9/11 Eleven Years Later

Like this year, September 11 occurred on a Tuesday eleven years ago.

I was about to leave for my office on that fateful morning, but before doing so, I went to the computer in my home office to dash off a heated email to Molly Ivins, the acid-ink columnist for the Dallas Times Herald who delighted in poking fun at President Bush’s malapropisms. Before I could build up a head of steam, though, my wife stuck her head in to say that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and coverage was on television.

My mind flashed back to a similar incident which happened when I was a child – a B-25 light bomber had flown into the Empire State Building during a foggy summer morning in 1945. That was before the days of television (yes, television was not present at the Creation) and our family got its news by radio. It was a topic of family conversation because the pilot’s name was Lt. Col. William Franklin Smith (no relation) and because my dad’s brother was also a WW II B-25 pilot.

By the time I got to the family room television, the second plane had hit the second tower. It was obvious that these were no accidents and the commentators were beginning to speculate that we were being attacked by terrorists. It wasn’t the first time they had tried to bring down the Trade Towers. Terrorists had converted a truck into a bomb and parked it in the building garage in 1993, hoping to cause Tower One to collapse into Tower Two, bringing them both down. It failed to do more than blow a hole through several floors, but it killed a half dozen people and injured about a thousand.

I returned to complete my email to Ivins, telling her that now we were under attack by terrorists, no doubt of Middle Eastern origin, maybe she ought to focus her columns more on what was happening in the world and less on Bushisms like “misunderestimate” and “nuclar.”

After the nation recovered from the initial shock over the suicidal lunatics who turned planes into bombs, the predictable finger-pointing and dot-connecting began. From it we learned just how well-planned this mission of death and destruction was. The two flights departing from Boston were scheduled to Los Angeles, the one leaving Newark was en route to San Francisco, and the Dulles departure was headed to Los Angeles. That meant each of the four planes was loaded with fuel for their coast to coast flights, making sure that their impact would produce an inferno.

Nineteen men, 15 of whom were citizens of our alleged Middle East ally, Saudi Arabia, had been organized into four groups, each led by a hijacker capable of handling the flight controls of the planes. Aside from the “pilot,” the other thugs in the four groups were there to provide the muscle to subdue the passengers.

At 8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11, piloted by a 33-year old Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, plowed into the north tower, known as One World Trade Center, in New York City. Less than a half hour later, United Airline Flight 175 crashed into Two World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m. At 9:25 a.m. the Federal Aviation Administration shut down all domestic airports in the country, but that didn’t prevent American Airline Flight 77 from crashing into the west face of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. At 9:59 a.m. WTC 2 collapsed, ten minutes later a section of the outer ring of the Pentagon collapsed, and at 10:28 a.m. WTC 1 collapsed. Due to fires started when WTC 1 collapsed, WTC 7 collapsed at 5:21 p.m.

United Airlines Flight 93, which had departed Newark at 8:42 a.m., was about 45 minutes into its flight and over eastern Ohio when the four terrorists took control of the plane. As they began breaking into the cockpit, the quick-thinking pilot put the aircraft on autopilot and switched the radios so that attempts to communicate with passengers via the intercom would be routed to air traffic control. As the terrorists got into the cockpit around 9:30 a.m., the pilot sounded the alarm to air traffic control: “Mayday, mayday.” Another voice, perhaps the co-pilot, repeated the distress call. Once on the flight deck, the terrorists killed or mortally wounded the captain and first officer, and then the hijacker-pilot announced through what he thought was the intercom "Ladies and gentlemen: this is the captain. Please sit down and keep remaining sitting (sic). We have a bomb on board. So sit.” That message went out to air traffic control.

There were 35 GTE air-phone calls and two cell phone calls made by ten passengers and crew during the chaos that prevailed for the half hour that the terrorists controlled the plane. These calls allowed the passengers to learn of the World Trade Tower crashes and they allowed people on the ground to learn what was happening on Flight 93. The fate the passengers were headed for became obvious to them. Passenger Jeremy Glick called his wife and stayed on the line to report what was going on. Passenger Todd Beamer tried to call his wife but was routed to the GTE air-phone operator, Lisa Jefferson. Beamer told Jefferson that several passengers were planning to “jump on” the hijackers, and if they had to, their plan was to crash the plane into the ground. Several passengers voted to join in fighting back, according to Glick. Beamer recited Psalm 23 with Jefferson, who later said she heard him say on the open line, "Are you guys ready? Okay, let's roll.”

From sounds heard on the flight recorder, the passengers may have used a service cart as a battering ram to break open the flight deck door. Convinced that they would succeed breaking into the cockpit, the hijacker pilot rolled the plane into a steep right bank, nose down, and around 10:03 a.m. Flight 93 crashed in an isolated field near Shanksville, PA. The NTSB estimated the plane hit the ground in an inverted attitude at 563 mph at an angle of 40 degrees. It was the last of the hijacked planes to crash.

Four months later in January, Todd Beamer’s wife Lisa gave birth to the couple's third child, daughter Morgan Kay Beamer.

“We've been hijacked," Barbara Olson, whispered into her cell phone as she huddled with other passengers and the crew in the back of American Airline Flight 77, 30 minutes out of Dulles Airport. On the other end of the call was her husband Ted Olson, Solicitor General of the United States who argued cases for President Bush before the Supreme Court. From his Washington office, Olson asked his wife about the location of her plane. Barbara said they were flying over a residential area. That’s when her husband told her about the World Trade crashes. Both probably realized at that moment that she was doomed. They exchanged some personal comments that have not been made public. Moments later, Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon.

The 9/11 death toll was horrendous. Of the 2,753 killed in New York, 343 were firefighters, 23 were police officers, and 37 were Port Authority police. In the Pentagon crash, 125 were killed. Of course all aboard the four planes were killed, which totaled 265 people. Driven by hatred, 19 men had killed over 3,100 innocent people.

Everything within blocks of the World Trade Center looked like post-Vesuvian Pompeii after the buildings collapsed. Cab driver, John Payafestas, upon seeing the second plane hit Tower Two, later said "I busted a U-turn on the West Side Highway. I thought, 'I gotta’ get home now, or I'll never get home again.'"

Relatives and friends of people who were believed killed or injured in the New York carnage walked the streets like zombies carrying signs and placards with names and photos of the missing loved ones. Some, like Edlene LaFrance, periodically gathered at the National Guard Armory where rolls with the known dead and known hospitalized were periodically updated. These searchers sat patiently in rows of chairs as if waiting to renew their driver’s license. Edlene hadn’t been able to find her 48-year husband, Alan, an audio/visual technician who had been in the towers that morning to earn a little extra rent money. She hadn’t heard from him in almost 60 hours, making it almost certain that he was among the casualties. When her name was called, she trudged down the armory stairs where the current lists were kept. An assistant offered to look for Alan among the names of dead and injured. His name wasn’t there.

Like many in major metro cities, Edlene and Alan lived on the margin. He had no life insurance. She was a nurse in “a really bad part of town.” They lived paycheck to paycheck. Since Alan managed the finances, in the days after 9/11 she couldn’t find the checkbook, which likely was on his body at the bottom of the rubble pile. A charitable organization helped her dodge an eviction for non-payment of rent. Despite her tight finances, she continued to pay for Alan’s cell phone, even though it was on his body, so she could call his voice mail and hear his voice. “They never found remains,” she said, “it’s all we have left of him.”

An iron worker volunteered his time and skill to help cut through the mangled remains of what once were the Twin Towers. His second day on the job started with 16 ounces of beer. It was his “breakfast.” After what he saw on his first day, he needed the alcohol. Not only did he cut steel in pieces that could be hauled away, he also filled bags with pieces of bodies as he came upon them. “I filled 25 bags full of parts,” he said of his first day. One belonged to a woman, who tortured what sleep he could get the previous night. He knew it was a woman because the toes were painted. Everything above the thigh was missing. “I don’t want to go back in there,” he says as he dulled his senses with what was left of his beer. But as his eyes misted behind his welding glasses, he set off for the pile. Two of his friends who were firefighters and his cousin who was a paramedic were buried there.

At the Pentagon, FBI technicians were going through the ruins by hand, looking for human remains. Canine police officer Jim Lugaila had been handling cadaver dogs for 25 years for the Washington DC Police Department. His description of the scene was this:

Think of taking a giant blender, filling it with pieces of ceiling, metal, pieces of flesh, pieces of clothing, paper, glass, and putting it on the highest speed possible.  That is what we had to sort through to find something sometimes no bigger than a dime.

I told the FBI, who was in charge, that they were missing a lot with their hand-sorting since cadaver dogs could find human remains the size of a dime or less for DNA purposes.  I was given the job of canine commander after proving the dogs' worth.  King, my German Shepherd that looked like Rin Tin Tin, came across a piece of metal that looked like a pizza pan folded in half.  King went crazy.  After recovering it and opening it up, a piece of a human brain was found inside.  Unfortunately, non-dog people don't believe in the dog until you prove to them that the dogs can recover more.

About a third of the human remains at the Pentagon were recovered by cadaver dogs.

A 9/11 artifact you’d expect to find in Ripley’s Believe It or Not happened last August. Stock broker Randy Scott was working in Tower Two when American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into Tower One. He called his wife’s school, where she taught the first grade, leaving a message in the school office that he was okay. Then United Airlines Flight 175 hit his building. Scott quickly scribbled a note: "84th floor, West Office, 12 people trapped" and dropped it out of a window. The note inexplicably contained his bloody thumbprint.

Randy’s note was found on the ground by someone who gave it to a Federal Reserve guard. The guard went to call it in when the building collapsed, distracting him until he later realized that he had it. The note ultimately ended up at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and remained there for ten years.

When he couldn’t be located in any of the local hospitals it became apparent to Denise Scott that her husband had been killed – she hoped instantly – when the second plane struck the building near where he worked. But Dr. Barbara Butcher, chief of staff and director of the Forensic Investigations at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York, confirmed by DNA testing last year that the thumbprint was Randy’s, and she contacted Denise in August 2011 – almost ten years after the note was written – to tell her that she had something she believed had been written by Randy Scott. "The minute I saw it I didn't need to see the DNA test," Denise said, "I saw the handwriting. It's Randy's handwriting." The hope that Denise and their daughters had held for ten years that Randy’s death had come quickly was suddenly smashed by a 10-year old call for help.

Each year since the 9/11 tragedy occurred, the 9/11 commemorations held by universities are like none other held around the country. The focus of university recollections is not on the 3,100 innocents killed on that day, including over 400 first responders who were trying to save them. The focus isn’t on the 3,000 or so children who were living that day, or born within the nine months following, who have grown into adolescence or adulthood missing the parent who would have been at their games, school festivities, weddings, or to see grandchildren born. No, what you would see on those college campuses that even make a fuss about 9/11 would convince you that the Muslims were the victims, thanks to the insightful research of Charlotte Allen writing on last year’s remembrances of that modern day of infamy.

Take the commemoration of Trinity University in San Antonio, for example. Last year’s remembrances included a series of lectures which consumed its entire fall semester entitled “A Decade After 9/11: Muhammad in History, Politics, and Memory.” Those who suffered the loss of a loved ones at the hands of hate-filled, suicidal fanatics no doubt found comfort in expositions of “New Views of Muhammad and Early Islam,” “Muhammad the Warrior; Muhammad the Peace-Maker,” “Islam and the Strength of Visual Images,” and “Of Prophetic Ascents and Descents: Muhammad’s Journeys through European Cultural Space.” Now you know why I left university teaching.

Pepperdine University, whose religious roots recognize the reality of evil versus goodness in this world, called their 2010 commemoration “Honoring the Heroes of 9/11.” Now there’s a word you will not have heard used on many college campuses in the ten anniversaries since September 11, 2001.

The post-9/11 investigations concluded that the primary target for Flight 93 was the White House and the secondary target was the US Capitol building. Apparently the mission planners changed the target as the launch date drew near, deciding that the White House would be too difficult to hit. The US Capitol would be their target. But the rebellious passengers made certain the terrorists would not repeat what they had done in New York, forcing the plane to crash near the village of Shanksville, PA.

Within minutes of the crash the local first responders were on the scene. Afterward, hundreds of investigators descended on this small town whose facilities were incapable of supporting them. Only 245 permanent residents lived there. But with true American selflessness, the local people opened their homes, prepared meals, and provided the outsiders help that only a local would know how to provide. “We had to take care of these people,” one resident remembers.

Soon family members began streaming in to see where their loved ones had died. Others came for whatever reason a hallowed site draws people to gaze upon it and contemplate. Tributes of various types began to appear around the crash site, left by those who needed to quietly honor the passengers who thwarted the terrorists in their deadly mission.

Within weeks of the attack, the first memorial to the Shanksville heroes appeared – a makeshift creation that a local woman set up in her front yard. Looking out her window one morning she saw that a bouquet of flowers had been placed next to it during the night or early morning. With it an appreciative survivor of the Shanksville crash had left a card that read, “Thanks for saving our lives – The Capitol Employees.”