I haven't really shared broadly what I saw on 9/11 - in conversations with friends, in a anonymous set of postings that night back when AOL had chat rooms (maybe they still do) and I needed to get the images out of my head. (It helped.)
With time, callouses set in and sentiments fade. It gets easier. And perhaps its time to share more broadly. It was a long day for all of us, a day that got worse and worse. If you have a few minutes, let me tell you how I saw it, up close and personal.
I worked at the time one block across from the WTC, at 120 Broadway, which is located southeast of the WTC site, diagonally across from Zucotti Park which earned its fame later as the basecamp of Occupy Wall Street. Zucotti, you see, bordered the WTC site and the entrance to one of the towers.
I was in a breakfast meeting on the 29th floor, bored. I was standing, looking out the window at the WTC buildings. And suddenly, there was a vivid explosion toward the top of the northern tower. It was shockingly large and I yelled out that a bomb had just gone off. From my angle, I couldn't see the first plane hit, but the explosion billowed out and it was significant. It was clear at that moment that many people must have been injured or killed. Flying papers filled the sky like ersatz confetti. It was surreal. (After the fact, I realized that not many of us actually witnessed both impacts - but indeed I had.)
The half dozen others in the room stood to watch; a colleague got a call that a small plane had just hit the tower. It seemed a big explosion for a small plane, but it was the only explanation we had to work with and so we believed it. A few minutes into the event, I saw my first jumper. I said something to the effect of "Oh my god, they're jumping" and a woman who was standing by me tried to reassure me by saying it was just debris (she didn't see it happen). I responded "he was writhing all the way down".
The room emptied as I stood there, and soon it was just myself and one other employee. We were standing there as the second plane came in - it felt like at eye level but it was another fifty stories up. It crossed my field of vision from left to right and just sank into the south tower. For a brief second, I couldn't process what I had just seen - it looked like a hot butter knife had passed through the building - there was even for a split second the cruciform outline of the airplane visible in the side of the building and I distinctly remember myself thinking "now what the heck just happened?"
And then the building blew up. I fell to the ground because I was afraid that the explosion, which wasn't more than a thousand feet away, was going to blow in the windows. I could hear my colleague screaming in a high-pitched whine that I will never forget. I immediately stood up, looked again out the window to confirm what had just happened - smoke and flames were billowing out the side of the south tower - and I knew instantly that this was terrorism and that we were under some sort of attack.
I half ran to my desk, which was an open cubicle out on a open floor, and shouted to others who were there that a jumbo jet had just flown into the second tower and that we were under some sort of attack. I grabbed my bag and called my wife (who was still teaching school and had not made it home yet), leaving a message that some sort of attack was underway and that I was leaving work and coming home.
I took the elevator down to the lobby and was on the street, headed north. I walked to City Hall Park, passing stunned passers-by who were all standing in shock looking up at the burning towers. Many were crying. I told a number of people I passed what I had seen, and several reacted in disbelief. There was an SUV pulled up on the sidewalk close to City Hall: it's doors were open and the radio was on a news channel, loud enough to hear on the sidewalk. The announcer was saying that subways were halted (so much for my Plan A to get to Grand Central, the way home for me) and that possibly other planes were incoming to the city. I decided that Grand Central might not be a safe place to walk to, that the Empire Building might be struck, so that wasn't safe to walk by, and that the best course of action was to walk toward the World Trade Center and watch the firemen put the fires out. Like most others, it never occurred to me that the buildings would collapse.
So I walked over on Park Place to West Broadway, and then stopped amid a crowd of around a 100 people to watch the towers be saved. I stood with strangers, all quietly staring up at the calamity. We saw many jumpers - its not something people talk about, but it was a major part of the trauma I experienced. One pair, they held hands when they jumped, and I still choke up at the memory. Skirt fluttering. Tumbling forward, together. Were they office buddies? Or just strangers stuck at the window and looking for that human touch before the final moment? They died together. Just awful.
And as we stood, there was this machine-gun-like sound - clack-clack-clack. Apparently, I found out later, it was the sound of the floors collapsing on one another as the structure failed. And it took a second or two for all of us to realize what was happening, and then we all turned, like flocks of birds do in the air, suddenly, together, simultaneously. And ran. Because we all suddenly realized we were three blocks away and a quarter-mile structure was collapsing before our eyes. Some people were screaming. I think I remember that. But mostly I remember running as fast as I have ever run and then looking back.
And up the avenue, headed right for us was a white tornado of smoke at least ten stories high rocketing towards us. I had no idea what it was - was it a white-hot explosive cloud? Would it hurt when it finally caught up with us? Was it full of poison gases and we would all choke? I was strangely calm and analytical as I ran for my life. I remembered a Scientific American article I read on a lake in Africa that had burped up a gigantic bubble of carbon dioxide that had rested on the floor of the lake, and the gas flowed down a valley and killed five thousand villagers. I wondered if that was what this was and wondered if it would hurt when I died.
And I ran faster. And I outran the smoke plume. Four or five blocks later, I stopped running, turned around and walked backwards, watching this cloud flattening out and dissipating, wondering what it was, entirely confused, scared and in shock.
Out of the cloud ran several people toward me. They were covered in white ash and for a brief moment, I remembered how Hiroshima victims had been described as burnt white, and my sanity strained - was I about to watch these people who had been horribly burned collapse in front of me? It was grotesque beyond words, and I gaped, looking at them, and then I noticed that the first person was an African-american woman and her eyes were streaming tears and the tears were carving paths in the ash and her skin was showing through and realized she was OK. The next person had a few surface skin wounds and the blood ran freely, bright red against the white ash and she (he?) ran by me.
At that very moment, a fighter jet whipped across the sky overhead and a sonic boom cracked the air and I looked up and then back at the smoke cloud and thought "Right. Got it. This is what war feels like. This is what it's like to be attacked." The sky was brilliant blue and the air was crisp and lovely and I had the absurd thought that I certainly wasn't going to go back to the office today and I couldn't go home so maybe I would just walk up to Central Park and take it easy - lie down in Sheep's Meadow and relax.
Instead, I shuffled up to Canal Street where thousands had gathered, and turned around to watch the other building come down. And it did.
While I stood there with thousands of quiet fellow witnesses, a middle-aged woman came out of a building and approached me. And for some reason, this memory also really affects me. She asked me: "What happened?" And I responded "They're gone", nodding my head in the direction of the WTC site. And she looked toward where the WTC used to be, and she looked at me, confused, and she said "I don't understand. Where are the buildings? What happened?" And I looked at her and said simply "Bad men flew planes into the buildings and knocked them down and they're gone now" and even eleven years later, I tear up at that memory. And this woman looked at me in total disbelief and horror and said "Oh. My. God." and I nodded and she stumbled/ran away back into her building.
A good samaritan approached the group I was with and said that she had a gallery and a working phone and we could wait there. A dozen of us went to her gallery, where we congregated around a portable radio. I called my wife (I didn't own a cellphone then, and it wouldn't have worked anyway) and reassured her I was alive.
When the news indicated around noon that there were no more planes in the air, I walked up to Grand Central and took a train home to my nice, normal, suburban community, located on the Hudson River a few miles north of the Bronx.
And from that point forward, I experienced the day like everyone else did, with endless loops on TV of the same images we collectively will never forget.
I will always have in my head a slow-motion newsreel-like image of the jumpers, holding hands, tumbling to their doom.
And I cheered last year when President Obama announced that we had gotten OBL. Finally, closure. Of sorts.