before dawn, Ron Clifford dressed in his new blue suit and knotted his bold yellow tie. He gathered his thoughts and scanned his notes for the meeting he hoped would secure his financial future. As Ron prepared to leave his New Jersey home, his cellphone rang: the meeting had been moved, from a hotel in Times Square to the Marriott World Trade Center, tucked between the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan.

  Ron considered the change a good omen, signifying a homecoming of sorts. Before shifting his career to computer analytics, he had spent eight years as an architect for the New York Housing Authority, in the city’s Financial District, with a corner window view of the World Trade Center.

  Ron liked the bustling neighborhood, though he never cared for the towers, which he thought looked like blocky structural supports of a suspension bridge. Occasionally he ate lunch in Windows on the World, the restaurant and catering complex on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower, for a spectacular view of the city unblemished by the towers themselves. Now and then his dislike edged into ridicule. While visiting a friend in the South Tower, Ron ran a strip of masking tape down a window, as a point of reference to show the North Tower swaying in high winds. Ron laughed out loud when he read an interview in which the towers’ architect claimed he designed them mindful of the “human scale.”1

  By coincidence, Ron had discussed the World Trade Center while out sailing the previous weekend. When Ron and a friend ran into engine trouble, they called the friend’s handy cousin, a recently retired engineer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Soon they fell into conversation about the 1993 bombing. While he worked on the engine, the engineer confided that the attack was personal: the pregnant woman killed that day was his secretary, Monica Rodriguez Smith.2

  Ron’s complicated feelings weren’t unique.

  Three decades after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center reshaped Manhattan’s skyline, they remained enigmas. On one hand, New Yorkers admired the swagger it took to erect the planet’s two tallest buildings only a short distance apart, even if they held the title only briefly. And no one could deny the moxie of designing them to look like colossal exclamation points on Gotham’s greatness. But size matters only so much. Signature skyscrapers need panache. Souvenir models should look like dream castles, not Kit Kat candy bars. It’s hard to love a 110-story monolith, even one with an identical twin.

  Doubts, or worse, were the towers’ birthright. Criticism accompanied every step of the decadelong process of planning the sixteen-acre World Trade Center complex, located near the southern tip of the thirteen-mile-long island that is Manhattan. The loudest protests arose in the early 1960s from small business owners who faced displacement by construction, and real estate titans who worried that the huge towers would tilt the city’s power balance away from Midtown to the Financial District. They felt especially piqued that the developer was a public entity, the Port of New York Authority (soon to be renamed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey). Private developers didn’t mind the agency as an overseer of infrastructure such as bridges and airports, but not as a landlord competing for high-end tenants to fill an unprecedented ten million square feet of vertical office space.

  An opposition leader, developer Lawrence Wien, tried scare tactics to ignite a public outcry. He repeatedly invoked the crash of a fogbound B-25 bomber into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, an accident in 1945 that cost fourteen lives. Wien’s point was sharp and personal: he co-owned the Empire State Building, an Art Deco cathedral to capitalism complete with a spire pointing to heaven, and the longtime holder of the “world’s tallest skyscraper” crown. As part of his campaign, in 1968 Wien and his allies bought a large display ad3 in the New York Times with an artist’s rendering of a passenger jet bearing down on the north face of the proposed North Tower.

  The Port Authority expressed outrage, insisting that a structural analysis had determined that each tower could withstand a direct hit by a Boeing 707, the largest passenger jet of the day, traveling at 600 miles per hour. One of the agency’s outside consultants insisted that such a plane crash would trigger “only local damage4 which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.” The claim sounded comforting, but in fact no such detailed analysis5 had been conducted, and no one calculated the risk if a plane’s fuel exploded on impact, a predictable result that had, in any case, already occurred in the B-25 crash.

  Along with air traffic concerns came withering design complaints. The towers’ boxy severity led critics to deride them as oversized filing cabinets.6 Some said they resembled leftover shipping crates that had once contained more elegant skyscrapers. Even moderate assessments had some sharp edges. In 1966, the powerful New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable reviewed the blueprints and wrote a lukewarm semiendorsement headlined who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Her conclusion: “On balance,7 the World Trade Center is not the city-destroyer that it has been popularly represented to be, its pluses outweigh its minuses in the complex evaluation that must be made, and its potential is greater than its threat.” She ended the review with a line that read like a cross between a backhanded blessing and a voodoo curse: “The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or th
e biggest tombstones in the world.”

  Port Authority officials swatted away their opponents and broke ground. In the background, meanwhile, engineers hired to carry out the architects’ plans pioneered inventive construction and safety techniques that made the towers models, for good and ill, of countless tall buildings that would follow.

  At the outset, the engineers came up with a novel strategy to battle gravity, the bane of all human-made structures from sandcastles on up. Previously, super-tall buildings relied on internal “bones” of heavy steel, upon which hung the structural equivalent of muscle and skin made of stone. In this case, though, the towers’ engineers designed each one essentially like a box within a box. The external walls, the outer boxes, were made entirely from thin bands of structural steel.8 Like the exoskeleton of a crab, those outer walls minimized the need for heavy, bulky internal steel support columns.

  The external columns gave the towers a look reminiscent of pinstripe power suits, but it was more than a stylistic choice. Fewer interior steel columns meant more rentable space on each acre-sized office floor. Some internal columns were still necessary, so the engineers clustered them in the inner boxes, known as the central core, among the elevators, stairwells, and utility shafts. The result was an extraordinary thirty thousand square feet9 of rentable, customizable space on nearly every office floor, uninterrupted by columns or walls, with incredible views to boot. Also, the narrow windows between the closely spaced exterior columns tended to reduce dizzying vertigo among people afraid of heights,10 which oddly enough included the architect, Minoru Yamasaki.