I had a meeting that morning, and I was going to be late. I frantically ran around the house until I found my keys, and managed to get out the door about half an hour after I planned to. I jumped on the number 2 express and planned to transfer to the 1 at Park Place. I'd only end up being 15 minutes late that morning.
But Park Place was the end of the line. Forever.
An announcement came over the loudspeaker - there was no southbound service, this train was out of service, last stop, no passengers, yadda. No explanation was given. Hardened NYC straphangers grumbled and bestirred themselves from the commuter-trance, preparing to exit and make other transportation arrangements. "Fuckin' trains."
A woman ran the other way screaming, "They're blowing up the city! Get out! Run!" as we all exited the subway car. Seasoned NYC subway travellers shook their heads. "Fuckin' subway crazies."
I ascended the steps promptly at 9am. Chaos.
The World Trade Center complex had already been cordoned off. Sirens and flashing lights were everywhere. Police were not allowing anyone in. I was ordered to "Go north" by a policeman. No explanation was given, but I suspected there was a fire.
I walked north to Foley Square, which is where I first saw the triangular, smoking hole in tower 1. My pager was going crazy. The system was clearly overloaded, pages were coming in in spurts one after another with coworkers asking if everyone was ok and requests for people to report in. I managed to get off one page to my supervisor and another to my fiancee, then gave up and turned it off in disgust, realizing it was going to be less than useless for the duration.
Two guys ran up covered in grey dust. They said they'd come down from the first tower and that a second plane had hit the second tower. "It's a terrorist attack!" they yelled. While this was all happening another dust-covered guy ran up and put his hair, which was on fire, out in the fountain.
The line for the pay phones in and around Foley Square stretched the length of the park, but I grimly got on one and waited. When I finally got through to my mother, she wanted to sit there forever wringing her hands with the drama of it all, and I kept having to tell her that other people were waiting behind me to call. I was literally the last phone call made from that phone. The next person's call was interrupted by tower 2 - with it's prominent broadcast antenna - collapsing, and taking all the phone service south of 14th street with it.
As this occurred, everyone waiting on line scattered, screaming, and a wave of terrified people poured up Broadway. Meanwhile, I had my own issues. My military conditioning was kicking in. I was having to fight the urge to go south and kick the ass of whoever was doing this to my city. The logical part of my head was saying that there WAS no ass to kick and it was a done deal and that I'd been out of the military for a good decade by then, and I'd only be in the way. but the hindbrain - the part that went through basic training and combat first aid training, the part that beat a bully bloody because he dared to harass my sister in kindergarten, the part that swore to protect my country from all enemies foreign and domestic... that part of me wanted to get involved.
So I was at a standstill. I was totally paralyzed with rage. Tower 1 fell, and again I had to fight the urge to go down south and do something to help. I'd been in a back brace for most of 1998 and my injury was not going to allow me to do a fireman's carry even though I knew how to do one. I looked south and saw cops, firefighters, ambulances and several people in FBI jackets. I'd only be in the way, I kept telling myself. My training is out of date. I'm not active duty anymore. I can't help. I'd only be in the way. I kept having to tell myself that over and over until logic overruled my less sensible instincts.
Lower Manhattan was now an eerily empty wasteland. Stragglers continued north or across the bridges east and west. Groups gathered in the streets around stores who had placed televisions in the windows, trying to find out what was going on. Nobody was talking.
Eventually I turned around and went north along 1st Avenue, choosing to avoid the Empire State Building in case it, too, was attacked. I got as far as the UN, which was completely surrounded with cops holding automatic weapons and dogs. I realized it too might be a target and headed toward midtown. I remembered that I still had a badge for Morgan Stanley, where I'd been placed as an onsite representative for Sun Microsystems. They'd still have telephone and internet service. I could let my family and friends know I was still alive.
Even this far north I was still seeing shoes in the street, mostly women's shoes. As I watched a weary woman in a business suit abandoned hers and left them sitting in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
Although I was not at Morgan Stanley any longer, my badge was accepted and no one gave me any trouble as I used my still extant account and the nearby phones to let people know I was alive. My fiancee (now husband) and I decided that I wouldn't go to meet him at Columbia as was originally planned, because apparently the entire city subway system was no longer running and driving was also not permitted anywhere within Manhattan with the exception of first responder vehicles. I told him I'd make my way to Penn Station and just go home. The exhaustion was setting in. I'd been walking for two hours and my feet (in comfortable boots - I was a field engineer) were aching. Even on a good day I wasn't going to be up for walking another seventy blocks and back.
I had to work on myself for a while to leave the computer and the phone behind - a psychological PTSD byproduct of that day which still manifests itself daily. These days I am absolutely obsessive about checking email and the online news - although quite frankly the utter and consistent failure of our traditional media to give us the entire story since that day has also unfortunately played quite well into that. I kept telling myself that I'd leave when my feet stopped hurting, and after about two hours I did so.
When I arrived at Penn Station there were no train schedules. The LIRR were simply running trains as fast as they could bring them in, load them up and send them out. No one was being asked for tickets, it was just "Get your ass on the next train to where you live. Now. Here's the track number and when it's leaving."
I took out my WTC access badge and looked at it with the numb realization that the building it allowed me access to no longer existed. A woman next to me was doing the same thing. She was from Marsh Insurance Company in tower 1 and lost many friends and coworkers that day.
I arrived home and the next three days were spent mostly in bed. I did not eat for those 72 hours. I guess I was in shock. I drank some water but food was absolutely out of the question. Mostly I didn't want to be awake. The television was constantly showing what I'd seen with my own two eyes over and over again and I couldn't stand to look at it, but I wanted to know what was going on so every now and then I would look.
A lot of what started sinking in at this point in time was the realization, with my classified military background, that there was no way the United States intelligence infrastructure didn't see this coming. To someone with three generations of family having supported the military intelligence community, the implications behind a successful terrorist attack on American soil were the worst possible nightmare. The event itself was horrific enough, but what lay behind it was what was really tearing me apart. Our intelligence infrastructure had failed somewhere - and knowing what I knew from six years of active duty in an Air Force MAJCOM environment, I was 100% fully aware that "they didn't see it coming" was a stinking fucking lie.
I guess in some ways I didn't want to be awake to process this, and in other ways I kept going to sleep because I was subconsciously hoping that when I'd wake up again, this time the nightmare would be over. I didn't realize it had only just begun.
And I was right. It eventually came out that a terrorist threat assessment directly mentioning Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda had been placed on Bush's desk on August 6th that was completely ignored. When the soulless sons of bitches running this country into the ground who have exploited the deaths of far braver, finer people than they will ever be end up burning in hell for all their transgressions, that's going to be one of the biggest logs on the fire.
So anyway, on the fourth day, I finally decided that I was hungry, and I was assisted out of bed by my dear husband who accompanied me to Burger King. I was a little shaky but I insisted on driving the car. It actually helped me to focus and concentrate and come back a bit more to reality.
I decided my first meal in 3 days was going to be something I like and something I didn't have to cook. So we went into the BK and just as I was about to order, the fire alarms in the place went off. Great, just what I needed. More flashing lights, more sirens, more frightened people, more danger, more drama.
But I managed to deal with it and I ordered my food, although we ate in the car. In retrospect the sheer overkill of sensory overload ended up not really working as perhaps it should have, and so I actually found it darkly funny that my first meal in 3 days would be accompanied by yet more sirens, flashing lights and drama. I was hungry and said to hell with the drama, and I had my whopper with cheese, no tomato. There are people who say that cynicism is a bad thing, but I find that it tends to be a survival trait. It helps you laugh at the scary shit and deal with it.
A year later I wrote that I was going to live, and live well - on my own terms. I'm doin' that as best I can, and I think today I am going to go down to my local BK and get another whopper with cheese, no tomato.
Thanks for listening.