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 (9 page)

They undid the Velcro straps, removed her from the evacuation wheelchair, and placed her in the back of the ambulance.
She started to cry. She hadn’t cried at all the whole time we’d been together. In fact, throughout our entire journey, she’d shown little emotion at all. As soon as she was in the ambulance, she began to let it out. “Hey, what are you crying for?” I said to her. “Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.” I thought maybe she was still worried about her motorized wheelchair. She motioned to me with her hands—tiny hands—to give her a hug. We embraced gently. I gave her my business card. “Listen,” I said. “Don’t worry. When I get back up there, I’ll find your wheelchair.” I backed out of the ambulance. The paramedic said, “Do you guys want to take the ride with us?” John and I looked at each other. We saw no need to do so. It seemed like the right decision for both of us.

If I had to pick a partner to help me that day, there could have been no better person than John Cerqueira. He was a young kid who I knew had a good heart and good character and would do the right thing.

I hired John. I had interviewed him when he came up on spring break from North Carolina State. I didn’t know that he was still in school when the interview was set up. He was a kid full of energy—very positive, with a confident outlook in life and the future. He was perfect sales material. At the time, we had just begun hiring kids straight out of college. “I like what I see,” I’d told him. “You say all the right things. You look like you really want to do this. After you’re done with graduation, come back up and interview with me again.” He came back up at the end of May, and I hired him in June of 2001. Think about it. This kid from North Carolina had been working in the Towers for three months when all hell broke loose.

John’s youth, energy, and good nature worked as the perfect complement to my instinct to navigate. While I was constantly
looking for the next move and deciding which turn to take, John provided very positive vocal support to the woman—joking around, asking her what she needed. We were constantly trying to keep her level so she didn’t fall. John would often shout to a third person helping us, “C’mon, we got to keep this level. She’s falling!”

From the moment I met John in the stairwell to the moment we shut that ambulance door closed, he and I had been together, keeping an eye out for each other. We’d made sure to remain within reaching distance of each other, calling back if either of us lagged behind. When we got to the 68th floor, John followed me off the stairwell and into those offices. When I asked him to help me carry the woman in the wheelchair, I felt a little weird, like I was imposing. But John helped without hesitation. Now that we’d gotten her to relative safety and our hands were free, we stood in front of the ambulance and wondered, “Where do we go from here?”

The ambulance pointed south. Watching the ambulance doors shut, we faced west with our backs to the devastation. At this point, I still had no idea about the enormity of the morning’s events. I still didn’t know exactly what had happened to my building, Tower 1. I thought a plane—a small plane—had hit us, or that there was some gas-related fire. As we got lower and lower down the stairs, I began to realize that something more dire had taken place. But what? I didn’t know, nor had I considered that anything at all had happened to Tower 2.

Questions jumbled in my head.
Should I be finding my office-mates?
I stood there in the middle of the West Side Highway and turned around toward the Towers. I suddenly lapsed into a state of shock and disbelief. Dust and paper filled the air.
Shattered glass, mangled wires, and broken pieces of concrete and metal were everywhere. I stood still in front of the North Tower, my building. Just a few feet away from me, a giant piece of the building’s façade had crashed into the ground. I stared up at Tower 1. It was still intact. I could see that the top of the building was on fire. It was a huge, raging fire. I checked myself. I wasn’t completely shaken. I was just trying to take it all in. Even amid all this ruin, I didn’t feel that my life was completely in danger. Hell, I was out of the building now and no longer carrying the woman in the wheelchair. I wasn’t restricted at all. I was in control again.
I could run. No, I could walk out of this now.

There weren’t that many people outside. I shouted to someone walking by, “Where’s this big piece from?” No response, only blank stares. They were walking around dazed. In retrospect, I bet most of them had seen the South Tower fall just minutes before. They didn’t know I didn’t know. Nobody directed us to get out of there because nobody knew what to do. Everyone was covered in a gray dust. And there were papers everywhere, so much paper.

All of this wreckage came from the implosion of Tower 2. But from where I was standing, I couldn’t see Tower 2. Even if I could, I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend that it was not there. There was so much to process, and none of it was making sense. If someone had sat me down and explained to me there was no more Tower 2, there’s no way I could’ve been able to wrap my head around that fact. In my worldview, there was still a Tower 2, there were no terrorists, and no Osama bin Laden.

I tried to get my bearings. I looked for the Marriott Hotel, which was situated in between the two towers facing the West Side Highway. Some nights after work, we’d go to Tall Ships, the
corner bar-restaurant in the hotel. The Marriott was there, all right. It looked as though the hand of a giant had smashed an equally giant arrow right through the middle of its roof. I had never seen anything like it.

Standing in front of the North Tower, I contemplated my next move. I started walking south because that’s where it looked like there was more of the destruction. Maybe I could find out what really happened. After a few steps, a firemen in a white shirt stood in my way. He looked drawn. “Listen,” he said, “if you go down that way, be prepared to see things you haven’t seen before. Be prepared to see carnage.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

He looked me in the face, and I saw all his sadness, resignation, seriousness, and resolve.

John, who had been standing next to me, immediately began walking in the opposite direction, walking north. His face had suddenly changed. He looked ill. “C’mon, Mike. I don’t want to see dead people.”

Dead people? Carnage?
My brain couldn’t accept it.

But what did I know? All my frames of reference were lost to me. It no longer sounded like New York City. I heard the fire burning and crackling on top of Tower 1 and a cacophony of screaming sirens, papers fluttering, voices here and there calling out to each other for help. All this set against an unusual silence much like the kind that takes over Manhattan on a snow-covered day when the city goes silent yet you can hear single noises.

Jolting me from my confusion, a firemen came running out of Tower 1, right in front of me, as if he’d just made it out in the nick of time. Another firemen rushed to help him with an urgency I hadn’t seen in anyone in the few minutes I had been standing outside. They moved as if getting out now was a matter of life and death.

Then I heard sounds unlike the others. The strangeness of the sounds—sounds so foreign that I could not relate or associate them with anything my brain could define or visualize— distracted, but didn’t frighten, me. In the context of everything else, the sounds were inherently suspicious. There was no familiar source like paper or sirens that I could match to them. They were loud, unpleasant thuds of singular things falling and hitting hard. I heard them one, two, sometimes three in a row. Then several seconds, maybe a minute, would pass; and I’d hear those sounds again. I wanted to know what they were, but I did not want to look. I knew these were not good things.
I just knew.

Without a word, John peeled away from me again, walking farther north. Where was
he
going? The firemen’s warning echoed in my head.
Do not go there unless you want to see things you’ve never seen before.
All of a sudden, this guy—a stranger— appeared in front of me.

I don’t know who he was. I don’t know why he was down there. He wasn’t a firemen. He was a guy dressed in casual street clothes. Not too tall. Long brown hair, almost shoulder-length. Chiseled features. Sunken eyes. Around my age. He had a lightweight jacket on. “C’mon, Mike,” he said to me. “I’ll go with you down this way.” He motioned south. And he called me by my name.

“What?” I said, feeling confused.

He said it again. “Really. C’mon, Mike. I’ll go with you. Let’s go down this way. C’mon, Mike.” He said my name a few times.
Do I know this guy
? I looked at him—this stranger—and I thought for a second:
Should I go down that way—south? Maybe people need help. Or maybe I need to see what’s really going on—see the things I “haven’t seen before.”

I looked back over at John. I saw his chin go into his chest. He was sobbing. I looked at the guy, and I looked at John. I walked to John.

John said it again. “Mike, let’s go. I don’t want to see dead people.” That’s when it dawned on me. I looked up, and I saw them—people falling from Tower 1, my building, and hitting the lower roof of 6 World Trade Center. That’s what those sounds were—the sounds I’d never heard before, and never want to hear again.

John had seen it and understood. So much had been falling from the sky I hadn’t paid close attention to what the sounds were. They hadn’t registered. Seeing John’s reaction made it register. I saw then too clearly that it wasn’t paper or debris. It was bodies. My brain and my emotions were completely overwhelmed. Unlike any other moment since this emergency began, there was no blocking this horrific reality out of my mind. This changed me.

Somewhere inside, I broke. I had no
reaction
for this. I looked at John with his head hanging. “Sure, let’s go.” I did not look back.

If I had gone south, I wouldn’t be here today.

We walked north.

My head was spinning.
What the hell did I just see?
Things weren’t making sense. That calm, disembodied voice was now an emergency signal.
I’m still here. I’m safe. I still don’t know what went on here, but now I’ve got a burning question I need answered: What in God’s name has happened here that people are falling from the sky?

I couldn’t process what I’d just seen. I couldn’t accept it. I tried, but I couldn’t. I lost focus. My ultra-sharp sense of
what’s the next move
that was so acute inside the building had gone foggy. I was staggered, meandering.

We took a few steps north. My head was no longer on an alert swivel, but bowed. A cameraman must have seen me shaking my head in disbelief. He got close and said, “Tell me what you
saw and heard.” Incredibly, I related to him every material fact of my journey in a reasonably coherent manner: my name, my company, what floor I was on, what floor we found the woman in the wheelchair, that we put her in an ambulance.

People very well could’ve been watching this live at the time. It was probably around 10:25 a.m. or 10:26 a.m. The cameraman said thank you. John and I stepped clumsily over the rubble away from him. We didn’t know it, but he kept filming us.

At one point during his questioning, I choked up. I couldn’t stop thinking about those horrible images. I realized that yes, we’re here, we’re out of the building, but this is not a good situation. The entire day began to catch up to me. From the Network Plus office, to carrying the woman down, to the dark panic of the 5th floor, to the disorientation outside the building, the debris everywhere, the unthinkable things I witnessed—it was all coming together. I finally came to accept what I could not accept at any point before:
This is bad. Something awful and dangerous happened because people are dead, and I’ve seen people dying in front of me, and I don’t know where anybody is. And whatever this awful danger is, it might still be happening.

I could see the cameraman flming us from a distance.
Why is this guy filming us? What’s the matter with him?
I shook my head and said the first wholly accurate thing I’d said all day: “It’s chaos, man. This is chaos.”

Without speaking, John and I took a few unsure steps north, away from the tower. Then I heard an explosion that made my whole body flinch. As if on reflex, I raised my hands to cover my ears and protect my head. I’ll never forget actually feeling it coming up behind me on the back of my neck. It shook me out of my skin. It’s almost as if someone had pushed me from the back. That’s because the enormous explosion I heard was actually right behind me. I turned around, looked up, and saw
the top of the North Tower erupting like a volcano. I thought it was going to come down right on top of me. One look was all I needed.

Real and abject fear took hold.
You fucked up! You waited around here too long. Now you’re going to die.

The basic instinct to move—the one I had inside the tower— screamed inside me. I instantly became reduced to nothing more than the sum of my instincts to survive. I took off running. Like a shot, I ran. You should know that I am fast. Very fast. I was all-area high school track in the 100 and 200 meters. A “fast white boy,” they used to call me. This was the fastest I’ve ever run in my life. It was everyone for themselves. You knew you had to run to survive, and that was all you could do. John had been several yards ahead of me when the explosion hit. There were firemen around me. And the cameraman was well north of me.

I blew by John and the firemen. The cameraman stayed put, filming me running toward him.
What is he doing? He will die
. I kept running.

I felt a thunderous, rumbling force coming up from behind me, like a tidal wave of iron and wind. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was gaining fast. I knew it would hurt me if it caught me. And I knew I couldn’t outrun it. Something would hit me or knock me into something else. Cover was my only way out.
Find cover!
This was surely a new kind of survival mode from the one I felt in the building. This was not simply next-move mode, but next move fueled by the certain knowledge that I was not invincible. I’d already seen death, and I could be killed.