Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  “This is huge,” Terry agreed. “This is international.”

  They would repeat versions of those phrases to each other for the rest of the day.

  No matter how big it was, they had only small fires to fight and no one to rescue. There wasn’t much for them to do, not until they could take part in the painstaking work of collecting evidence, organic and otherwise. The United Flight 93 crash site was a crime scene, to be supervised by the FBI, and a monumental challenge for a small-town coroner.

  Wally Miller showed up in khaki pants and gum boots. He knew the Diamond T site,19 having fished nearby as a boy. Back when the mine still operated, coal workers excavated old fieldstones carved with the names of local settlers from a farm cemetery. The bodies once interred there had long since turned to dust, but the coal company worked with Wally, his father, and a local historian to find a new location for the headstones, casket handles, buttons, and other items that remained.

  Wally felt as surprised by the crash site as Rick, Terry, and other emergency responders, but unlike them he understood immediately that he had months, possibly years, of work ahead. He needed to preserve the integrity of the site, to oversee the recovery and identification of remains, and equally important, to provide information and comfort to the next of kin. Wally understood that these tasks would test his core belief—“Everybody that dies, that’s somebody’s favorite guy, whether it’s a prisoner or the richest guy in town or somebody else”—on a massive scale.

  As Wally took his first steps around the field, he recalled the crash of USAir Flight 427, which seven years earlier spiraled into the ground near the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport, killing 132 people. He thought about the reports he’d heard describing a gruesome scene of charred remains, followed by years of acrimony that victims’ families directed at the county coroner who had handled it.

  As Wally surveyed the scene and walked alongside Rick King among the hemlocks, he heard the pssss, pssss sounds of melting plastic dripping from the trees and sizzling when it hit the ground. Someone tossed out an inflated estimate of how many people might have been aboard Flight 93, a number nearly ten times too large. The wild guess rattled Wally, especially considering how little he saw in the way of human remains. “If there’s four hundred people20 on this plane,” Wally thought, “we’ve got a serious problem.”

  From the very first, he resolved to identify every last passenger and crew member who died. “This is a big country,” Wally told himself. “It happened here? Well, okay, we’re going to deal with it.”

  As law enforcement officials tried to impose order and remove civilians and rubber-neckers, Terry walked through a blue haze21 of fumes past the crater, where searchers would find the plane’s two “black boxes” that recorded cockpit conversations and flight data. Wandering into the woods, Terry saw a stone bungalow, home of a lumberyard worker named Barry Hoover, blown off its foundation, its windows shattered, the door to a garage turned inside out.

  Terry walked toward a pond where he would have drawn water if there had been a fire. He saw shards of metal embedded in trees, clothing in high branches, shoes that may or may not have been empty. He saw papers and U.S. mail and remnants of luggage. Terry saw wires and debris he couldn’t identify, most of it no bigger than his fist. He saw seat belt buckles and torn pieces of foam cushions and laminated instructions for oxygen masks and emergency exits. A quarter mile from the impact point, Terry came upon a sapling chopped down by the impact of a footlong piece of the plane’s nose axle. In the woods south of the crater he saw the biggest, most recognizable evidence that a plane had fallen there: a crumpled section of fuselage about six feet by seven feet, with two intact window openings.

  Searchers would find twisted silverware for first-class service, the blunt end of a spoon implanted in a tree, knives that might have belonged to the hijackers, and a weathered but intact copy of the handwritten terror instructions titled “The Last Night.” At the base of a hemlock tree they’d find a SunTrust bank card belonging to terrorist pilot Ziad Jarrah that would help investigators trace the flow of money that financed the attackers and the attacks.

  Some of the earliest responders on the scene chased down more than a dozen twenty-dollar bills pinwheeling through the charred grass and handed the cash to the FBI. Soon searchers would find thousands of personal effects, much of it as ordinary as socks and ties, but also passenger Todd Beamer’s ID badge and assorted jewelry including passenger Andrew “Sonny” Garcia’s wedding ring.22 The gold band would be returned to his wife still inscribed with their wedding date and “All my love.” Passenger Richard Guadagno’s credentials, with the badge he’d earned from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, would go to his parents. A state trooper would find flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw’s flight log,23 with a photo of her family inside. Copilot LeRoy Homer’s wife, Melodie, would receive the dog tags from his service in the Air Force, which he’d hung on a keychain. She’d be reunited with his wedding band, inscribed with a Bible verse about the blessings of faith, hope, and love: “And the greatest of these is love.”

  Walking on, Terry saw several drivers’ licenses but didn’t pause to read the names. One, found by other searchers, belonged to flight attendant and former police officer CeeCee Lyles. Terry thought about how the licenses and other IDs had been in someone’s wallet earlier that morning, and now they were singed or half-melted on the ground, their owners gone.

  Nearby, on a pile of rocks, were the remains of a coiled snake, its head up and ready to strike. The snake had been flash-burned and preserved as ash, like the ancient volcano victims of Pompeii. The macabre find attracted a crowd of onlookers who knew that if they touched it, it would disappear.

  Back out on the field, not far from the crater and Big Mo, Terry looked down and saw an open Bible, its cover charred but its pages pristine and white, untouched by fire. Others who saw it would claim it was pressed open to a particular passage, but Terry saw the pages fluttering in the breeze that always seemed to blow at the Diamond T. The Bible belonged to retired electric company executive Don Peterson, who’d been heading to Yosemite with his wife, Jean, for a family reunion. Tucked safely inside was the handwritten list of names of men struggling with alcohol and drugs whom Don counseled and prayed for.

  Terry saw another book, too: a flight manual written in Arabic.

  At first, Terry didn’t want to see the human remains that he knew were all around him. But soon he surrendered to the responsibility and trained his eyes to distinguish between the countless man-made items and the untold pieces of burned flesh, bone, teeth, and cartilage in the grass and soil.

  Once Terry became a witness to death, he couldn’t stop seeing it. Remains were everywhere, small bits of men and women who at that moment should have been landing in San Francisco. Some larger parts, too, including part of a torso; a charred buttock; a piece of spinal cord with five vertebrae; and a foot with three toes that tree-climbing arborists,24 sent by investigators, would find in the hemlocks. All the remains would require DNA matching, dental records, or other means of positive identification. Somewhere near where Terry stood was a napkin-sized piece of skin, charred at the edges, whose source was never in doubt: the intact Superman logo tattoo25 on the flesh of Joey Nacke’s shoulder.

  Years would pass before Terry spoke of the most disturbing thing he saw: not far from Barry Hoover’s ruined house, on the grass near a red bandanna, Terry spotted a detached male face. Something about the misshapen features and the complexion convinced him that it belonged to one of the four men who rained death on the little borough of Shanksville and beyond.

  As night fell, the FBI took full control of the scene, with Wally Miller empowered to do his job as he saw fit. Most responders were sent home, but the FBI decided to include Terry and the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department in the recovery efforts. They’d serve as evidence workers and the primary on-site emergency response team.

  Terry returned to his fire station around 10 p.m. Kathie w
as there, along with two other local women determined to organize a flood of donated food, clothing, and other goods that would provide hot meals and small comforts to investigators and emergency responders. Exhausted, haunted, and changed by what he’d seen, vaguely aware that their little community would never be the same, Terry swept Kathie into a bear hug.

  Chapter 21

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”

  Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center

  The express elevator imprisoning Chris Young had two sets of doors, on opposite ends of the car. Each set had interior doors attached to the car and exterior doors connected to the building. Motors on the car’s roof were supposed to keep all interior and exterior doors shut until the elevator reached a landing. However, a loss of power like the outage caused by the South Tower collapse might allow people trapped inside to force open the doors to escape. Yet even that might not be enough.

  Since 1996, the Port Authority had been installing devices called “door restrictors”1 that prevented passengers from forcing open stalled elevator doors even if power were lost. Designed to prevent falls down shafts, the restrictors acted like deadbolts. They lifted automatically within eighteen inches of a landing but otherwise could only be disengaged by a technician or a firefighter atop an elevator car’s roof. Of the 198 elevators in the Twin Towers, about half had been equipped with restrictors.

  As minutes ticked by, the smoke and dust settled inside Chris’s elevator, but his fear rose. No one responded to his yells or his S-O-S alarms with the emergency button. Chris fought panic. Desperate to free himself, he pressed against a set of doors he’d tried earlier with no luck. This time, to his surprise, Chris felt them give. The loss of power apparently removed pressure from the motor atop his elevator. The car either didn’t have a door restrictor installed yet, or it had disengaged automatically.

  Still breathing through his dress shirt, Chris wriggled his fingers into the crack. He pulled open the doors a few inches—to reveal a blank wall.

  Chris rushed to the opposite doors to repeat the process. This time, light poured in. Chris pried the doors open farther and discovered that the car had stopped a little more than a foot from the floor of the North Tower lobby. He’d been only a hundred feet from where firefighters, Port Authority officials, and other emergency responders had operated the now empty command post for more than an hour after Flight 11 hit the North Tower.

  Chris squinted against the sunlight, his eyes sensitive from more than ninety minutes2 stuck in a dark elevator. He stepped into a moonscape of broken stonework and shattered glass, coated with a pinkish-gray dust as thick and fluffy as a layer of fresh snow. He turned to his right, where he thought the seven people he’d spoken with had been, and saw the doors to that elevator open and no one inside. The lobby was empty, a modern ghost town after an unspeakable horror.

  Confused, Chris pushed through a turnstile similar to the one he’d entered before so much changed in so little time, back when this was a normal day. Back when he was headed to the 99th floor, a floor Chris didn’t yet know had been gutted by a hijacked plane, to see Marsh & McLennan managing director Angela Kyte and other colleagues who were killed instantly or trapped by flames and broken stairwells, to deliver a box of materials for a PowerPoint presentation that would never be given.

  Half in a daze, treading gingerly through the powdered debris, Chris felt as though his feet never touched the ground. He stepped through a broken window frame and headed toward a fire truck he spotted on West Street. But first he turned and looked toward the sky. The twisted steel and rising smoke made no sense. “Oh my God,” Chris said aloud.

  He yelled to two firefighters helping an injured person: “Where should I go?”

  One firefighter waved for him to follow them, but for reasons Chris couldn’t explain, he continued walking, onto Vesey Street, west toward the Hudson River.

  He’d walked less than a hundred feet when he heard someone scream, “Run!”

  It was 10:28 a.m.

  As Ladder 6 began to evacuate the North Tower after the South Tower collapsed, Roof Man Sal D’Agostino asked Captain Jay Jonas if they could drop their heavy tools. If they weren’t going to rescue anyone, why carry irons and a roof rope? Even as he asked the question, Sal could have guessed the answer. Jay regularly preached to his men: “What’s a fireman without his tools? He’s a walking lump of carbon. Worthless.”

  Jay barked, “We bring everything with us.”

  Down they went, moving double-time for the first few floors, with Can Man Tommy Falco and Irons Man Billy Butler out front.

  Around the twentieth floor, they came upon a heavyset woman in a purple dress, standing in a doorway, softly weeping. Her name was Josephine Harris, and she was a bookkeeper for the Port Authority, one week shy of her sixtieth birthday. She had limped down about one thousand steps from the 73rd floor, hobbled by fallen arches, a bad leg from having been hit by a car several months earlier, and assorted maladies. An office manager and others had helped Josephine to get this far, but she could go no farther and had sent her helpers ahead to safety. Now she was alone. Josephine might well have been the same woman Gerry Gaeta noticed as he helped Elaine Duch down Stairwell B.

  “Hey, Cap,” said Tommy Falco, “what do you want us to do with her?”

  Every fiber in Jay’s body wanted to speed up and get as far away as possible. Every human instinct told him to run, back to his firehouse then home to his family. But if a firefighter followed raw instincts, he’d never charge into a burning building. Ladder 6 had already moved past two burn victims they saw on the way in. They still hadn’t fought a fire or rescued anyone. If Ladder 6 survived this day, Jay wanted his men to look themselves in the mirror and say the phrase he lived by: “I was a fireman today.”

  Jay turned to barrel-chested Irons Man Billy Butler, as powerful a firefighter as Jay had ever known. “Give your tools to the other guys,” Jay told him. “Take her arm, put it around your shoulders. We’ll stay together as a unit.”

  Billy did as he was told, then turned to his new charge.

  “What’s your name?”3 he asked.

  “My name is Josephine.”

  “Josephine,” Billy Butler promised, “we’re going to get you out of here today.”

  When Cecilia Lillo reached Church Street, on the east side of the trade center, she let go of the stranger’s hand and watched him walk away, like a zombie through an apocalyptic landscape. As he disappeared, Cecilia wondered if she should have asked his name. Near the Millennium Hotel, she brightened at the sight of an ambulance from FDNY EMS Station 49: Carlos’s unit in Astoria. Eager to put their emergency rendezvous plan into effect, Cecilia waved her arms and called for help. But the ambulance was empty, and she realized that she was alone on Church Street.

  Wondering where everyone had gone, Cecilia turned around to see the North Tower still burning. She knew nothing of a second plane, or that she’d survived the fall of the South Tower from inside the mall below the trade center. Cecilia agonized about her friends Nancy and Arlene, and about the security guard and everyone else who had disappeared in the smoke. But now her priority was to find Carlos.

  Cecilia reached into her purse for her cellphone but discovered it must have fallen out during her ordeal. She grew frightened, upset that she couldn’t reach Carlos. Cecilia worried that he’d be terrified that something awful had befallen her. She zigzagged northeast, caught up with a group of stragglers, and followed them to Broadway, where she saw a police officer.

  “I need to get hold of my husband—he’s a paramedic!” Cecilia told him.

  “Sorry, hon,” the officer said, “we’re on different frequencies.” His offhand comment summarized the massive communication and coordination failures that plagued the entire response. He offered one piece of advice: “You gotta find a firetruck.”

  None was in sight, but she spotted several buses congregated a few blocks up Broadway, near City Hall. Cecilia climbed onto one, not sure whe
re it was headed. A woman who didn’t speak English rose, gave Cecilia her seat, and handed her a bottle of water. When the woman pantomimed washing her mouth and eyes, Cecilia realized that grime coated her face. She looked down and saw her clothes layered in filth and wondered if she might need to be decontaminated from hazardous materials.

  As the bus headed uptown, another woman in a nearby seat mentioned the crash of a second plane and the fall of the South Tower. Her stress rising, Cecilia announced that she wanted to get off the bus. She resolved to return to the trade center, to find Carlos.

  “They’re not going to let you go down there,” the woman said kindly. The bus was headed toward Woodhall Hospital in Brooklyn, and the woman urged Cecilia to stay aboard to be checked for injuries. She handed Cecilia her cellphone.

  Cecilia tried Carlos but got no answer. As Cecilia dialed her sister’s number, images of her life with Carlos flashed in her mind. Every day since their first date, she had basked in the certainty that he would do anything to protect her. She expected that to be true for every day of the rest of her life, for herself and for the children they hoped to have together.

  On their commute only hours earlier, Carlos was his usual kind self, expressing his love with a small act of thoughtfulness that on any other day she might have forgotten: he’d chosen the type of bagel she preferred for them to share. Inside the car, as she spread a napkin across his lap as he drove her to the train station, Cecilia had asked, “Why are you always trying to please me?” He just smiled. Cecilia already knew the answer. Carlos was the man she’d always dreamed of.

  As Cecilia pressed the buttons of her sister’s phone number, she knew one more thing: even as Carlos helped to save lives amid the catastrophe of two burning skyscrapers and the chaos of untold victims, unless he was grievously hurt or worse, he’d somehow find a way to reach her. Or, if that failed, he’d call her family, to learn if she was safe. When her sister answered, Cecilia asked: “Have you heard from Carlos?”