Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Major Kevin Nasypany left the NEADS bunker in Rome, New York, shortly before midnight on September 11. More than thirteen hours had elapsed since the fourth crash. The skies were empty of commercial planes. Yet Nasypany walked off the Ops Floor still expecting “the other shoe to drop”29 in the form of hijackings from overseas.

  Despite his fatigue, he spent the drive home racking his brain, cataloging what he and his team did right and what they didn’t. Nasypany believed there were “probably more” than four U.S. hijackings planned but the ground stop by the FAA’s Ben Sliney had foiled the other plots. On the night of 9/11, sleep wasn’t in the cards. Nasypany knew that the world had become vastly more complicated, which would mean longer workdays for him. He wandered into the half-finished bathroom he’d been remodeling and wondered, “Who’s going to do this now?”

  For the next year, Nasypany and his crew worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, always on edge, watching for the next wave that never came. Later, when he’d win praise and awards for his work juggling information and communications on 9/11, Nasypany would joke that he’d trained by listening to his kids talking over one another at the dinner table.

  Despite increased budget and staffing, powerful updated technology to scour the skies, and new lines of communication between the FAA and the military, Nasypany remained on defense. “We’re focused on internal and external, always looking for that next threat, because you just never know,” he said shortly before he retired in 2014. “I mean, you hear all these talking heads on TV, ‘Oh, this will never happen again, never happen again.’ . . . Well, look, it did happen. So, we’re all extremely vigilant, extremely vigilant.”

  Nasypany grew emotional when he talked about the passengers and crew of Flight 93. “They did my job,”30 he’d say. “They basically did what I was going to have to do in the long run, because I was not going to let another aircraft—I couldn’t let another aircraft go into D.C.”

  Word quickly spread beyond Shanksville about why United Flight 93 crashed short of its target and how the uprising prevented more deaths on the ground. Amid the widespread grief and anger, the rebellion became an inspiration. Coroner Wally Miller put it simply: “The Americans lost some people31 doing it, but by God, the terrorists lost that day . . . at least in that one.”

  Wally earned praise as a champion of victims’ families and a guardian of the place where they died, which he and many others considered hallowed ground. Yet shortly after the crash, he made an offhand comment about his initial impression of the site that unintentionally fueled conspiracy theorists. “All you saw was debris,”32 he told a reporter for the New York Times. “There was no blood. You couldn’t see any human remains. You almost thought the passengers had been dropped off somewhere.” They hadn’t been, of course.

  Searchers scrabbling on their knees and climbing high into the hemlocks eventually recovered about 650 pounds of charred body parts. Wally estimated that that represented about 8 percent of the potential total. The remainder was consumed by the explosion or lost in the grass and trees. DNA profiles, dental records, and fingerprints enabled the identification of unique remains from each of the forty passengers and crew. One casket was sent to the family of a victim with a single tooth and a piece of skull33 the size of a quarter, but it was something.

  Forty-eight samples34 of human remains, weighing less than ten pounds, came from four individuals whose DNA profiles matched none of the passengers or crew. Wally labeled them Terrorist A, B, C, and D, and gave the items to the FBI.

  “A lot of people say to me, ‘This had to be the worst case you ever had.’ Well, it was the most complicated case I ever had,” Wally said later. “But to say that this was the worst case I ever had, I can’t say that, because every time my phone rings, it’s somebody’s worst day of their life.”

  No mapmaker would ever again overlook Shanksville. It took its place alongside another Pennsylvania hamlet forever linked to an epic battle: Gettysburg. Within hours of the crash, the little community was overrun by investigators and international media. Soon it became a destination for people eager to pay tribute to the men and women of Flight 93, tourists who wandered into town and searched for any connection to the heroes. They sought out witnesses and gravitated to makeshift memorials, where they left flags and hats, flowers and ribbons, hearts and teddy bears and stone angels and photos and insignia of first responders. More than a few wore “Let’s Roll” T-shirts.

  For the most part, the people of Shanksville and Somerset County embraced their place in history. They understood the responsibility that had befallen them. One Sunday months after the crash, Kathie Shaffer’s sister, Donna Glessner, stood in church and suggested that locals become volunteer guides, an idea that turned into an enduring Flight 93 Ambassadors program. After weeks of organizing food and donated goods for searchers and investigators, Kathie led a massive oral history project for the National Park Service. Over roughly fifteen years, she conducted more than eight hundred deep and nuanced interviews, preserving the thoughts and experiences of emergency responders and Flight 93 family members, witnesses and investigators, government officials and reporters, and even the flight instructor who taught the terrorist pilot Ziad Jarrah. Donna did many of the transcriptions.

  After years of disputes over land values and designs, plans took shape for what would become a bucolic 2,200-acre national park, including an outdoor Memorial Plaza with a quarter-mile walkway adjacent to the crash site, and a concrete-and-glass Visitor Center that movingly tells the story of the courage aboard Flight 93. Among the National Park Service rangers working there was Terry and Kathie Shaffer’s eldest son, Adam. In June 2018, the park service trucked four shipping containers to the site, containing virtually all the recovered wreckage of Flight 93. The contents were buried in a private ceremony, in an area accessible only to loved ones of the victims.

  Of all their experiences after the crash, among the Shaffers’ most treasured was Shanksville’s first and only July Fourth parade, held in 2002. Politicians clamored to speak but were told no. This was a celebration of the country and of the ordinary people who responded that day, willing to do whatever they could. Thousands of cheering, flag-waving paradegoers lined the mile-long route as brass bands, tractors, a costumed Uncle Sam and Betsy Ross, and numerous fire companies rumbled by. Donna organized 273 people—more than the entire population of Shanksville—into a “living flag.” Kathie was a star, Donna a stripe. As the “flag” marched down Main Street, crowd members placed hands over hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Terry sat proudly on the podium, his tie knotted tightly despite sweltering summer heat. He kept proud watch over his fire company’s gleaming new truck, with red, white, and blue hoses, a three-thousand-gallon tank, and a silver plate with the names of all forty heroes of Flight 93, financed partly by donations from people who never knew Shanksville existed before 9/11.

  Six years later, in 2008, hundreds of motorcyclists, many of them current or former FDNY members, roared into town escorting a two-ton, fourteen-foot-high cross made from twisted steel from the World Trade Center. They erected it outside the fire station, on a pedestal shaped like the Pentagon, with a plaque that read: “Never Forget. We honor those who saw their untimely fate before them and chose to defeat evil to ensure America’s freedom. Flight 93.”

  Another decade passed. Terry’s health deteriorated, and the emotional toll became a burden. He left his job at Pepsi and his calling as Shanksville’s fire chief, though he remained the station’s president. One spring morning, touring a visitor around the memorial, he squinted into the sunlight as he gazed upon the field where he’d arrived hoping to help on 9/11. “You’re seeing grass35 and I’m seeing plane parts,” Terry said. “Every day for me is a Flight 93 day.”

  Elaine Duch, the severely burned Port Authority senior administrative assistant, was quickly transferred from St. Vincent’s Hospital to New York–Presbyterian Hospital’s Weill Cornell Burn Center. She arrived the night
of September 11 in critical condition, in a medically induced coma, with severe lung injuries and burns over 77 percent of her body. Odds against her survival were high.

  Elaine spent weeks on a ventilator, underwent seven skin grafting operations between September 18 and December 11, and battled bouts of pneumonia and bacteria in her bloodstream that doctors feared would kill her. Her twin, Janet, and their older sister, Maryann, kept vigil.

  After three and a half months, on December 29, Elaine regained consciousness. She immediately picked up where she’d left off on 9/11: “You have to call Janet,”36 she told a nurse. “You have to make sure Janet’s okay.” When Janet heard that Elaine was awake, she told her boyfriend: “I got my Christmas miracle.”

  Slowly at first, during the next several weeks Elaine learned the full story of what happened. Despite having experienced it firsthand, Elaine Duch might have been the last American adult to know the awful details of 9/11. It took far longer for her to accept that the towers were gone and that so many lives were lost.

  A month after she woke, in late January 2002, Elaine became the final 9/11 burn victim released from the Weill Cornell Burn Center. Overwhelmed by obituaries, desperate for any remotely good news related to the attacks, reporters and camera crews swarmed a press conference that marked her departure. Heavily bandaged, seated in a wheelchair, Elaine welcomed the media with a jaunty “Hi, everyone!” She thanked her doctors, nurses, and hospital staffers, then announced that she was ready to visit her favorite casino in Atlantic City. As for her long-term plan, she declared: “I want to get back to the way I was.”

  Elaine spent the next four and a half months in a rehabilitation center relearning how to stand, how to walk, how to use her hands, how to live. The last skill she relearned was how to navigate stairs. She finally returned home to Bayonne, New Jersey, on June 5, 2002. When friends from the Port Authority visited, she asked often about the messenger she’d gone to meet on the 88th floor, but no one seemed to know his fate. More than sixteen years passed before she learned that his name was Vaswald George Hall and that he’d been killed by the fireball37 that maimed her. She underwent more surgeries and extensive physical therapy. “It was hell and back ten times over,” she said. Her condition improved, but her body could only heal so much.

  As years passed, Elaine accepted that she’d never live without pain and scars; she’d never fully regain her independence; never return to work; never again drive a car. Her personality changed, too. She’d been the more confident, take-charge twin, but after 9/11 she retreated, and those roles fell to Janet. Elaine even lost her taste for coffee, her last drink before the fireball swallowed her. She often said: “The old Elaine died on 9/11.”

  After 9/11, EMT Moussa “Moose” Diaz took a few days off then refused to sit at a desk on “light duty.” He and his partner Paul Adams went back to work, though both felt health effects from their heroism that day. Moose suffered regular bouts of bronchitis, which his doctor suspected resulted from dust he’d inhaled. Over time he fell out of shape, got fitted for hearing aids, and battled difficult memories. But Moose remained on the job, fixing equipment on ambulances as the lead technician with the Medical Equipment Unit. He continued his long commute from upstate Monroe, New York, which had been home to five firefighters who died on 9/11.

  As Moose looked ahead toward retirement, newbie EMTs occasionally spotted a photo of him with Elaine Duch, taken as he and Paul strapped her onto their stretcher. “You were there?” they’d ask in awe. Moose would tell his story, often ending with the line “I love my job. I love helping people.” Other than that, he rarely talked about 9/11.

  After his escape from a North Tower elevator, Chris Young spent several weeks convalescing with family in North Carolina. Upon his return to New York, he worked for six months at the midtown office of Marsh & McLennan, which lost 295 employees and 63 consultants. Among them were Chris’s supervisors, Angela Kyte, who dreamed of retiring on Cape Cod with her husband, and Dominique Pandolfo, who had just begun classes38 for an MBA at New York University.

  Chris returned to acting, but his heart wasn’t in it. His moods swung from helplessness to grandiosity, from feeling lost to believing that his 9/11 experience empowered him to accomplish anything. Ultimately, he embarked on a successful career in advertising. Chris’s role in Macbeth: The Comedy remained his only movie credit.

  When Chris first returned to New York after 9/11, friends dragged him to a Brooklyn bar to lift his spirits. That night he met a nonprofit executive named Christian Lillis. They married in 2015. Long after his ordeal, Chris kept his temporary ID badge to a tower that no longer existed, his eyes shut in the grainy black-and-white photo. He donated it to the permanent collection of the September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.

  On September 11, the families of Brian Clark and Stan Praimnath39 felt certain they were dead. Only twenty-five minutes elapsed between their phone calls from the 31st floor and the South Tower’s collapse. Brian’s wife, Dianne, fainted when he called her from a ferry terminal at 11:15 a.m., more than an hour after the building fell. Stan found his wife, Jenny, holding their daughters on their front porch. Bloodied and filthy, he rushed to them, only to have his younger daughter recoil, not recognizing him.

  Brian called Stan’s home late that afternoon and left a message. After visiting a doctor, Stan called back an hour after September 11 passed into history. Each man again credited the other for saving his life. Later, they appeared on television shows and at memorial events, but their private moments meant more. Stan and Jenny sat at the Clark family table at the wedding of Brian and Dianne’s eldest daughter, then repaid the honor at their older daughter’s wedding. Brian introduced Stan to guests as “my only brother.”

  After 9/11, it emerged that eighteen people40 escaped from the 78th floor of the South Tower or above, all by using Stairwell A at least part of the way down. Brian and Stan were two of only four people who survived from above the sky lobby. Another was a telecommunications manager from Euro Brokers, Richard Fern, who reached a barbershop where he listened on his walkie-talkie to the excruciating sound of his friends pleading for help high in the tower. The fourth was Brian’s friend, Ron DiFrancesco, who’d initially joined Brian in the search on the 81st floor. After being overcome by smoke, Ron caught up with the men who’d helped the heavyset woman. Ron told a reporter he believed that he climbed as high as the 91st floor before heading down. He escaped moments before the collapse, but suffered a serious head injury and burns to 60 percent of his body.

  Stan recovered quickly from his injuries. His relationship with Brian was a salve to his survivor’s guilt. Stan took comfort in having sent temp Delis Soriano home, but the collapse killed the colleagues and friends who’d returned to work with him after being assured that their building was safe. Among them were John “Jack” Andreacchio, Manny Gomez, Hideya Kawauchi, Alisha Levin, Joseph Zuccala, and Brian Thompson, with whom Stan had joked in the elevator: “You’d better start thinking relocation.”

  Stan returned to work but suffered years of nightmares. He obsessed over the question “Of all these good men and women, why me?” He delved deeper into his faith, gained a measure of acceptance, then began to say, “Why not me?” Stan spoke often at churches, relating his survival story through Bible lessons. “Life,” he told people, “is about getting up and moving forward.”

  Still, parts of Stan Praimnath remained in the phantom South Tower. He saved the dust-covered shoes that carried him to safety, with shards of glass embedded in the soles, in a box he labeled deliverance. Stan also kept Brian’s flashlight, which they later donated to the September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.

  Brian shed his first tears when he told his story in church the Sunday after 9/11. Euro Brokers lost sixty-one employees, including Bobby Coll, Dave Vera, Kevin York, and others who had helped the heavyset woman and the frail man up the stairs. Also killed were Susan Pollio and Randy Scott, who dropped the plaintive note from the 84th floor. His wife
learned about the message a decade later, in August 2011, after a DNA match of the bloody fingerprint.

  A week after 9/11, Brian dreamed that he was visited by José Marrero, the facilities manager he passed in the stairwell at the 68th floor, who also died in the collapse. In the dream, José wore a white shirt and a broad smile. “José, you’re alive!” Brian called out. “How did you do that?” Brian heard no response. The dream didn’t eliminate his sadness, but it left him at peace.

  Before he retired in 2006, Brian helped to rebuild Euro Brokers and ran a relief fund that gave more than $5 million to the families of the company’s lost workers.

  As they lived with their losses, Brian and Stan cherished one gain. Nearly twenty years after the day they met, they still considered themselves blood brothers.

  It’s unclear exactly how Alayne Gentul died, but there’s evidence she wasn’t inside the South Tower when it crumbled. Unlike the fragmented remains of people trapped in the collapse, Alayne’s body was found intact, across the street, still dressed in her red blazer. Her husband, Jack, understood the implication: Alayne apparently was one of the scores of men and women who jumped or fell to their deaths. Jack had hoped that she was unconscious from smoke inhalation, inside the building when it fell. But if Alayne chose an ending on her own terms, he accepted that.

  “The last thing that she would have wanted to do was die at that time in her life,” Jack said years later. “She may have jumped.41 You can’t stop it, but this is something that you can do. To be out of the smoke and the heat, and to be out in the air. It must have felt like flying.”