MItchell Zuckoff - Fall and Rise - The Story of 9/11

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollins Publishers

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First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Mitchell Zuckoff 2019

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Cover photograph © Catherine Ursillo/Getty Images

The Impossible Dream (The Quest)

From Man of La Mancha

Lyric by Joe Darion

Music by Mitch Leigh

Copyright © 1965 Andrew Scott Music and Helena Music Corp.

Copyright Renewed

All rights for Andrew Scott Music Administered by Concord Music Publishing

International Copyright Secured

All Rights Reserved

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

Designed by Leah Carlson-Stanisic

Map by Nick Springer, copyright © 2018 Springer Cartographics LLC

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Mitchell Zuckoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008342098

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008342128

Version 2019-04-15

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Introduction “The Darkness of Ignorance”

Prologue “A Clear Declaration of War”

PART IFALL FROM THE SKY

Chapter 1 “Quiet’s a Good Thing”

Chapter 2 “He’s NORDO”

Chapter 3 “A Beautiful Day to Fly”

Chapter 4 “I Think We’re Being Hijacked”

Chapter 5 “Don’t Worry, Dad”

Chapter 6 “The Start of World War III”

Chapter 7 “Beware Any Cockpit Intrusion”

Chapter 8 “America Is Under Attack”

Chapter 9 “Make Him Brave”

Chapter 10 “Let’s Roll”

PART IIFALL TO THE GROUND

Chapter 11 “We Need You”

Chapter 12 “How Lucky Am I?”

Chapter 13 “God Save Me!”

Chapter 14 “We’ll Be Brothers for Life”

Chapter 15 “They’re Trying to Kill Us, Boys”

Chapter 16 “They Done Blowed Up the Pentagon”

Chapter 17 “I Think Those Buildings Are Going Down”

Chapter 18 “To Run, Where the Brave Dare Not Go”

Chapter 19 “Remember This Name”

Chapter 20 “This Is Your Plane Crash”

Chapter 21 “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”

PART IIIRISE FROM THE ASHES

Chapter 22 “Your Sister and Niece Will Never Be Lonely”

Appendix 1 The Fallen

Appendix 2 Timeline of Key Events on September 11, 2001

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

About the Author

Also by Mitchell Zuckoff

About the Publisher

DEDICATION

For my children—

and everyone else’s

EPIGRAPH

The ravages of many a forest fire of a bygone age may be read today in the scars left in the tree itself. The exact year that the fire occurred and some idea of its intensity are recorded in the wood, oftentimes grown over with living tissue and hid from the casual observer.

—FOREST PATHOLOGIST J. S. BOYCE, 1921

MAPS

INTRODUCTION

“The Darkness of Ignorance”

ON OCTOBER 28, 1886, PRESIDENT GROVER CLEVELAND SAILED TO A teardrop-shaped island in New York Harbor to formally accept France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty. Under leaden skies and a veil of mist, the president ended his speech with a tribute to the copper-clad lady’s torch and her symbolic power: “A stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and men’s oppression until Liberty shall enlighten the world.”

Dignitaries pounded ceremonial last rivets as warship cannons boomed. Across the water in Lower Manhattan, revelers erupted in celebration. Cobblestone streets pulsed with braying horses, throbbing drums, and blooming flower carts. Brass bands marched like front-bound soldiers, and children scrambled up lampposts to avoid being trampled.

Out-of-towners drawn to the spectacle tilted their heads to gawk at the impossibly tall buildings that loomed over them. Amused by these sky-eyed rubes, an office boy in a high tower felt seized by a raffish idea. He opened a window and tossed out long ribbons of the narrow paper tape that normally recorded the drunkard’s walk of stock prices. His pals followed suit.

“In a moment, the air was white with curling streamers,” a reporter for the New York Times observed. “Hundreds caught in the meshes of electric wires and made a snowy canopy, and others floated downward and were caught by the crowd.”

The fun was contagious. Serious men of finance became boys again, pressing against office windows to unspool paper onto the crowd. “There was seemingly no end to it,” the Times reporter wrote. “Every window appeared to be a paper mill spouting out squirming lines of tape. Such was Wall Street’s novel celebration.”

With that, the ticker-tape parade was born.

During the next one hundred fifteen years, countless tons of celebratory confetti sailed from high-rise windows onto a stretch of Lower Broadway that became known as the Canyon of Heroes. Paper blizzards honored more than two hundred explorers and presidents, war heroes and athletes, astronauts and religious figures, luminaries from Einstein to Earhart, Churchill to Kennedy, Mandela to the Mets.

Then came September 11, 2001.

Torn open, aflame, weakening from within, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center spewed paper like blood from an arterial wound. Legal documents and employee reviews. Pay stubs, birthday cards, takeout menus. Timesheets and blueprints, photographs and calendars, crayon drawings and love notes. Some in full, some in tatters, some in flames. A single scrap from the South Tower, tossed like a bottled message from a sinking ship, captured the day’s horror. In a scrawled hand, next to a bloody fingerprint, the note read:

84th floor

west office

12 People trapped

After the paper came the people. After the people came the buildings. After the buildings came the wars. The ashes cooled, but not the anguish. For years, New Yorkers couldn’t stomach a ticker-tape parade, especially so near the hallowed hole renamed Ground Zero. Yet with time, the unthinkable often becomes acceptable.