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 (7 page)

“Leave it, John,” I said. “It’s too cumbersome. It’s way too heavy. We’ll come back up later and get it for her.”

I could see the woman didn’t like my plan. I bent down, looked her in the eye, and assured her, “Look, we can’t get you out of here and carry that wheelchair too. I promise you, I will personally come back up here and get that wheelchair for you.”

She nodded in agreement. She was a decisive person. That was good. John still insisted. “We can take it, Mike. Really, we can.”

I looked at him, perhaps unconsciously prevailing upon our boss-employee relationship. “Leave it and grab a side of this evac chair.”

Carrying her, not wheeling her, made the most sense. It was faster, plain and simple. Plus, it let us move at the pace our feet would carry us. Was she heavy? Well, she wasn’t light, but the real challenge was balance. Keeping her level while moving down the stairs was our main concern. If we didn’t distribute the weight evenly, she could tip over. John took one side of the evac chair, and I took the other, which made us a three-person load coming down the right side of the stairs. As long as we concentrated, I felt that we could make it.

“Here we go,” I said to the woman.

“One second,” she said, putting on a surgical mask. “OK. Let’s go.”

We carried her. Her friends carried her belongings. And we headed into the stairwell, hoping to get out as quickly as possible.

John and I carried her from the 68th to the 55th floor. My prime directive was still
Keep moving
. Anytime there was a little stoppage or the stairwell got crowded, I tried to figure out our next move. I was always looking ahead, thinking ahead. With each step my role as navigator became more and more defined.
What little talking we did, John did most of it with the woman in the wheelchair. I was figuring out how to get around people and making sure there wasn’t anyone or anything in our way. I simply wanted to keep us moving forward.

This wasn’t a chitchat atmosphere. We were tense. Our limited dialogue consisted of the frequent “You OK? You all right?” from me and nods of assent from her.
Keep moving.

We rapidly made our way to the 55th floor, where somehow someone had created an impromptu water station. Many were leaving the stairwell to rehydrate. It made sense to us to stop there too. John and I set the woman down on the office’s foyer floor. Then John went to grab himself some water in one of the adjacent offices. I asked the woman if she wanted some water. She moved her surgical mask to the side to answer: No. “Are you sure?”

“No,” she said.

Why wouldn’t she want water?
“Well, I’m setting you down here for a moment, and I’m getting some water.” I looked at her through the mask. “I’ll be right back.” But she didn’t look right to me.
Did she say she didn’t want water because she didn’t want me to leave her? Did she think I was leaving her?
I sensed she wasn’t telling me all she really felt. I turned back around. “Don’t go anywhere.” I wasn’t being facetious. I meant to assure her I was coming back. Her changeless mixed expression of calm and concern remained as earnest as it was when I first saw her. I didn’t know what to make of it. I took one last look at her and walked toward an office.

The truth is I didn’t want water. I wanted to see what was going on. I thought maybe people on this floor might know something. And I knew I had to be quick.

I ran toward a window in an office space and looked out eastward over the courtyard. I saw all forms of detritus strewn about
on the ground far below, but it was hard to make out exactly what it was. For a split second, I thought that some of the things I saw on the ground were bodies. As quickly as that thought entered my mind, another part of my brain immediately shut it down. How could I be sure? We were so high up. But at that point, it mentally and emotionally registered to me that something was very, very wrong. Danger was near, maybe closer than I realized.

I ran from the window to a desk with a phone. I called my parents’ house. I dialed but couldn’t get through. I dialed again and still couldn’t get through. I dialed a third time and got my father.

“Dad!”

“Jesus Christ, Michael! What’s going on? Where are you? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. I’m helping a woman in a wheelchair.”

“You have to get out of there,
now
.”

“I’m getting out. I might try to look for an elevator to go down.”

He thought I said I was
in
an elevator. He was so excited that he didn’t hear a lot of what I was saying.

“Dad, I’m all right. I’ll call you as soon as I get out.”

My father had already seen it all on TV. He saw the plane hit my building, just twelve floors above my office. He saw the second plane hit the South Tower. He knew the gravity of the situation, but I didn’t give him enough time to tell me. I wanted to keep moving.

I hung up on my father. I hustled back to the woman in the wheelchair. I brought her water. She drank it.

I got the vague sense from my father’s voice that something more serious than I thought was taking place. But as serious as I imagined it might be, I thought that at worst he was telling me
to get out of a building that had a fire in it,
somewhere
. I thought the fire was high above me, and that I was out of danger. But my father knew how bad my situation was. Worse, in his mind, he was thinking I was in an elevator, which is a very bad place to be in a building fire. On top of that, I’d told him I was helping a woman in a wheelchair, so he knew I wasn’t moving as fast as I could.

It was, in fact, at 9:02 a.m., sometime between when we began carrying the woman in the wheelchair and the 55th floor, that the second plane hit the South Tower. The stairwells were very well insulated. You couldn’t hear a lot. We heard none of it. In a matter of minutes, within those thirteen floors, our grave danger had doubled in scope, and we knew nothing of it.

John and I picked the woman back up and resumed our descent. Though it had only been thirteen floors, we had effectively established our carrying positions: me on the left navigating, John on the right.

From floor to floor, men jumped in intermittently to help us. There were handles on the front of the wheelchair. That made it easier. When offers to help came forth, John and I took the front handles, and various men took turns holding the back. Some stayed longer than others. But eventually each left to move faster. We were moving. That was all I cared about. But what if we stopped moving? Then what?

Two things became more evident the lower we descended down the stairs: We moved slower, and we saw firemen.

Things got really backed up. The firemen told us to stay to the right so they could make their way up the left side of the stairwell. That slowed the flow of traffic considerably. It also made two men carrying a woman in a wheelchair a very inconvenient
way to travel down the stairs. Turning a corner was always a negotiation for us. Because we were three across, the firemen had to make an exception for us. They let us pass on the left or go to our right, whichever worked better.

You could hear broken-voiced dispatches coming through the firemen’s radio devices, which made people in the stairwell think they had information we didn’t. People hectored them with questions, trying to find out what was going on. For our own protection, they never gave a complete or straight answer. That kept me calm. It didn’t allow me to dwell too much on what could really be going on, or if and to what degree our lives were in danger. What good would it do for us to know what happened? Would it move us down the stairs faster? It might set off panic. Could they have even described the entire situation if they tried? Lack of information kept me concentrated on moving forward.

To this day, I can’t get those firemen out of my mind. I see their faces. With each one I passed, I saw in their eyes extreme exhaustion and extreme determination. Those looks shot right through me then, and they still do now. I must have seen fifty, maybe a hundred—sweating, lugging heavy gear, knowing what we didn’t know, knowing they were headed toward incredible personal danger, risking their lives to help others. But despite their load, their fatigue, and their rush into danger, they calmed all of us. They told us in reassuring tones, “Just keep going.” They were professional. Through their manner and movement, they spoke to us without speaking:
You’ll make it.
Never once did they let us know how dire the situation was. “Keep moving. It’s gonna be OK,” they’d say. They were very positive, very steady. They gave us what we needed. And we kept moving.

The more I think back on their faces, the more I realize that they didn’t simply look tired. Their expression said more than
This is unbelievably hard. Will I make it up all these stairs?
It went beyond that. It was more of an expression of profound knowing. It said,
I know the gravity of what’s going on around me here
. They knew it was an incomprehensibly bad situation. They knew we had been attacked. They knew what airplane fuel could do. Of course, this was a physically challenging rescue that went beyond the wildest imaginable and most brutal training manual scenario. Sure they were tired. But they were more pensive than tired. These firemen understood that in this matter of life and death, they were doubtless heading toward the latter. And they walked into it with such bravery, dignity, and stoicism.

Of the handful of instances I remember of civilians selflessly helping firemen, I’ll never forget one man, stripped down to his T-shirt and suit pants, who, seeming like he might be a volunteer fireman in his hometown, moved quickly past me carrying a heavy fire hose. He was an Asian-American man who looked to be in good shape. He appeared very much like a man on a mission who knew what he was doing. The firemen told him, “It’s OK, you can set it down.” And the man said, “No, it’s all right. I can handle it. I feel good.” The firemen kept saying “Don’t worry about it,” and the guy continued to insist he could help.

I should do more than I’m doing now. I’m just carrying this woman down. Anyone can do this. Maybe I should trade off with somebody in the stairwell and go help the firemen. That Asian man is helping. How incredibly noble! The firemen look tired. They’ve got to carry up more stuff than I’m carrying. Why don’t I help them?
I paused for just a moment. John and the woman looked at me quizzically. The firemen were still telling the Asian man to set the hose down.
If I let go of the evac chair, it will just be another fireman that takes her down, and he’ll be taken away from saving another life.
It’s amazing how your mind rushes to calculate
risk-benefit in a situation like that. It does this in fractions of a second. I stared into the eyes of the woman in the wheelchair, and then looked straight ahead. I reminded myself of what I was doing.
Keep moving. Get us out.
I would learn what those firemen knew soon enough.

The farther down we went, the longer it took to get from floor to floor. Conditions worsened. The human traffic had increased twofold in number. The exodus had become increasingly diverse. Some women carried their shoes, others went shoeless. There were bandaged people, bloodied people, people wearing far less of the clothing they wore to work that morning. Everyone was sweating. And always, always firemen. Heavyset people leaned on banisters for a moment, for a few moments, breathing heavily, regrouping themselves in order to go on. Older people wheezed and sat down to rest, if only to catch their breath. For many it was just a simple matter of fatigue anyone would experience traveling the sheer number of floors. We counted floors like you count repetitions in gym workout: down the stairs, hit a level, hit floor. Repeat. When would this be over? The monotony was compounded by the steady rise in temperature. The air became thicker with more people sharing the limited oxygen in the stairwell. It was hot. It was uncomfortable. After the 33rd floor, it became a challenge to keep moving at any pace.

I
had
to keep moving.

If I was moving, I felt OK. My survival instinct was placated. Any pause, any halt in our progress alarmed me. Standing around made me very, very nervous. If we weren’t moving, my mind shifted away from hopeful thinking about the next move to fearful thinking about why we were stopped. Were the exits
blocked? Did someone else need help? Any restriction of movement compromised my sense of invincibility and control, the belief that I could get out of a situation because of my speed or my strength. That was the way I’d always viewed myself. If you trap me, take away my ability to move, then who am I? I wasn’t trapped helping this woman. I was merely slowed. As long as I was moving, I was still in control of my situation. When I wasn’t moving, I was not in control; I was being controlled. That’s when I started to hear the tiny distress signal in the back of my head. And that’s precisely the signal I was trying to mute.

Sometimes the stoppage was due to having to let firemen go up the stairs. That was better than being stopped and not knowing why. Whatever the case was, the slow pace, the slow descent heightened tension among the people on the stairs.

As I looked around, it became clear to me that everyone on the stairwell was in a state of semi-shock. Nobody was talking to each other in a normal way. We were a zombie-like procession of tired, blank faces occasionally mustering up enough strength to show fear and to take the next physical step forward. The challenge was to do anything to keep oneself in reality, in the present, and out of shock. As we moved from floor to floor, I’d see somebody crying or bloodied. I’d ask them, “Are you OK?” They’d say, “Yes,” “No,” “I think so.” Then we’d keep moving. Offering to comfort another was one of the best ways to feel some power and control in what was a helpless situation. Little gestures like that, no matter how ineffectual, reminded you of your humanity. Those little gestures kept me grounded in reality, kept me sane, and kept me moving forward.

For John, me, and the woman in the wheelchair, little had changed. It was me on the left and John on the right, constantly reminding each other to keep her balanced. Adrenaline overrode fatigue.