ONE

“We Saw People Jumping”

The forms, sometimes not much more than specks against the gleam of the skyscraper, tumbled downward almost indistinguishable from the chunks of debris, the airplane parts, the vapors of flaming aviation fuel that filled the air like fireworks. They fell at the rate of all falling bodies, thirty-two feet per second squared, slowed a certain amount by the friction of the air, so they fell for eight or nine seconds and they were going at least 125 miles an hour when they hit the pavement or crashed into the roof of the Marriott Hotel at the bottom of the World Trade Center. It took a few instants for the witnesses to understand what they were seeing: that the forms silhouetted against the sky or against the flaming buildings themselves were bodies; they were men and women who had chosen to leap to their deaths from a 110-story building rather than endure the conflagration that had engulfed them inside.

Those eight or nine seconds made up the dreadful interval remaining to these victims, an interval spent hurtling past the vast geometrical precision of windows and pillars downward to death. And then everything, the towers themselves, all 110 ten stories of them, the entire 1,368 feet of the north tower, the 1,362 feet of the south tower with their 400,000 tons of steel and their 10 million square feet of offices, trading spaces, bathrooms, and conference rooms disintegrated in an avalanche of concrete, steel, glass, airplane parts, and thousands more bodies, all compressed into seven stories of rubble below.

The television stations and the newspapers delicately chose not to show too many images of the falling bodies. But there was one photograph published on September 12 in the New York Times that captured the horror. It was of a man in a white shirt and dark pants and what looked like large shoes or boots falling headfirst, upside down, frozen for all time against the background of one of the twin towers, which is a ghostly, silvery white in the morning sunlight. September 11, 2001, as many have ruefully noted, was a glorious fall day. It had to have been for the pilots of the hijacked airplanes to see clearly enough to carry out their missions. The autumnal glitter brought the event into sharp focus for those who witnessed it nearby and for the hundreds of millions around the world who watched it unfold, in real time, on television. And so, the camera was able to record the falling man’s descent with icy clarity. It is an outlandish, incongruent image, surreal, absurd, a man suspended in a place where no human being should be. It is easy not to realize, stilled by the camera as he is, that his experience of falling and ours seeing the image of his fall are utterly different. Going headfirst like he was, the air resistance would have been minimal, and he would have reached a speed of close to 170 miles per hour before he hit … whatever it was that he hit below. It is a gruesome detail, but it is details like that that make up a tragedy; it is their accumulation in the experience of thousands of victims that adds up to the human cost of September 11.

It was a large event, three dimensional, and any one person seeing it on the ground saw only a narrow fragment of it, like George Shea, for example, a public relations executive who was in a car just emerging from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and heading north on the West Side Highway when American flight 11 hit the north tower. He saw an immense wheel materialize from above—he assumed it was the wheel of the airliner—strike a blue-gray SUV in front of him and then bounce away into a building. The director of graduate admissions at the Nyack College Alliance Seminary, Carol Webster, saw no airplane parts crashing to the ground; what she saw was people getting hit and burned by aviation fuel, people dropping purses so their money fell out, people dropping their children as they ran and other people behind them stopping to pick them up, and then running too.

But it was the falling bodies, the desperate suicidal leaps caused by the actions of suicide terrorists that made for the grimmest images, the images that would haunt forever those who were there to see them with their own eyes.

They were anonymous. Like the man pictured in the New York Times photograph, those who jumped remain unidentified and unenumerated. The tragedy of September 11 was televised; millions around the world saw it in their own homes as it happened in lower Manhattan. And yet these hundreds of millions of spectators watching simultaneously in France and Japan, Brazil and California, could not see the event’s human details, which were obscured inside a fog of dust and debris. And therefore, the jumpers died in a paradoxical sort of obscurity, their deaths witnessed but their identities unknown. And it’s not just that we don’t know who they were; we also don’t know how many of them there were among the 2,813 who died when the planes hit and the two towers disintegrated behind the billowing curtain of dust and debris visible to the world that watched. But videotapes scrutinized later show that there were at least sixty people who jumped or fell, almost all from the north tower, the first to be hit.

An emergency medical technician named John Henderson was on Fourteenth Street when he and his partner, Lou Parra, heard the sound of the plane hitting the north tower, and the two of them then raced toward the scene. They could see heavy pieces of debris falling from the gash that the plane, a guided missile with ten thousand gallons of aviation fuel on board and edges like knives, made as it tore into the tower, shattered the aluminum façade, sliced through eighteen-inch-thick exterior steel columns, and erupted in flames. They saw shards of the plane that left streaks of sparks against the tower’s vertical lines. Then they saw bodies begin tumbling down, one, two, three, men in business suits and white shirts, then another and another.

“We saw people jumping,” Leonore McKean, a paralegal at the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, said. When the south tower was struck about twenty minutes after the north tower, Ms. McKean was evacuated along with the rest of her office. “We had to walk north. I saw what might have been a piece of the engine from the plane. You could hear people screaming as they saw people jumping.”

But nobody heard the jumpers. They fell in what seemed like silence, though very likely they were screaming too, as though echoing the screaming of the people below who saw them. And nobody knows what it felt like to be falling, what it felt like in their stomachs and bowels to leap from so terrifying a height and to drop like stones. Did the jumpers remain aware as they plummeted downward? Could they see the ground rushing up at them, the parked cars, the roofs of lower buildings, the pedestrians who had the luxury of running to safety? Did they see their lives pass before them, or think of their loved ones, whom they had kissed good-bye an hour or two before in what seemed like the start of just another day? Or did they black out as they accelerated, their guts churning, their lungs pressed flat against their diaphragms, their skin scorched from the burns they suffered before they jumped? What was it like to be sitting at a desk one minute, perhaps to be sending an e-mail or drinking a cup of coffee or checking the schedule of the day to come, and the next instant to be pressed so hard by the hot iron of burning aviation fuel against the exterior walls of the office that you tumbled out in your desperation to get away?

We know that at least a few survivors from the stricken towers, people who managed to climb down the stairs to safety, actually saw the planes banking in the morning air just instants before they struck. But what of the victims? Did any of them happen to be looking outside their windows, perhaps admiring the view of the Hudson River as it flows past Manhattan’s West Side, and actually see the airplane, its fuselage glinting in the sun, hurtling right at them? Did they dive for cover or did they stand there transfixed by the inconceivable, like a deer caught in headlights? Did they understand for a flickering instant that men from faraway countries whom they had never met and didn’t know were bent on the task of murdering them? And those who didn’t jump—those, for example, among the 160 or so people who were having breakfast in Windows on the World, the restaurant with the million-dollar view on the 107th floor of the north tower, or the 135 people attending the Risk Waters Financial Technology Congress one floor below? When the buildings collapsed, were they killed instantly, painlessly, or did some of them remain conscious for a few seconds as the once solid, carpeted floor dematerialized beneath them and they fell, at the same speed as their desks and water coolers and file cabinets and computer terminals and boxes of paper clips and framed photographs of their children?

On Park Place, the busy commercial thoroughfare near City Hall, pedestrians heard the whine of the jet and some who looked up saw the plane coming in extremely low. And then they saw people jumping out of the building. One person said he was even able to make out a lady in a green suit and a man in jeans, both jumping out and falling to their deaths. Another witness, a photography student named Jamie Wang who had been taking pictures of people doing tai chi exercises in a nearby park, described the jumpers as figurines. He remembers one woman in particular, the way her dress billowed out in the wind created by her fall. Firemen rushing to the scene reported that they had to dodge bodies being propelled from windows on the upper floors.

“I saw at least ten people jump,” one fireman said. “I heard even more than that land and crash through the glass ceiling in the atrium. We could hear them crash. We thought the roof was crashing down, but then we looked up and saw that people were falling through the glass. Some people fell right onto the pavement.”

People getting out of the towers, walking down the stairs and out onto the plaza level, saw them too, even though, once they had arrived on the scene and began organizing the evacuation, policemen told them not to look. “There was a head, a whole body, just mangled, two feet with shoes on them,” an evacuee from the 82nd floor said. “I saw heads. I saw feet.” People watching from their offices in buildings whose chief attribute was the view they offered of the trade center saw a ball of fire erupt from near the top of the north tower and then some of them said they saw as many as twenty people jump, some of them blown by the wind around the corner from where they had started.

A veteran lieutenant in the Fire Department, a member of the elite Rescue I squad in midtown Manhattan named Steve Turilli, was searching for a command post near the Customs Building on West Street, which runs between the Trade Center itself and the World Financial Center closer to the Hudson River.

“That’s when we started to get hit by all the bodies, or people, jumping out of the towers,” he said. “You would get hit by an arm or a leg and it felt like a metal pole was hitting you. It was like a war zone, seeing body parts everywhere. Then we’d be hit by the bodies.”

“It wasn’t pretty,” Lieutenant Turilli said. “The bodies would hit the ground and they would explode and disappear. I saw this black guy impaled on a street sign. He was like hanging on the pole pierced right through him. That sticks in my mind. The pole through his body. From Liberty and West we went to Liberty and Washington. Firemen were yelling at us. One guy told us to get out of the way, away from the buildings, because a fireman was killed when a jumper landed right on top of him.”

*   *   *

Even though millions of people saw on live television what witnesses on the ground saw, when the towers crumbled into rushing billows of dust, powder, and smoke, few minds could encompass exactly what had happened. The words most commonly heard were “unbelievable” and “unimaginable”—that so many could die in an enemy attack on American soil; that four airplanes could have been hijacked on a single day, and used as aviation fuel-laden missiles to hit targets that symbolized American might and prosperity; that the president of the United States was, for the better part of a day, kept from the nation’s capital out of fear for his safety. Perhaps Joe Disorbo, who escaped to the street from the 72nd floor of the south tower, the second to be hit, best expressed the American loss of innocence. His clothes and skin coated gray, blood drying on his ears and left leg, he stood for a while fumbling with his cell phone trying, unsuccessfully, to call his wife on Long Island to tell her that he was all right. He had been too busy surviving to contemplate the scope of the disaster. Then he happened to look up, and he realized that he was staring into a dusty vacant sky.

“Where is the building?” he asked, not quite believing the evidence of his eyes. “Did it fall down? Where is it?”

What happened on September 11 is the story of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon, but it is not a single story. It is the 3,046 individual stories of the dead and the much higher number, the tens of thousands of people, the children, the wives (many of them pregnant), the husbands, the parents, the friends and colleagues they left behind. There were brothers, like Peter Langone and Thomas Langone, one a fireman and the other a police officer, who both died trying to rescue others. Peter was forty-one and Thomas was thirty-nine. They each had wives, Terri and JoAnn, and four children, Caitlin, twelve, Brian, ten, Nikki, nine, and Karli, five.

“We owe you a great deal,” New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani told their family members at a joint funeral service. “It will be paid back.”

But it won’t be paid back. It can’t be paid back.

About 15 percent of the total dead were firefighters, police, and other rescue workers—not people who failed to get out of the buildings on time, but people who rushed into them after the planes had struck.

Whole families, traveling together on the hijacked planes, were obliterated together. Leslie A. Whittington, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, was on American Airlines flight 77, the one that crashed into the Pentagon, killing the 64 people who were on board, including the five hijackers, and 125 who were in the building. She had gotten a visiting fellowship at the Australian National University for two months, and so she was traveling with her husband, Charles S. Falkenberg, a software developer at the ECOlogic Corp. in Washington, D.C., and their daughters, Zoe, eight, and Dana, three, on the first leg of their journey to their long-anticipated Australian adventure. The last anybody heard from the Whittington-Falkenbergs was when Leslie called her mother from the airport waiting lounge to say good-bye. Later, at the funeral, the Reverend Barbara Wells remembered Whittington as “the irreverent economist with a razor-sharp wit” and Falkenberg as “the bike-riding, mountain-climbing, love-to-be-at-home-with-his-girls kind of dad.” Zoe was strawberry blond and had “perfect ballerina feet” and no doubt she had long, serious conversations with her stuffed bears. Dana was, Wells said, “the toddler robusto, who filled the room with her curly-headed smile.”1

The Hanson family—Peter, his wife, Sue Kim, and two-year-old Christine—were on United flight 175, going to San Francisco to visit Sue’s family. Peter Hanson, a software salesman for TimeTrade in Waltham, Massachusetts, was an avid gardener and an ardent Grateful Dead fan. Sue Kim, who had lived with her grandmother in Korea when she was a child, was a doctoral candidate in microbiology at Boston University. Christine was a little girl just getting steady on her feet. When the hijackers took control of the aircraft, Peter called his parents in Easton, Connecticut. “They’ve gotten control of the cabin, and they’ve killed a stewardess,” he said. “I think we’re going down, but don’t worry. It’s going to be quick.”

When Peter signed off, his parents, Eunice and Lee Hanson, turned on the television, and then they watched as the plane their son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter were on slammed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.2

Stephen Adams, fifty-one, the beverage manager at Windows on the World, and Christopher Carstanjen, thirty-four, a computer expert at the University of Massachusetts, knew each other because of a common interest. Both were passionate about Morris dancing, a kind of ritual dance from the west of England performed with bells and sticks and the waving of white cloths that is the recreational passion of teams of devotees that meet and greet each other around the world. Adams and Carstanjen attended performances together at Marlboro College in Vermont. Carstanjen was a motorcycle enthusiast, and he was on flight 175 to California to bike up the Pacific Coast with some friends. Adams, according to his wife, Jessica Murrow, a musician and another Morris dance enthusiast, had found himself professionally after some years of drift, serving as a beverage manager at Windows and planning to be a wine steward. He was going to San Francisco for a tasting of German wines. The two of them, Adams and Carstanjen, hadn’t seen each other for some time, though they ended up almost in the same place when they died. Adams was at work when flight 11 struck the north tower. Carstanjen was on flight 175, which slammed into the south tower.

Edward F. Beyea and Abe Zelmanowitz both died because Zelmanowitz, a computer programmer at Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield, refused to leave Beyea, also a programmer and a quadriplegic, who got around in a wheelchair. Beyea was an enormously resilient man who never allowed his disability, sustained in a diving accident, to overcome him. He typed with a stick he held in his mouth; he played computer golf at home, listened to music, and didn’t spend his days feeling sorry for himself. Zelmanowitz, his loyal friend, his blood brother in life and death, rigged up a special tray for him that allowed him to read in bed. Zelmanowitz, as his brother Jack said, “could never turn his back on another human being,” words that might seem florid in another context, but Zelmanowitz proved on September 11 that they were true. Lisa and Samantha Egan, thirty-one and twenty-four, sisters and co-workers at Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond information company that lost 658 of its thousand Trade Center employees, died together. The victims were from many countries. At Windows on the World alone, they came from Bangladesh, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Ghana, Senegal, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, El Salvador, Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Jamaica, China, Brazil, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Ireland.3 The Trade Center site is a mixed grave where millionaire security traders are entombed with undocumented immigrants. It is a democratic tomb, a grim melting pot, an unwanted emblem of the genius of America life, of the quality that made New York so special.

*   *   *

The events of September 11 are also the story of the nineteen Arab men who hijacked the planes and killed themselves so that Stephen Adams and Christopher Carstanjen, Edward F. Beyea, Abe Zelmanowitz, and the four Whittington-Falkenbergs, and Peter and Thomas Langone, Lisa and Samantha Egan, and the three members of the Hanson family, and three thousand others would die. And, of course, it is also the story of the evil mastermind named Osama bin Laden who was almost without a doubt ultimately behind their actions.

It is worth noting in this regard how bin Laden himself experienced September 11, and, thanks to a videotape discovered by American forces in Afghanistan, we have his testimony on exactly that. A few weeks after the attacks, bin Laden was with some of his close aides and a visitor from Saudi Arabia, and, sitting on a rug, relaxing with their backs leaning against the wall behind them, they expressed joy at the extent of the destruction, and they made jokes—yes, jokes—about the events of September 11.

“The TV broadcast the big event,” said Sulaiman Abou-Ghaith, a radical Kuwaiti cleric who served as a close adviser to bin Laden. “The scene was showing an Egyptian family sitting in their living room. They exploded with joy. Do you know when there is a soccer game and your team wins? It was the same expression of joy.”

“A plane crashing into a tall building was out of anyone’s imagination,” the visitor from Saudi Arabia put in. “This was a great job.” The identity of this visitor is not certain. Initially, Saudi officials said he was a religious scholar named Ali Sayeed al-Ghamdi, but a different Saudi official later said he was Khaled al-Harbi, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya who had lost his legs in combat.

“It was 5:30 P.M. our time,” bin Laden said. “Immediately, we heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We turned the radio station to the news from Washington. The news continued and there was no mention of the attack until the end. At the end of the newscast, they reported that a plane just hit the World Trade Center.”

The visiting sheik interrupted to give a kind of religious sanction to this happy news. “Allah be praised,” he intoned. It is worth noting here this religious scholar’s, this man of learning’s casual conviction that committing mass murder and doing God’s work are one and the same.

Bin Laden continued his account of how he experienced September 11.

“After a little while,” he said, “they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Center. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it.”

*   *   *

Sasha Tsoy-Ligay is a four year-old girl from the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan. She didn’t speak English at the time, having only arrived in the United States three weeks before September 11. Sasha—the name on her birth certificate is Alexandra—will always remember the morning when her mother, Zhanetta Tsoy, thirty-two years old, left their house in Jersey City, New Jersey, without eating breakfast, because it was her first day in a new job in the new country called America and she was too excited, in too much of a hurry, to eat. Zhanetta went from Jersey City to lower Manhattan that morning since her job, as an accountant for the firm Marsh & McLennan, was in that amazing building that she could see from New Jersey, rising megalith-like on the far bank of the Hudson River. Probably she took the express elevator in the north tower of the World Trade Center to the 79th-floor Sky Lobby, transferring to the local to go to 93, where she arrived sometime before 8:46. She wasn’t actually due at work until 9:00, and her eagerness to arrive early that first day probably cost her her life.

They’re telling Sasha that her mother had to go on a long trip, and that’s why she hasn’t seen her since that morning she went to work. Sasha has Barbie dolls and stuffed toys to play with, donated by kind, sad neighbors. Her father, Vyacheslav Ligay, takes her to a nearby pet store so she can stroke the animals. Someday when she is older she will understand what happened to her mother on September 11, and she’ll probably wonder what kind of people those faraway and unknown “brothers” were to be laughing about it.