Reluctant Hero: A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable Day, What He's Learned, How He's Struggled, and What No One Should Ever Forget (13 page)

I thanked Lisa, left Angelo’s house, and went back to my parents’ in time to meet my mother, who was returning home from work. And then the calls started again.

NPR called. They wanted to do a phone interview. I didn’t know it was live. I spewed out my story. NPR got me while I was still raw—still in shock—and intensely describing every detail of my experience. Many people heard that interview. I have a cousin in North Carolina who called and said he heard it. Friends from all over the country heard it. They were amazed at what I went through. As soon as I hung up, I got a call from CBC in Canada. Another phone interview. My cell phone was unlisted, but because my father and I share the same name, they were finding me through my parents. Friends and family were calling. I was on the phone a lot.

I was surprised by all the media attention. I didn’t think it was a big story, just one of many. Everybody who was there had an amazing story to tell.

I ate dinner at my parents’ house; then Joy and I spent the night at Angelo’s. I had no plans to go back to my place in Jersey City. I was right where I wanted to be, with the people I wanted to be with.

My mother heard reports about the smoke at ground zero and that harmful elements might have been in it. She made an appointment for me to see a local doctor. He checked me out and said I was OK. He also told me that he was a trained psychologist. “How’s the head,” he asked. I said I was fine, perhaps a little on edge. He prescribed Valium. I took it.

The truth was my sleep had been fitful the night before. I didn’t dream about 9/11, but my dreams were of struggle. Not happy dreams. They were dark and desperate. Since 9/11, those are the only kinds of dreams I’ve had. I no longer have any good dreams, the kinds from which you wake up and beautiful things have happened, or the kinds that make you feel like you’re ready to go at life. I don’t have those dreams anymore, not since ten years ago.

Media were calling from far and wide. John, the woman in the wheelchair, and I had become a national story.

John’s parents drove up from North Carolina to take him home. They picked him up in Manhattan, then drove to my family’s house in Verona. John, his parents, his aunt, and his sister sat down with my family for coffee in the kitchen. John and I left them to talk. We took a walk out to the backyard and sat down on a bench. John said, “It’s crazy how much the media wants to speak with us since the
USA Today
article came out
yesterday.” I agreed. “You know, Mike,” he said, “I can’t help but feel weird, like undeserving.” I knew what he meant. We didn’t even know if the woman we carried was alive. Nobody knew. We just knew we carried her down. We knew we left her in an ambulance facing south. South was the wrong direction to go if you wanted to remain alive in the five minutes that followed our placing her in the ambulance. How likely was it that the ambulance made an immediate U-turn and got out of there? Based on my last memory of her, I believed she perished in the collapse of the North Tower.

I thought about what to say to John. I wanted to say something positive. I wanted to find some meaning in all of this. “Maybe she was there to save us,” I said. “You see, even though we were there for almost the entire 102 minutes—from the time the first plane struck to the time the second tower went down— we managed to stay out of harm’s way. We’re not dead. We’re not hurt. Maybe if we had gotten out at a different point in time, we would have been hit by flying debris. Or we would’ve stepped right into the fall of the South Tower. Or if we were just on our own, not carrying her, we would have taken a different turn—a wrong turn. But because of the timing of it all, because we moved at a certain speed by carrying that woman, we’re still here.”

“Well, maybe that’s it,” he said. “Did you even know her name?”

“No.” I paused. “I never asked her.”

John and his family left in the evening to stay with some friends in Fairfield, New Jersey. They would be heading home to North Carolina a day or two later.

Angelo returned home that night. He had been setting up a new optician’s office in Watertown, New York, near the Canadian border. He and one of his bosses heard me on the CBC
radio up there. He was the only member of my family I hadn’t seen. It was very emotional. He gave me a big hug and gave me that look that said,
You don’t know what you put us through
. Though we had talked on the phone a lot already, he was beside himself working in Upstate New York those past three days. He couldn’t wait to get home. It was great to see my brother, to sit at his kitchen table and talk. We talked late into the night.

Network Plus wanted to see everybody. They organized a meeting of the World Trade Center office employees at their office in Newark, New Jersey. That’s right. I still had a job.

I shot back to my apartment in Jersey City to pick up some clothes. I hadn’t been there since the morning of 9/11. I understand better now why I didn’t want to go back there. I wasn’t ready to get back to any normalcy until I had made some sense of what had happened. I didn’t want to get clothes, check the mail, or do anything like that. That life wasn’t important to me anymore. Being trapped under that truck when the North Tower imploded—unable to breathe and unsure of whether I would make it—gave me a new perspective. It reduced things. Under that truck, I measured my life by what I would have lost if I didn’t make it out. The answer was simple: the human connection to the people I loved. All I wanted to know was whether they were all right and to let them know I was all right. No other worldly concerns mattered. I just wanted to see my family. My reconnection with them allowed me to reconnect with the rest of the world.

But joining the “real world” again wasn’t easy. Even Joy felt my resistance. I didn’t realize it then, but I acted edgy and distant. I
was just trying to keep it together in those first few days. I was desperately trying to regain control. I wanted no more surprises. No more trauma. I’d had enough of that.

In a strange way, 9/11 felt like a Friday to me, and Wednesday and Thursday were part of an extended weekend. Years of conditioning—working 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.—told me it was time to get back to work. When Network Plus called about a Friday meeting, it hit me like a ton of bricks that for so long, work had consumed me. Work was where I had spent most of the hours of my life. The last few days were a massive interruption of that routine. Since that “interruption,” ten years ago, it has been incredibly difficult for me to return comfortably to a sustained “work” routine of any kind. It no longer occupies that same place of importance in my life. In fact, in most all aspects of my life, I see very little in the way I once did.

Before 9/11, I didn’t know what it was like to witness a murder. I didn’t know what it felt like to have one of the world’s tallest buildings implode just feet from me. You might watch footage of 9/11 today and say to yourself,
I can’t even imagine it. I don’t know who I would be in that situation. Would I be able to function?
I was there, going through it, but I didn’t even know what
it
was. I wasn’t thinking about the size of devastation or how close I was to it, or the magnitude of the event itself. I was simply running from an exploding building. I was diving under a truck. I was
reacting
. And I think anyone would do that. I don’t see myself as having done anything extraordinary. The week after 9/11, I snuck back to what they were calling Ground Zero. I took a good, long look at all the devastation. I saw massive pieces of twisted metal and fires and a ton of wreckage.
I came out of that! This fragile human flesh, skin, and bones came away without a mark!
Many other people suffered the complete opposite result. I continue to struggle with that fact, with the randomness of it all.

And what about that whole feeling of invincibility I walked into the office with on 9/11? I’d carried that feeling around for years before that day. I’d always possessed a self-generated confidence that my physical and mental ability could get me over and out of anything. I clung to that feeling as we moved through the North Tower. That mind-set got me through it. I never let the reality set in, never paused to think about how bad the situation was. The singular thought in my head while I was going down those stairs was,
No matter what comes up, find a way to get out of it
. Two basic forces propelled me forward: an unfounded sense of invincibility naturally coupled with an innate survival instinct. Where does one end and the other begin? I don’t know. But I’m sure there were hundreds of people who were of the same mindset, reacting the same way—reacting, reacting, reacting—until they reached that moment, that point where they knew they were going to die. They faced death. And to know that just kills me. That’s the guilt I carry now. I had a brief moment of facing my own end. It was nothing, I’m sure, compared to what some people were going through—trapped, crushed, or taken by fire.

Watch videotapes of the plane hitting Tower 1 around the 93rd floor. I was twelve floors below that on the 81st floor. Watch tapes of the South Tower going down. I was right next door, somewhere between the 10th and 5th floors when it happened. Then watch tapes of the North Tower going down. I was running from that collapsing tower. Many other people did this. I wasn’t the only one. Some people didn’t make it, and we still don’t know what happened to them. I can’t stop thinking about other catastrophes: Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, the tsunami in Asia. I watch tapes of these events. I see real people. They are running. Some of them make it. Some of them don’t. The only questions are, why did he make it, and why did she not make it? They’re unanswerable.

Though the events of the previous few days gave me what you might call a new perspective on my professional career, getting back to work wasn’t a bad idea. I thought it would be useful to get back in the swing of things and try to return to normalcy. Plus, it put my mind on something else. If I sat around and thought too much about what had happened, it became too overwhelming. Returning to work helped me signal to myself that I was OK. I was getting right back at it. There was a bit of a defiance to it as well.
You can knock me down, but you’re not going to keep me down.
Going back to work was what I saw as the third step in the process of my self-restoration. Step 1: I’m OK. Step 2: My family is OK. Step 3: I’m back in life, engaged and participating.

The meeting at the Network Plus corporate office in Newark commenced at 10:00 a.m. on Friday. They brought in special trauma therapists. “Traumatists,” I called them. It was probably a requirement of our health plan. Everyone who was inside the New York office when the plane struck was there, plus the people who had been out on calls, plus the entire Jersey office. It was a delicate atmosphere. We all walked on eggshells, making sure to be sensitive to what anyone might be going through. Via telephone contact over the last few days, I knew everyone had made it out safely. Some people sustained injuries, but nobody was hurt badly.

Our CEO and our VP of sales drove down from Massachusetts. Breakfast was catered in. People exchanged hugs and stories. We looked at each other, eye to eye, with a sincerity that did not exist before. They herded us into a separate room with the traumatists. We were encouraged, only if completely comfortable, to tell our stories. I looked around at my officemates. We had shared so much work and play. Now we shared this.

Mike Wright wasn’t there because he was getting out of the hospital after suffering facial injuries when he got caught near the collapse of the South Tower. Kevin Nichols, Marc Reinstein, Jim Gaffney—they were there. Salespeople who were out of the office on calls that morning—they were there. John was there with his parents. From that meeting, he was heading straight back home with them to North Carolina. It was his last day.

The room was packed. Emotions were brimming at the surface. And the stories came out. Sujo John stood up to tell his story. I’ll never forget it. His experience was purely from a religious perspective, his faith in God and calling out to Jesus. He spoke with a dazzling, dramatic flair. He told of how he was in a collapsed part of the building, in a hallway, in the dark with a group of people who somehow got separated from the others. He asked each person if they were ready to die, and if they were, were they ready to accept Jesus and yell his name “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” And the people began to yell the name. There were dead bodies around them. But all of a sudden, they began to see this light, which led them out of the building and into safety. He told this magnificent, emotional, spiritual story, and I was rapt. Some people didn’t appreciate it at all. They felt that he was preaching. I didn’t care. That was his story, and that’s the way he felt.

I was hungry for everyone’s story. They were all amazing to me. When it was my turn, people crowed, “Oh, we know your story.” Somebody shouted with good-natured teasing, “Hero!” But I really didn’t want to talk. I still held on to a little bit of that “I’m their manager” machismo. I wanted to hear everyone else’s experiences and what they had gone through. There were some harrowing and tragic stories. Eric Martin was standing outside having a smoke when our building got hit. He moved out of the way at the last minute but saw someone impaled by huge shards of glass. It was an image that was hard for him to
overcome. Some people got to the bottom of the World Trade Center mezzanine level after the second plane had hit and before the South Tower collapsed and saw unspeakable carnage out on the area where the globe and the fountain were. Neil Lucente and Peter Doran were riding an elevator when the tower was hit. The elevator shaft filled with flames, and they managed to jump from the car at the last second before it went sailing down. I wish I had a tape recorder for that session. These guys—many in their twenties, fresh out college—came together as a group and made it to safety because they looked out for each other. I was proud of them. This was my team. This was my office. They were all there, and they made it through this thing because they took care of each other. How are
they
not heroes?