At the approach of its 25th anniversary, 9/11 is being called the day that changed the world.
It should have.
And for a brief few days following that very worst day, it did.
Absolute evil was met by pure good and we were united by what was best in us.
The dead were remembered for what their loved ones most loved about them. There was no talk of liars or abusers or cheats in the obituaries and eulogies.
And the living were left with the example of the unhesitating first responders who had perished seeking to save people they had never met.
An invitation to magical thinking came that day as the air began to clear after the collapse of the second tower. Thousands of orange-and-black monarch butterflies appeared, impossibly delicate as they fluttered past steel girders twisted by astonishing violence, their colors vibrant amid acrid-smelling gray smoke and dust.
“Souls,” a firefighter exclaimed.
The butterflies proceeded on what seemed to surely be more than just their annual migration to forested mountains in Mexico. They wafted all but weightless through air where jumper after jumper had plummeted.
I can still too vividly see the figures that began as little more than specks in the cloudless sky that morning. But even as they quickly became more distinguishable as individuals, they all remained governed by the same indifferent law of nature; a falling object accelerates at 32 feet per second squared, minus any air resistance, be the object a lead weight dropped by Galileo from the Tower of Pisa or a human being leaping from the Twin Towers of Downtown Manhattan.
Male or female, young or old, healthy or ill, urban or suburban, Black or white or Hispanic or Asian, married or single, parent or childless, straight or gay, rich or poor, generous or miserly, kind or cruel, fierce or meek, virtuous or sinful, dreamy or practical, toned or flabby, Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu, all fell at the same ever-increasing rate. The only variants were density and surface area.
Mundane business papers wafted gently down, but even the most decent person was soon plummeting at nearly 150 miles per hour. Those who leaped from the topmost floors of the North Tower fell for as long as nine seconds. The people on the floors closest to where the plane actually hit had maybe seven seconds, still time to think of loved ones and pray to their particular notion of the Almighty.
A Roman Catholic, for example, would have been able to say a Hail Mary but not an entire Act of Contrition. Everybody had time to utter “Oh, God!” or “God, no!” or some other plea even atheists cry at the onrush of death. All likely remained as keenly conscious as skydivers, all the more intensely aware of the difference between dead weight and living. They must have felt their own unique shape, apart from whatever they had ever pretended to be, the boundless contours of what could rightly be called their soul.
Some jumped together, holding hands. Most leaped singly, often tumbling as they fell. At least one man stayed feet-first, his red-and-blue tie streaming above him. But most were on their backs as they reached the lower floors, facing the heavens if not necessarily heaven. Their last sight was of the perfect baby-blue sky as they struck the pavement with a velocity that instantly turned a living person into a bright red splatter.
The sound was jarring, loud, a body becoming a bomb, the person ceasing to have any shape at all save what lived on in those who remembered them. A firefighter outside the towers who had been watching from beneath his helmet brim asked aloud a question many would remember thinking.
“How could anybody jump from up there?”
An answer came from FDNY Captain Timmy Stackpole, who had arrived at the foot of the South Tower. He had survived being terribly burned in a fire.
“They’re choosing their own fate,” he now said. “Nobody wants to burn.”
People kept jumping until the whole South Tower came down. Stackpole was killed. So was FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge, who was that rare person brought out intact. Father Mychal was the first fatality officially recorded in what the New York City Medical Examiner designated Disaster Manhattan (DM). A photograph by Shannon Stapleton of first responders carrying out the body of DM0001 would be called a modern Pietà.
On another day, Judge had spoken of a God of Surprises, saying that even the most terrible times present us with wonders, that good always arises from bad in the most unexpected ways.
Now Judge was dead and more monarchs than anybody could count soared and dipped in fragile splendor over the rescuers searching 1.8 million tons of debris for the 2,753 missing. Nineteen people were either extracted alive or dug themselves out. The last was Genelle Guzman McMillan, an office worker who had been trapped for 27 hours when she was found by Firefighter Paul Somin of Rescue 2.
None of the survivors were among those whose final calls to 911 had been summarized on the screens of emergency dispatchers as Incident No. 0727 via SPRINT (Special Police Radio Inquiry Network). The codes and abbreviations were the same as for a fender bender or a kitchen fire. MC was a male caller. FC a female caller. STS stood for states, or says. Some of the minute-by-minute reports are still wrenching 25 years later.
“FC STS THEY ARE STUCK IN THE ELEVATOR...STS THEY ARE DYING.”
“MC STS ON 106 FLR ABOUT 100 PEOPLE IN ROOM---NEED DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO STAY ALIVE.”
“FC STS SHE’S GOING (TO) DIE...WANT TO CALL MOTHER.”
“CALL FLR 103--ROOM 130---APPROX 30 PEOPLE---LOTS OF SMOKE---FC IS PREGNANT.
“ANOTHER CALL CAN HEAR PEOPLE CRYING...NO VOICE CONTACT.”
Even as those calls were being made, the God of Surprises was at work in the person of Police Officer Moira Smith leading a bleeding executive to safety before the South Tower came down. She had a 2-year-old daughter at home, but she turned right back inside with courage such as first responders had always shown, but was largely taken for granted and had never been seen in the face of such apocalyptic danger. Her steady blue eyes and calm instructions—“Don’t look, keep moving”—saved hundreds who began to freeze at the sight of the carnage in the plaza and would have blocked others from escaping.
The recovery of Smith’s remains and dented shield was still seven months away when a woman pushing a stroller approached a group of uniformed cops striding toward the still smoldering ruins in the immediate aftermath of the attack. She had a baggie in her hand and extended it with the spirit that had seemed to spread nearly everywhere.
“She said, ‘I don’t have much money, but this is what I can do,’ and she gave me a bag of ice,” recalls NYPD Det. James Nuciforo, who is now retired.
Other surprises big and small had continued to abound when the visitors to what first responders called The Site and others called Ground Zero came to include President George W. Bush. He began to speak and somebody called out that they could not hear him and he reached for a bullhorn.
“I can hear you,” Bush said. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
The rescue workers cheered and a chant rose up.
“U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
When he heard Bush, the best friend of fallen FDNY Captain Patrick Brown felt a first rumbling that the world was starting to un-change after just three days. Brown had gone to Vietnam as a Marine when he was 17, having been told he was fighting for freedom but had been called a baby killer when he returned home. He had gone from the USMC to the FDNY and became one of the department’s most decorated savers of babies and whoever else was in danger. Brown had been in the North Tower with the rest of Ladder Company 3 when the collapse of the South Tower prompted a call over the radio.
“Command Post to Ladder 3. Get out of the building.”
Brown replied, “This is the officer of Ladder Co. 3. I refuse the order! I am on the 44th floor and we have too many burned people with me. I’m not leaving them!”
On hearing Bush three days later the best friend—who himself became a firefighter—feared that the deaths of Brown and the others on 9/11 would be used as a pretext for another bloody misadventure such as political leaders mount while gazing at themselves in the mirror of imagined history.
“Well, that didn’t take long,” Brown’s friend said.
On the death certificates for everyone who perished that day at the Twin Towers, the same word is used for “cause and manner of death.”
“HOMICIDE”
Osama Bin Laden was immediately the prime suspect in the 9/11 homicides, but the Bush administration did not take the next step taken in murder cases by experienced detectives such as the one who accepted a bag of ice.
“Just keep it real simple; identify who you’re looking for and go find them,” Nuciforo told the Daily Beast last week.
In early December, the U.S. was all but certain that Bin Laden was holed up in the tunnels of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. CIA station chief Gary Berntsen reportedly asked for some 1,000 U.S. Army Rangers to keep Bin Laden from escaping through the mountain passes leading into Pakistan. Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld decided to use local Afghan chieftains instead. The chieftains are said to have been easily bribed, and Bin Laden escaped.
Rather than remaining focused on collaring the killers, the U.S. government spoke of them as “enemy combatants.” The U.S. quickly removed the Taliban regime from power, but was unable to quell the ensuing insurgency despite belatedly committing up to 100,000 U.S. and allied troops.
Rumsfeld, who in his own way was as bad a defense secretary as our current Pete Hegseth, reportedly complained that there were not enough bombing targets in backward Afghanistan. He and Vice President Dick Cheney convinced Bush to invade target-rich Iraq on March 20, 2003, on the pretext that dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the homeland. Bush had the added incentive of outdoing his father, who had ended the six-month Gulf War in 1991 with Saddam still in power.
On May 1, 2003, the younger Bush gave a victory speech from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. A banner hung behind him famously proclaimed “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.” This insurgency continued for eight years before the U.S. admitted failure and left in 2011.
Among those who saw two decades of combat in the War on Terror was the son of FDNY Fire Marshal Ron Bucca, who had been a Green Beret in Vietnam. The father had become known as the Flying Fireman after he survived a five-story fall while trying to rescue an FDNY lieutenant from a burning building in 1986. He was the only firefighter who climbed to the 74th floor of the South Tower. He had been joined by others who managed to get an elevator running, and they had been putting water on the first when the building came down.
That day his son, also Ron Bucca, had been working on planning a Thanksgiving trip home from Tulane University. The younger Bucca joined the Army at 23. He became a Green Beret with the hope of getting the people who had killed his father. The son was on his latest deployment to Iraq on May 2, 2011, when he learned that Navy SEALs had killed Bin Laden in Pakistan.
Every year he was able, Bucca returned to the site on the anniversary of 9/11. He was there for the 20th with his wife, Silvana. She is a former Army officer who served five tours in Iraq.
“I had a birthday in Baghdad,” she noted.
Also present that year among 70 fellow Green Berets was Master Sgt. Brendan O’Connor, who received the Distinguished Service Cross—America’s second-highest medal—after repeatedly exposing himself to withering gunfire to aid wounded comrades in Afghanistan in 2006.
“Twenty years of war,” O’Connor said in 2021. “And we are no safer.”
He added, “We went to war and the rest of the country went to WalMart.”
Some of the changes as a result of 9/11 were as stark and perpetual as an empty seat at the dinner table. Others are harder to determine. A shift in the wind filled my 8-year-old daughter’s bedroom with the smell of burning jet fuel for weeks after the attack in which several family friends were among the missing. And one night, when she should have long been asleep, I heard her saying in the darkness, “Please find more people in the rubble.” I can only wonder what effect those days may have had as she proceeded on to adulthood in a world that in too many ways is ever less than it should be.
Another change is the significance of a call that SPRINT logged in at 9:59 and 13 seconds a.m., moments after the South Tower collapsed.
“FC STS SHE SAW THE PLANES HIT THE BLDGS [ALSO] SAW SOME WHITE PARTICLES FALLING [AND] SHE LIVES NEARBY CONCERN ABOUT THE RESPIRATORY EFFECT OF THOSE PARTICLES.”
A concern that initially seemed ridiculous when people were leaping to certain death was typed into the system by Operator No. 18. The computer automatically traced the call to a Charmane Bembury Starkman of Duane St., four blocks from the World Trade Center. She would later say her first thought on seeing the white particles was that the attack was accompanied by some kind of chemical warfare.
“I just noticed all these white particles coming down. What is it?” she recalled saying to the 911 operator.
The federal and city governments subsequently assured us there was nothing to worry about, but Bembury felt certain there was quite literally something in the air.
“They were too minute to see [but] you could sense it,” she said.
In the immediate aftermath of the second collapse, I watched a firefighter pause to examine a check from the Sumitomo Marine Claims Services of Suite 9035, World Trade Center. He read aloud the amount with a hollow tone that said this was one day in the financial capital of the world when money meant absolutely nothing.
“A hundred and seven thousand dollars,” he said.
Nobody touched a mass of dollar bills strewn nearby in the fluffy grey dust that was the result of everything in the buildings save the steel being pulverized. The oddly cloying dust would prove to include a remarkable number of toxins and what was termed “measurable amounts of human remains.”
But as money began to reassert its primacy over well-being, there was a rush to reopen the financial district despite the poison that would kill thousands more than died in the attack. Health experts say the toll will continue to grow.
At the approach of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, it does not seem that we learned much at all beyond better securing civilian jetliners.
The aircraft carrier from whose deck Bush declared Mission Accomplished in 2003 has just returned from a prolonged deployment to our latest war of choice. This apparent quagmire-in-the-making with Iran was launched by President Donald Trump, who was elected to his second term promising there would be no more Forever Wars. The Lincoln has been replaced by another aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington.
Bush has taken to painting portraits of service members who were wounded during the wars he launched after 9/11. He is expected to attend this week’s 25th anniversary ceremony, along with former presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. One difference between them and our current president is that they are not pathological narcissistic liars.
Trump has chosen not to attend because he was told he would not be allowed to give a speech. He did hold an event at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., honoring the first responders who died at the World Trade Center.
As he stood beside a 21-foot, 17,000-pound steel beam recovered from the South Tower, Trump claimed to recall gazing out this window that morning and telling himself, “the world has changed forever.” He told what was almost certainly a false tale about two firefighters supposedly carrying him to safety several days after the attack, when a building near the fallen towers began to creak.
But he also recounted the true story of a 24-year-old volunteer firefighter named Welles Crowther who worked as an equities trader in the South Tower. Crowther famously became known as “the man in the red bandana” because he tied one over his mouth and nose against the smoke as he made multiple trips leading people to safety when he could have just saved himself.
Trump awarded Crowther the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The fallen true hero’s mother, Alison Crowther, accepted it. The God of Surprises made another appearance as she recited the very principle that seemed to change the world for too brief a time and still could.
“In moments when others need us, each of us has the power to choose courage, compassion, service,” she said. “That’s the real meaning of the red bandana, to be courageous, to find the good, to be the good.”
In New York this week, I chanced to see a butterfly flutter just uptown from Ground Zero. What was surely not just the annual migration of the monarchs had begun.
