Reluctant Hero: A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable Day, What He's Learned, How He's Struggled, and What No One Should Ever Forget (6 page)

Marc Reinstein completely froze. He thought the building was going to fall over because that’s how much the tower was swaying.
Holy shit, the World Trade Center is swaying!
I noticed it too. This swaying was not merely perceptible. It was palpable. I can explain the difference. Standing at the urinal in the men’s room on the 81st floor, one could, guided by the bellwether compass of one’s discharge, observe the clear sway of the building. You could only really notice it in the men’s room. I never felt it in my office. But we always knew the tower swayed. This wasn’t like that. This was more like
leaning
, not swaying.

I quickly came to accept that there was something serious going on above us. But there was no reason for panic. Some reps were diving under cubicles. Some lost control of their legs. They didn’t know whether to stand or fall or what. Women were screaming. Guys were hugging other guys. Everyone was grabbing on to someone. (Marc Reinstein remained frozen.) And all I’m doing is yelling, “Calm down. Calm down.”

I needed to act. The first thing I did was assess the damage. Flames were coming from the south. The big wooden doors that were always locked were blown open from the north. I ran through the office, outside the blown-open doors, and looked in the hallway at the elevators. The Sheetrock walls around the elevator banks were bending inward. The elevators would be of no use. I looked left toward the bathroom, but ceiling tiles and large pieces of the walls lay scattered and broken on the floor in the hallway, impeding access to the entrance. I looked
to the right. The staircase was clear. Nothing obstructed it. I turned around, facing north, and noticed more debris. Then I saw someone emerge from the office across the hall on the north side of the floor, staggering and bloodied. I’d seen enough.

I ran back into my office. People were maintaining relative calm. Somebody shouted that there were people stuck in the bathroom. I yelled back, “I’ll take care of it.” I made a mental note, but first things first. I knew for sure that the flames were to the south and that something bad was going on to the north. So I yelled in no uncertain terms, “Everyone: Move to the center of the office.” I wanted them all in one place, together. Everyone moved. Kevin Nichols held tight to our receptionist, who was crying. Mike Wright came toward me and said, “Ben,”—that’s what they called me at work sometimes, short for
Benfante
— “we’ve got to get everyone out of here.” Yes, that was the next step. I knew the stairwell was clear. So I sent the group to the stairwell exit. We moved quickly, decisively, and intelligently. Nobody left anybody behind. These were good people. They exited in clusters of two or three—always one with another— nobody alone. They looked out for each other. It was not a spirit of every man for himself. I heard them tell of more of this type of behavior in their stories later on. I credit the amazing fact that they all made it out safely in the end to their collective sense of responsibility to each other. I couldn’t have been more proud of these people, many of whom I had hired and some of whom I’d known for years.

I was reminded that people were stuck in the bathroom. I darted back into the elevator hallway, climbed over knee-high piles of broken ceiling tile and chunks of Sheetrock, and finally got down to the men’s room. More people started to emerge from the office across the hall on the north side. So many had blood all over their faces. My sense of urgency heightened, I
shifted into “moving mode.” As long as I was moving, I was fine. That would be the basic guiding principle from that moment until the end of the experience:
Keep moving and you’ll be OK— at least you’ll feel like you’ll be OK. Don’t stop moving.

I punched in the touch key combination to the men’s room, opened the door—and there was nobody in sight. Good thing. The place was demolished. The stalls were collapsed. Water was spraying everywhere. Smoke filled the room, making it hard to see. It looked as though a bomb had gone off. I wasn’t going farther in than I had to. I yelled, “Anybody in there?” No response. Later, I found out that they wanted me to help the people stuck in the women’s bathroom, not the men’s. I heard that some other guys eventually kicked down that women’s room door, which had become stuck, and everybody got out safely.

I left the men’s room, climbed back over the debris, returned to the office, and saw that people were filing down the stairs in an orderly fashion. I ran all the way into my office, grabbed my cell phone and my trusty bag. I strapped it across my chest, and as I turned to leave, I spotted the copy of
Black Hawk Down
on my desk. I hesitated. I had meant to return it to Mike Wright that morning.
I’ll give it to him when we come back up later
. Dashing out, I was startled to notice that the windows on the east side of the whole office were badly shattered; shards of broken glass were scattered all over the desks a few feet away. Joe Longorino and Phil Ipsan, the reps who sat there, were already out on appointments. I used to sit there when I first came to the office.

I checked the perimeter offices to make sure they were really all clear. Adam Andrews, the assistant manager, waited with me and helped make sure everyone was gone. There were no fire alarms or sprinklers going off. What else was there to do? Adam and I headed to the stairwell. I was the last man out. Only three or four minutes had passed since impact.

There were not a lot of people in the stairwell, at first. There were mostly those from my floor and some injured people scrambling. The injuries varied—some bleeding, some burned, some applying makeshift bandages to their wounds. Some of the uninjured walked cautiously, like old people walking on an icy sidewalk. Others gave aid to the injured. All were moving. Some quicker than others, but moving. The prevailing attitude was generally calm.

Off the stairwell, on the 79th floor, we heard two guys yelling for help behind elevator doors. We managed to open them enough to see that the elevator car was stuck in between the 80th and 79th floors. I ran into a nearby office and grabbed one of those bathroom keys that have a stick attached so no one walks off with it. Another guy used the leg of a metal chair. Prying the doors open, it looked like we would kink them, doing more damage than good. We realized our effort was futile. We opened up the doors just enough to shove the stick attached to the key and left it with them. We said good luck and kept moving. This all happened very fast. It took less than a minute.

I got back into the stairwell and regained my spot behind Adam Andrews again. I was moving. On the 79th floor, my phone rang. According to my cell phone records, I got the call at 8:52 a.m. It was Joy. She was frantic. “Oh my god, where are you? Michael, what’s going on?”

“I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m in the stairwell. I’m heading down, and I’m OK.”

I thought I was having this conversation with her. I thought I was allaying her fears. But the line was breaking up on her end, so I finally assured her, “Look, I’m fine, really. I’ll call you when I get to the bottom.” I hung up. I came to find out later that she never heard a word I said. I could hear her, but all she could hear
was static. In my mind, I thought I had talked to my fancée and she knew I was OK. She was having another experience entirely. What she went through as events unfolded was an emotional hell ride that so many loved ones endured that day. For so many, that tortured experience of waiting and not knowing had a very different conclusion. That I made it out and others didn’t still haunts me terribly.

We proceeded to the 78th floor, where the express elevator stopped. People moved quickly and efficiently down the stairs. It wasn’t crowded. I began to wonder what the hell was really happening. I heard people screaming. I kept getting different versions of what was going on. One person said definitely, “There’s a fire!” I saw a fire extinguisher out of the safety glass sitting on the stairwell landing on the 76th floor, so I grabbed it and began to head back up the stairs.

It was simple to me: People were yelling “There’s a fire!” I was standing next to a fire extinguisher, and nobody was using it. I figured,
Why don’t we do something?

I started to go back up, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. Too many people were on the stairwell heading in the opposite direction. I got up maybe a flight and a half.
This is crazy
. I put the fire extinguisher down and resumed my descent.

Not even two steps back down the stairwell, I ran into John Cerqueira. I had hired John three months earlier right out of college. Here was a guy who was classic sales material—six feet tall, all-American good looks, well-spoken. He looked nervous. I wondered what he was doing by himself. I didn’t remember seeing him in the office when all hell had broken loose. He was stuck in the bathroom when the explosion hit. Then he moved to a mechanical room, where he and some other people were stuck for a while. Now both of us were well behind the others in our office.

“Let’s stick together on the way down,” I said. That made good sense to both of us.

We hurried down the stairs. Things moved well at this point. Some people had minor cuts and scrapes, but nobody was hurt badly enough to stop the flow of human traffc. There was no panic. It felt like we were moving, so I felt OK. I didn’t feel I was in danger.

There was some talk in the stairwell that it was a plane that hit the building. I imagined a small commuter plane went off course. No big deal.

But the stories and theories kept on flying. Some sounded plausible, and some sounded outrageous. I didn’t say much. I took it all in. The wheels in my mind were turning in multiple directions. Sure, I wanted to know what the actual problem was, but mostly I thought,
Let’s get out of here first.
I actually could’ve moved even faster down the stairs. I wasn’t impaired physically in any way like some were. But I wanted to stay with John, and I didn’t want to be rude and just blow by everyone in an every-man-for-himself kind of way. We here heading down the stairs at a good pace. That was fine with me.

The network of stairwells and landings were well lit, one indistinguishable from the next. The small victories were seeing the floor numbers go down floor by floor. At each landing we could see the floor entrances. Sometimes the entrance doors were open, and sometimes they weren’t. On the 68th floor, they were wide open. I observed someone there calmly walk into the stairwell, then back into the office floor. That was odd.

I walked out of the stairwell and onto the 68th floor. I thought I should tell the others, “Hey, the stairwell is pretty clear. C’mon,
let’s go.” I also wanted to see if I could find out what was going on. Maybe I could see something from there.

John followed me. We said we would stick together.

There was a badly damaged Snapple vending machine in the office lobby. The glass casing showed what looked like a man-made smash in the middle of it. You could just grab a Snapple.

I told whomever I passed that the stairway was all clear. Some of them began to head toward it. I turned right down one hallway, which opened up into another long hallway on the right. At the end of the hallway, there were large see-through glass doors that were the threshold to more office space. Three women stood huddled on the other side of the doors. They were just standing there, together, still. Maybe they didn’t know?

I ran down the hallway leading toward the glass doors. I banged on the glass. They hit the Open button, and before I could open my mouth to tell them anything, one of them stepped aside, revealing a fourth woman sitting in a motorized wheelchair.

She wasn’t a very big person. She was quite small, in fact. “Is she OK?” I asked. They didn’t answer but instead solemnly looked down at their friend in the wheelchair.

The woman in the wheelchair stared straight ahead at no one in particular. I looked at her straight in the face.

“Do you need help?”

“Yes,” she said. No hesitation.

It was strange to me. Here were these women standing together. There were no men. It appeared as though everyone had already cleared out of the office. And when I asked her “Do you need help?” I sincerely meant it. It was as if maybe she was waiting for somebody, some formal procedure or the firemen. So when I asked her this question, I didn’t have a specific plan of action in mind about how I would help her or what help I could
offer. It was more of a general question that could’ve elicited a number of responses.

But she said one word: “Yes.”

The woman was calm. Her face showed noticeable concern, but she was in control. Her diminutive frame belied a definite strength she communicated through her clear and serious blue eyes. This was not a person who perceived herself as helpless in the world. Though I would later learn that her hands were clenched from rheumatoid arthritis since the age of three and her build was ever so slight, she projected a presence that indicated more ability than disability.

I wondered how long she might have been waiting there. The three women held her personal belongings. I sensed they were her friends.

An evacuation chair lay flat on the floor next to her. It looked like a folded beach chair attached to a lightweight hand truck with wheels and sliders on the bottom. It was all folded up with Velcro straps.

Keep moving
, my inner voice told me. A thousand thoughts flooded my brain. My mind was racing. She needed help. What was the next move? Whatever it was, the voice in my head was unequivocal:
Move!

I tried to open the evac chair. I fiddled with the straps, but the straps weren’t what kept the chair from opening. In my head I was screaming:
How do you open this fucking thing!
Finally, I saw this little lever on the bottom. I hit the lever. The chair opened. The Velcro straps were there for the purpose of strapping the person in the wheelchair, not strapping the wheelchair together. Now I know.

We placed the woman in the evac chair. She repeatedly expressed concern about leaving her motorized wheelchair behind. They’re very costly. John went to get it.