It was a safe bet that American Airlines Flight 11, a big Boeing 767, would leave Boston’s Logan International Airport on time for its early-morning trip to Los Angeles. Even during a hectic summer in which air travel nightmares had led to delayed and canceled flights all over the nation, the American morning flight from Boston had a 90 percent on-time departure record. On board were 81 passengers and 11 crew members.
It was something of a celebrity flight, carrying photographer-actress Berry Berenson, 53, and “Frasier” writer-producer David Angell, 54, and his wife, Lynn, a librarian and advocate for troubled children.
It was a bright, engaging morning, the kind of day that turns the routines of air travel into small delights, from the strong coffee and cinnamon bun before boarding to settling in with the morning paper after the wheels are up.
Early-morning travelers are different, always scrubbed and fresher than their day’s-end counterparts. It is an optimistic time to fly, particularly when the skies seem so friendly and blue. It would be good to get out of Logan airport, too, which seems to be enmeshed in an eternal, complicated and annoying construction project.
Flight 11 took off at 7:45 a.m.
At 7:58 a.m., another Boston-to-Los Angeles 767 flight with a strong on-time record, United Airlines Flight 175, rolled down the runway and headed west.
It carried 38 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants.
Neither of the planes was carrying anywhere near its capacity of up to 255 passengers.
They were a little behind schedule, but these would be easy, uncomplicated flights for the United and American flight attendants on the 767s, common airplanes on North American routes, particularly on transcontinental flights.
When their tanks are full, the planes hold 16,700 U.S. gallons of Jet A fuel, more than enough to carry them across the country, enough, in fact, for the plane to fly 5,570 miles before refueling.
They are not new planes. United’s average 767 has been around for 18 years.
They are familiar planes to commercial pilots all over the world.
At 8:01 a.m., United Flight 93 left Newark International Airport, 220 miles to the south, headed for San Francisco.
Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles prepared for the flight. Her cell phone, which would become very important to her in less than an hour, was within reach.
Newark, with spillover and bargain traffic headed to and from New York City, is a busier airport than Boston’s Logan, so the on-time record of United Flight 93 wasn’t quite as good. It was just 80 percent. The United flight out of Newark was a Boeing 757, which can carry up to 239 passengers, but it had only 38 on board Tuesday morning, along with seven crew members.
At 8:10 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77, with 58 passengers and 6 crew members, took off from Dulles International Airport in Reston, Va. It was also bound for Los Angeles. That flight, too, was a Boeing 757 with an on-time departure record of better than 80 percent. The 757s, when their tanks are full, hold 11,276 U.S. gallons of Jet A fuel, enough for the plane to fly 4,830 miles without refueling.
It seemed the standard “suburban Washington-to-anywhere” early-morning crowd.
Businessman Chris Newton, 39, had recently relocated to Arlington, Va., from Anaheim Hills, Calif. He was going back home to fetch his family’s golden retriever, Buddy, which had been left behind for awhile as the family moved east.
All four planes fit a common profile. Their flight decks and controls were similar. They were all fully loaded with fuel. They were all roughly in the same part of the country at exactly the same time. Their departure times were very dependable.
A betting person would find the odds greatly in his favor if he chose those four flights to conduct an unusual wager: What would the chances be that all of these planes would take off, be fully fueled and in roughly the same part of the United States at about the same time?
On the takeoff question, the odds are better than 8 in 10.
Once the plane is in the air, the other odds would fall along the same lines, assuming nothing went wrong. East-to-west flights follow similar flight patterns.
There is nothing remarkable about four commercial airliners, full of explosively volatile jet fuel, all in the air at just about the same time. At any given point in the day, there are some 5,000 airliners taking off, landing or enroute. But these four planes were special, because, just about every day, they were in the same places at the same times so dependably, so predictably that you could build a plan on it.
Someone did, someone who knew about their routines, their controls, their flight profiles.
Who knew enough about those flights to build a remarkable scheme that would transform America’s sense of itself; that would shatter assumptions about where the strongest nation sits; that would make America question what kind of power it really has in such a troubling, complicated world?
Who knew enough about the airliners and their routines to overpower the flight crews, take over the planes and turn them into fuel-packed flying bombs so powerful they would set off 1,000- degree fires that would liquefy structural steel?
As it turned out, by the FBI’s latest estimate, a total of 19 terrorists, some of them commercial pilots and others adequately trained to maintain minimal control of the planes, were on the four airliners as they departed.
Investigators now have their names and have pieced together a rough picture of the years of planning and training it took to pull off one of history’s worst terrorist assaults.
They look nothing like the terrorists look in movies, so swarthy and sinister and sneering with contempt.
In fact, the investigation has revealed, they were the folks next door in many cases, raising families, keeping a little distant, but no more distant than a lot of people in a nation where many people no longer make an effort to really know their neighbors.
They said hello in the morning and came home quietly at the end of the day.
They drank vodka, diapered their babies in disposables and lived their mundane, suburban lives.
There was little to indicate they were willing to take themselves, airplanes full with passengers and buildings full with victims into an inferno to make a political point about how much they disliked the United States of America.
Nothing at all.
The signs, the investigators now say, point to a coalition of terrorist groups somehow connected to Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi living in Afghanistan under protection of the Taliban government. Although evidence linking bin Laden to the attacks is murky, the Saudi millionaire has bankrolled and planned attacks on the United States before, but usually at facilities outside the country. The Central Intelligence Agency vaguely warned awhile back that he was interested in carrying his attack to the mainland, but the agency said nothing about when, where or how that might happen.
The details will deliver themselves as the investigation proceeds.
In an instant, America changed
One thing is certain: In a fiery instant on a brilliant, sunny Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, 2001, at 8:45 a.m. EDT, the United States shifted from a nation vaguely concerned about its enemies around the world (mostly in the context of arguments about expensive anti-missile systems) to a nation ready to declare war not only on terrorists, but also on the countries that house and support them.
The scheme, which would bring the country to its knees and open both its heart and its eyes to a new, troubling reality, began playing out an hour after United’s Flight 175 lifted off at Logan.
It was so well coordinated that it took just an hour and 16 minutes to play out.
8:45 a.m. EDT:
Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center Tuesday, touching off an inferno that forced dozens of people to leap to certain death to escape the metal-melting heat created as thousands of gallons of jet fuel burned with the fury of ignited magnesium.
9:05 a.m. EDT:
Flying fast and low, Flight 175 exploded into the south tower of the World Trade Center, touching off what would become twin infernos, death traps for thousands upon thousands of workers far from the reach of the hundreds of valiant, doomed firefighters struggling to save them.
9:39 a.m. EDT:
Flight 77, the smaller Boeing 757, crashed into one of the five faces of the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., just as a troubled, panicky America was coming to grips with the fact that the distinctive twin towers of the trade center, now aflame, had been targeted by terrorists.
10:10 a.m. EDT:
Flight 93, the San Francisco-bound Boeing 757, nosedived into the ground in an empty field in Somerset County, Pa., after meandering during its westward journey, leaving only some puzzled locals wondering why an airliner would be acting so wildly and some hints about its last moments and reports of heart-breaking cell-phone calls home to bid farewell to loved ones.
There was speculation it might have been headed for Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, or that it might have been headed for the White House or for Air Force One, as a presidential spokesman later suggested in explaining why President Bush stayed out of the nation’s capital for a while Tuesday.
Instead, it ended its flight nowhere, in a field in the woods 80 miles south of Pittsburgh.
No one knows yet what actually happened, although CeeCee Lyles had time to grab her cell phone and call her husband and four sons in Ft. Myers, Fla. She told them all how much she loved them. Her aunt said Lyles’ husband could hear people screaming in the background.
Someone used another cell phone from a bathroom on the plane, telling a rural 911 dispatcher that the craft was being hijacked, that he heard some kind of explosion and saw white smoke and that the plane was going down.
Thomas Burnett, also a passenger on Flight 93, had enough time to say goodbye to his wife and tell her the plane had been hijacked and a couple of the passengers were going to “do something about it.”
“I love you, honey,” was the last she heard from him.
Flight 93 hit with such force that there wasn’t much left above- ground in the way of big pieces. One of the locals said he saw the frame of a seat and then climbed onto the roof of a cabin to extinguish a foam seat that was setting the cabin’s roof on fire. Metal shards and lots of rubble spread over a vast area.
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There was talk that the plane might have been shot down by an F-16 fighter seen circling the area. There is also a thought that somehow, the passengers overcame the terrorists and managed to slam the plane into the earth rather than allow it to be used as another flying bomb. By the time Flight 93 crashed, because of the cell phone calls, some passengers were well aware of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
It is a noble idea, a scene that would play well in a movie about self-sacrifice and patriotism.
There is scant evidence that it happened that way, but maybe it was more important, on such a difficult, heartbreaking day, just to create the thought that it happened that way. And the reports of witnesses to the plane crash indicate the suspicion of a shootdown may not be supportable.
It just turned over and crashed into the ground, they said.
There have been more terrible days in American history, but not in this generation, not in the past century and not in peacetime.
There is a simple way to describe it.
In a few moments, more than twice as many people were murdered in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history than the 2,400 who died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, a day, as President Franklin Roosevelt put it, that would live in infamy, an attack that carried a dormant United States into a world war.
Where will this day, with its 5,000 or more victims, its vaporized airline passengers, its destroyed World Trade Center, its aching good-byes and its smoking Pentagon ruins reside in history, if not in infamy?
Even God is saddened, it is said, when bad things happen to good people.
Sept. 11, 2001, must have been a very sad day for God.
Towers a symbol for the world
Upon their completion in 1972 and 1973, the two towers of the World Trade Center immediately became landmarks for lower Manhattan in addition to becoming the world symbols of American business and economic acumen. Long before anyone thought of them as a target for terrorism, they were proudly pointed to as gleaming structural signs of American dominance, a glitzy thought with a dollop of arrogance at its center.
One World Trade Center was, for a brief period of time, the world’s tallest building at 1,368 feet. It lost that title when the Sears Tower was completed in 1973. Two World Trade Center, the south tower, was 1,362 feet high.
The buildings, one of the architects on the original project said, were built to survive a hit from a Boeing 707 aircraft, the dominant passenger plane of the era. The assumption was that such an incident would be an accident. They were designed to withstand the heat of isolated fires and the other kinds of disasters that might take place in such huge buildings.
Both towers were people magnets of the highest order. They could hold between 40,000 and 50,000 employees and guests, which made them the equivalent in population during business hours of a lot of smaller American towns and cities.
True to their status as world- class financial nerve centers, the towers were home to a collection of platinum-coated investment houses and banks, along with thousands upon thousands of much smaller, less visible, businesses. This is where Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe did their business.
The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, once the owner of the towers, also had offices there.
The north tower was home to the legendary Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th floor and the World’s Greatest Bar on the 107th floor. Cantor Fitzgerald Securities, Marsh USA Inc., a collection of Wall Street connected associations and a handful of foreign banks were headquartered toward the top of the building.
Fiduciary Trust Co. International; Keefe, Bruyette & Woods; Fuji Bank; Morgan Stanley; Dow Jones & Co.; Oppenheimer Funds Inc. had offices there. So did the New York Stock Exchange, Sun Microsystems, the New York State Tax Authority and a host of other interests. The city of New York’s disaster headquarters, with its brace of high-level fire department and police officials and sophisticated communications equipment, were housed in an adjacent building.
Someone is always at work in the two towers, but the buildings literally fill up during the morning rush hour, when lower Manhattan springs to life and the sense of “open for business” mingles with the fresh coffee, bagels and hectic scurrying that define Manhattan in the morning.
Air traffic in the vicinity of the towers is not unusual. Helicopters flit about carrying top-dollar executives to the tops of buildings where they perform their top-dollar work. Commercial airliners headed for the city’s LaGuardia airport seem to float in the sky as they make their various approaches, generally on a southward path.
A uniformed army of workers heads to the job, purposeful young women in snappy blue suits and white blouses with oxblood briefcases under their arms, granite-jawed young men in the unofficial dark wool of the world of banking and finance, young wannabe’s on the way to their first New York jobs, the testing grounds that will decide whether they have the stuff to make it in the world’s toughest, and also most delightful, city.
Because everyone is so busy, so determined, the roar of a jet engine at normal altitude doesn’t get much attention from a lower Manhattanite heading for work.
But the sound of Flight 11 did.
It was the attention people pay to something that shouldn’t be there, to something that doesn’t quite fit the routine.
Flight 11 was in the wrong place, flying much too fast and, at 8:44:50 a.m., heading straight for the north tower of the World Trade Center.
“The plane looked strange,” said Rob Nelson, who noted he saw the red and blue American Airlines logo on its tail.
It struck well up on the building at 8:45 a.m., slicing into the tower the way a sharp knife slides into a piece of meat.
“It was flying very low, heading south, and it hit the north side of the building,” said Nelson.
There was an instant’s delay, then an orange fireball sent thousands of pounds of debris into the air high above Manhattan. Pieces of the airliner, office papers, furniture, parts of the building, the debris began its long, surreal fall to the streets even as the people of Manhattan registered their first horror at an inferno developing high over their heads.
The crash filled upper floors of the trade center with fire, fuel, smoke and fumes and slashed an impenetrable cut through the escape stairways, trapping those who were on the uppermost floor of the building.
Immediately, the story was on the news.
But what had happened? At first, those who heard the explosion reached for an innocent explanation, perhaps a small plane crashed into the building, or a helicopter, some sort of freak accident.
Rick Nessel, a management consultant whose office is a block away from the World Trade Center, told reporters from The Washington Post that his first thought when he heard the explosion was that something had happened in the air conditioning ducts of his own building. Soon, though, Nessel and millions of others began to realize the horrifying dimensions of the tragedy.
People who sat closest to the windows in Nessel’s office began to scream.
“We saw things falling and thought it was debris, but it wasn’t. They were bodies. It was surreal,” Nessel said.
A door opens to a man in flames
Kenny Johannemann, a janitor at One World Trade Center, was on the first floor just after Flight 11 hit the building. He was standing in front of an elevator. The doors opened. The man inside, he said, was engulfed in flames. Johannemann and another man grabbed the person, extinguished the flames and pulled him outside.
He looked up and saw people leaping from the tower.
“It was horrendous. I can’t describe it,” the janitor said.
Clemant Lewin, a banker who works across the street from the tower, looked out his window after the initial explosion. He saw people jumping from the building as high as the 80th floor. He saw a man and a woman holding hands as they fell. People who would soon be dead crowded to windows in areas of the building above the zone of impact. They screamed, gestured and, in sad case after sad case, chose the certainty of death by a long fall over the pain of incineration.
“I don’t know if they were already dead or just going to die,” said Ellen Leon, who watched from her office nearby as people jumped, or fell, from the tower.
Alan Rivera wept as he stood on the streets watching the building burn. He had tried to reach his niece by cell phone but he could not get through to her. He said no one could tell him anything about what had happened.
The TV news crews arrived as the horror was developing. They began broadcasting everything they saw, inviting the world to watch as the north tower began to spark, smoke and spit out bodies and debris like a huge roman candle.
Their cameras were set up and recording at 9:04:50 a.m., when another plane appeared on the horizon. It was Flight 175, the Los Angeles-bound plane from Boston, the second of the four to lift off. Flight 175 drifted into sight and headed straight for the south tower of the trade center.
It hit at exactly 9:05 a.m. EDT, slicing, just as the first plane had, into the building so cleanly that it seemed to disappear. Again there was the instant of hesitation, then another huge explosion that sent glass, fuel, airplane parts, office papers, furniture and bodies across the New York sky, again, making that surreal, long drift to the ground.
By that time, firefighters and rescue workers had streamed into the north tower. The streets of lower Manhattan were being sealed off and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was trying to console his wounded city even as he marshaled its forces for what was to becoming a monumental, losing battle against the burning towers.
“I have a sense it’s a horrendous number of lives lost,” the mayor said just afterward. “Right now, we have to focus on saving as many lives as possible.”
Workers from the lower floors flooded the streets, fleeing the scene. More police officers, firefighters and rescue workers flooded the area, responding to the very danger everyone else was trying to escape.
Havoc broke out across New York.
No one seemed to know exactly what had happened. Reporters talked of hijacked airliners and a deliberate and murderous attack on one of the most important symbols of the financial world, a theme that developed even more strongly after the second plane hit the south tower.
There could no longer be thoughts that a tragic accident had taken place.
Far away from the scenes of the disaster in lower Manhattan, President Bush was visiting Sara sota, Fla., pushing his campaign for education reform.
He had begun his day with a brisk, 4.5-mile run with a reporter and a Secret Service agent. The run left them all dripping with sweat. The president cleaned up and headed off to push his education reform agenda, one of the keystones of his legislative program. He was happy with the reception he got at Booker Elementary School and was welcomed by 18 children for a reading demonstration.
It was 9:07 a.m. and the president was reading a story to the children when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, walked over and whispered in his ear.
The president briefly turned somber, then politely continued reading to the children.
After he completed the story, he left the room, was briefed on the New York developments and prepared to make a statement. At 9:31 a.m., after his staff had removed the posters and flow charts the president was using to push his education initiative, a stern and businesslike Bush walked to the podium at Booker school.
“I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington after my remarks. Education Secretary Rod Paige and the lieutenant governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at Booker Elementary School for their hospitality.
“Today, we’ve had a national tragedy.
“Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the vice president, to the governor of New York, to the director of the FBI, and I’ve ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and find those folks who committed this act. Terrorism against our nation will not stand.
“And now, if you’d join me in a moment of silence.
“May God bless the victims, their families and America. Thank you very much.”
At 9:39 a.m., only a few minutes after the president had read his statement to the nation, Flight 77, which had dropped out of contact with air traffic controllers shortly after it left Dulles, slammed into the Pentagon, igniting a furious fire and setting off a series of explosions.
Bush’s security team, initially planning to return on Air Force One to Washingon, immediately changed its plans. By the time of the Pentagon attack, it was clear to investigators that four airliners had been hijacked. Two hit the trade center towers, the third hit the Pentagon.
A missing piece of the puzzle
Where was number four?
United Airlines didn’t know, or at least wasn’t saying. At that point, its news statements about the hijackings reported only that certain planes were believed to be in trouble. There was so much confusion everywhere that at one point it seemed as though five airliners instead of four had been hijacked.
As long as the fourth plane was unaccounted for, President Bush wasn’t going back to Washington, no matter how callous that might seem.
Instead, Air Force One headed for Louisiana, to Barksdale Air Force base, where the president had secure communications channels he could use to talk with his aides. He also issued his first formal statement in response to the attacks.
“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.
“I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government is working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks.
“Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts. I’ve been in regular contact with the vice president, secretary of defense, the national security team and my Cabinet. We have taken all appropriate security precautions to protect the American people. Our military at home and around the world is on high alert status and we have taken the necessary security precautions to continue the functions of government. We have been in touch with the leaders of Congress and with world leaders to assure them that we will do whatever is necessary to protect America and Americans.
“I ask the American people to join me in saying a thanks for all the folks who have been fighting hard to rescue our fellow citizens and to join me in saying a prayer for the victims and their families.
“The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake: We will show the world that we will pass this test. God Bless.”
Air Force One stayed in Louisiana until 1:20 p.m., then flew to Omaha, home of the Strategic Command, where the president met by teleconference with the National Security Council.
In the meantime. someone found United’s Flight 93, the lost flight. It was heading for an empty field in Somerset County, Pa.
Glenn Cramer, dispatcher supervisor in Westmoreland County, which sits next to Somerset County, Pa., said an emergency dispatcher got a call a few minutes before 10 a.m. from a man who said he was a passenger locked in a bathroom on Flight 93.
“We are being hijacked. We are being hijacked,” the man told the dispatcher, according to Cramer. He also told the dispatcher that he had heard some kind of explosion and that Flight 93 “was going down. He heard some sort of explosion and saw white smoke coming from the plane and we lost contact with him,” Cramer said.
Air traffic radar had been following Flight 93 along its tortured course.
It had nearly reached Cleveland when it made a sharp left turn and headed back for Pennsylvania.
At 10:10 a.m., it was reported, Flight 93 crashed 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in circumstances that may remain a mystery for some time.
“There’s a crater gouged in the earth. The plane is pretty much disintegrated. There’s nothing left but scorched trees,” said Mark Stahl, a Somerset man who went to the scene of the crash.
The Flight 93 crash sparked speculation, reinforced by some comments from members of Congress, that the plane had been headed for Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. Later, the list of potential targets was expanded to include the Pentagon, the White House or Air Force One.
Even as the nation’s focus had shifted to the missing United plane, its whereabouts and the fortunes of its passengers, the scene was deterioriating in New York. It was still unclear across the nation exactly what had happened, except that there were terrorists in the air and they were carrying out a murderous plan that included destruction of key buildings of business and government.
Fear of more attacks arises
How many more were there and where would they hit next?
The images of what had already been wrought helped fuel those worries.
At 9:50 a.m., its structural steel rendered soft and weak by 45 minutes of inferno, the top of the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, falling down and taking the rest of the building with it. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were still in the building at the time of the collapse, which sent tornadoes of billowing smoke and debris down the canyons of lower Manhattan.
At 10:30 a.m., the north tower of the trade center, also weakened by more than an hour of inferno, slumped and fell inward upon itself, sending thousands of tons of structural steel, glass, furniture and building members crashing into the streets.
Giuliani, who by that time had become a constant presence on the streets of lower Manhattan, worried aloud about the firefighters who were desperately trying to find victims and save lives just before the south, and then the north, towers collapsed. It was a well-warranted concern.
At that point, some 200 New York City firefighters, an entire layer of the department’s hierarchy, its most senior enlisted man and its chaplain among them, were known or presumed dead. (The death toll of firefighters and police officers moved past 300 as the week progressed.)
The collapsing towers created a mammoth, superheated mountain of structural steel, debris, body parts and trapped victims. The fire and police departments, already in mourning for their lost comrades in arms, pushed right back into the debris, removing it bucket by bucket as the search for bodies and survivors continued.
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It is a process likely to take months.
The Federal Emergency Management Administration sent refrigerator trucks into the area to hold remains.
Giuliani put out a request for 6,000 body bags.
Once United confirmed that its missing plane had been located in the Pennsylvania field, the White House announced that President Bush, now apprised of what had happened at the Pentagon, would be heading back to Washington later in the afternoon after his stop in Nebraska.
There was growing criticism that the president was not on the scene to reassure the nation, but aides explained later that they took the threat against the White House and Air Force One seriously and did not want to put the president into further jeopardy as long as the fourth plane was not accounted for.
At the school in Sarasota, Fla., Bush had just finished his first address on the New York attacks when Flight 77 crashed into the Navy wing of the Pentagon.
Some 20,000 of the Pentagon’s 24,000 workers were in the building, many of them already gathered around television sets watching the news coverage of the World Trade Center attacks. There was a palpable sense of tension in the air, some said.
One, former Marine Mike Slater, told his co-workers, “We’re next,” according to the New York Times. Slater, about 500 yards from the point of impact, said he heard a roar and knew the building had been hit by “a bomb or something.” Blue and white strobe lights and sirens warned everyone to evacuate the building.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in his office when the plane hit. He rushed down the hallway to help people evacuate the building. Then he headed for the command bunker in the Pentagon basement. Even though smoke had drifted in through the ventilating system, he and his top aides stayed in the bunker to review retaliation options.
This third attack sparked an immediate national response.
Federal government buildings and prominent landmarks like the Sears Tower and the Seattle Space needle and Disney theme parks in Florida and California were closed or evacuated, a reaction that became more evident in Washington than anywhere else once the attack had been launched on the Pentagon.
The intelligence community and federal investigative authorities had already been on alert in the wake of the surprise attacks on New York, but the latest development pushed them to a fever pitch. U.S. military around the world, everywhere from National Guard units in the United States to obscure military garrisons in distant corners of the world, were moved to a high state of alert.
The Pentagon ordered aircraft carriers on patrol along the East Coast and sent warships into West Coast harbors to protect against any further attacks.
The section of the Pentagon that was hit had just been renovated, a process that included placing high-strength steel and Mylar web reinforcements in the walls along with thick safety glass windows and a number of other enhancements designed to make the building safer, if not impregnable.
The renovation, it is believed, helped save hundreds of lives by giving people more time to escape before the section of the building started to collapse.
But no one could plan for a collision with a 240,000-pound airliner moving at several hundred miles an hour and carrying 11,276 gallons of fuel, minus what the plane had used in its flight from Dulles International Airport. The crash started an inferno that incinerated the victims on the plane and anyone trapped inside the area of the Pentagon directly affected by the crash.
Charles Lewis was sitting in his office at the Pentagon watching the disaster unfold in New York. He was trying to call his mother, who worked in one of the World Trade Center towers.
His office exploded at 9:39 as Flight 77 hit the building.
“I couldn’t see anybody else inside. I was thrown up against the wall,” said Lewis, a civilian employee, as he limped along the Pentagon lawn after the attack. The Pentagon workers had been well trained in evacuation, so their escape from the building was disciplined and orderly.
It was a different scene inside.
Cabinets fell from walls. Ceilings collapsed. People were trapped behind doors.
“It was like the building was caving in,” said Josh Levesque, a computer technician who slipped out of the building’s area with dozens of others before it collapsed.
Rumsfeld struggled to send the message that it was business as usual for the U.S. military. But of course, it was not. Initially, there was a report that at least 800 people had been killed in the Pentagon attack, a number Rumsfeld and his deputies scrupulously avoided.
The Pentagon attack also set off a panic in Washington as federal agents evacuated the White House, Congress and other key federal buildings and as tens of thousands of government and private sector workers raced to get away from any building of prominence. Every move was beamed across the nation as full-time news telecasts took over for regular entertainment scheduling.
The nation, then, was able to watch a dual-screen Armageddon playing out in the nation’s financial capital and at the heart of its seat of government. The fact that the president wasn’t coming back to Washington helped fuel national anxiety about the attacks, along with the fear that the assault wasn’t over, that this was somehow just Phase One.
Within a few minutes of the Pentagon crash, heavily armed federal agents were in the streets of Washington, carrying machine guns and watching the skies for any more signs of trouble.
Perhaps inevitably, rumors started to circulate.
The first claimed that a car bomb had exploded in front of the State Department at Foggy Bottom, a report that was untrue. A second questionable report cited an explosion of some kind at the Capitol. There were more reports of explosions in New York, all of them products of the panic that followed the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all commercial flights in the United States until further notice, a move that would expose any other errant airliners to the F-15s and F-16s that had been scrambled in key areas around the country to protect against any more suicide plane attacks.
It also ordered U.S.-bound jetliners from other countries to either return or divert to Canadian airports.
All civilian aircraft were immediately grounded.
The FAA’s decision brought to a standstill an air travel system that moves 1.5 million people a day on some 40,000 commercial and chartered flights. More than 5,000 jets that spend most of their time crisscrossing the nation landed at the nearest airport, stranding equipment and passengers alike.
That set off a rush to the rental car outlets at every significant airport in the United States as people searched desperately for some way to reach their destination. The airwaves were full of stories of people who bought cars on the spot or spent thousands of dollars on cab fare for cross-country trips.
John Park and four other Los Angeles businessmen, stranded in Chicago, paid $3,000 to take a Checker Cab back home. Driver Yogi Ward planned to stop in Las Vegas on the way back to pick up a United flight attendant who needed a ride back to Chicago.
The panic was not limited to Washington and New York.
In Chicago, the city ordered the evacuation of the Sears Tower and warned everyone that cars parked illegally near government buildings would be immediately towed. Parking bans were put in place in sensitive areas. Highways out of town filled up early as countless thousands of people who had come to work only a few hours earlier turned around and headed for the relative safety of their homes.
Homeowners everywhere who had been accustomed to seeing the exhaust contrails of air commerce across the skies now saw only the military and police aircraft that were assigned to monitor for illegal flights that might represent some unanticipated threat.
A stunned people show resilience
If all of that reflected panic, it was a panic that was short-lived.
Even as the gritty firefighters and rescue teams of New York City worked by hand in their search for bodies in the rubble, and even as the stubborn fires persisted under the slate roof of the Pentagon, there were signs that the nation’s initial shock was yielding to two other powerful instincts, ironically, emotions that are opposed to one another.
Flags started sprouting on cars, on homes, on front lawns, everywhere around America, along with expressions of compassion for those who lost loved ones in the assault. People lined up for blocks to donate blood. Firefighters from around the nation started an exodus to New York to pay respects to their fallen comrades and offer what help they could in searching the rubble for remains or survivors.
Prayer services were scheduled almost everywhere, and millions upon millions of people joined in memorial services around the nation Friday morning and afternoon.
And that emotion, that goodness, ran head on into compassion’s old nemesis, a very common visitor in the first 24 hours of the disaster: Hatred.
A day after the attack, the World Trade Center looked like the remains of a nuclear test site.
One tower was completely gone. All that remained of the second was a ghostly skeleton of steel framework that jutted precariously into the sky. Everything in the area, including the rescue and salvage workers, was covered with a thick mantle of gray dust. The rubble still smoked and burst into flame any time the smouldering pockets were exposed to air.
It was beginning to smell of death, too, a reminder, as though one were needed after the first heartbreaking 24 hours, that thousands of people were still missing.
“We had body sniffing dogs with us, ironworkers who were cutting beams, they had bulldozers, cranes that were starting to remove the rubble. But they are buried, layer upon layer upon layer of rubble,” said Lt. Brian Gillen, a New York Fire Department company commander.
“You’re not supposed to hate people, but it makes it very tough,” he said.
There was less reluctance, perhaps less self-control, elsewhere.
Islamic-American organizations reported dozens of attacks on their mosques in the wake of the World Trade Center cataclysm. Shots were fired. Muslim students were intimidated. A Molotov cocktail was tossed at a school but bounced off a plexiglas window without exploding.
The American Islamic community’s leaders moved quickly to explain that they, too, lost friends in the assault, that they did not support terrorism, that such acts were forbidden by the Koran.
The U.S. reaction was probably inevitable.
In the first hours after the disaster, members of Congress and investigators alike began pointing to Islamic militants as the perpetrators of Tuesday morning’s horror. America has never been a nation that tuned its sights carefully. Much preferring a shotgun approach to a surgical one, the rhetoric heated up early on.
Disclosures that the suicide hijackers all had strong ties to Islamic terrorists organizations and had been training in the U.S. for their attack only added fuel to the fire.
The message from the Bush administration was clear: Whoever did this will pay a terrible price.
It didn’t take long before a target emerged from the dust, smoke and debris of the trade center and Pentagon attacks.
Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, long the nation’s terrorist nemesis, a man who apparently delights in anything bad that happens to the United States, was said to be the prime suspect.
In hiding in Afghanistan, he went to some lengths on Tuesday to distance himself from the airborne suicide attacks. His Taliban hosts, in a most unusual news conference, announced that they didn’t like terrorism, sent their condolences, asked the United States not to attack such a poor country and said bin Laden simply didn’t have the logistical clout necessary to pull off such a well-coordinated, well planned attack.
No one on the target side in the attack seemed interested in buying that argument.
From Secretary of State Colin Powell to a brace of White House sources to key members of Congress, the blame by Thursday seemed to be settling on the reclusive Saudi multimillionaire. At the same time, the Bush administration was reaching out, particularly to the Russians and to Pakistan, for assistance in identifying and running down the culprits.
Pursuit of revenge a delicate matter
Bin Laden has been living in Afghanistan for years, and the Russians are believed to have learned some heavy and valuable lessons about warfare there after their disastrous 1978 invasion. Powell said on Thursday that Moscow is eager to help. Pakistan, meanwhile, has long supported the Taliban faction that now controls most of Afghanistan, but also has a record of cooperation with the United States on questions of the pursuit of terrorists and has its own well-developed, albeit brutal, intelligence service.
Even as investigators presented the initial evidence they had collected connecting the attack to the militants, the push for retaliation grew. Congress was set to approve an open-ended appropriation giving the administration whatever it needed to pursue the case to the end.
Bush seemed eager to take advantage of the moment.
“Make no mistake about it, this nation is sad,” the president said two days after the attack.
“But we’re also tough and resolute, and now’s an opportunity to do generations a favor by coming together and whipping terrorism, hunting it down, binding it, and holding them accountable.”
The nation’s response to that call will be a measure of how much stomach it has for extended, focused violence; how willing it is to see its young men die in skirmishes unlike any warfare the nation has ever known, and how much it has been transformed by an hour of terror that visited starting at 8:45 a.m., September 11, 2001, changing everything that it touched.
———-
‘It hit in slow motion. I could see the plane sticking out of the building and then slowly disappear into it. I can still see it.’
— Paul Harting, a visitor from Greenbush, N.Y., who watched the cataclysm while riding on a ferry
‘I could see people with their shirts off, waving them out of broken windows. They were all above the fire, and there was nothing to be done. It was horrible. The smoke was pouring from behind them. Then the whole building went down. Everybody in our office just screamed.’
— Architect Tom Houston, who was looking through a telescope in his office when one of the towers collapsed
‘At first we just saw papers and stuff coming down. Then you noticed, all of a sudden, that it was people you were seeing and that they were jumping out two at a time. I counted 10 of them and then I stopped.’
— Bill Kelly, a bystander from Georgia
‘It was so amazing–so awe-inspiring. But Greg kept saying, “We gotta get away. We gotta get away.” And we did.’
— Dave Bell, who worked across from the trade center and was mesmerized by the spectacle but spurred to leave by co-worker Greg Shefrin.
‘The stuff you see on TV doesn’t show how bad it really is. It’s pure devastation. Like an atom bomb went off. Everything is covered in white dust. On the streets, the water from the hoses has turned the dust to six inches of white mud. There are twisted steel girders and police cars and firetrucks that are all burned up and smashed.’
— Al Lynch, a firefighter from Rockland County, N.Y.
‘I was standing outside and literally watched the United Airlines plane fly directly into the tower. … When that happened, everybody freaked out.’
— Russ Paparo, bystander, a NY Mercantile Exchange trader who was just arriving for work at the trade center
‘Everybody heard on their radios that a plane has crashed into the Pentagon.
And everybody looked into their rearview mirrors … .’
— Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), driving away from the Pentagon Tuesday morning
‘I know we’re all going to die–there’s three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey.’
— Businessman Thomas Burnett, talking on a cell phone to his wife, Deena, just before United Airlines Flight 93 plunged into the Pennsylvania countryside
‘This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.’
— President George W. Bush at a Washington memorial service Friday
September 11, 2001
The day that changed America
‘We mourn with those who have suffered great and disastrous loss. All our hearts have been seared by the sudden and senseless taking of innocent lives. We pray for healing and for the strength to serve and encourage one another in hope and faith.’
— President George W. Bush’s proclamation of a national day of remembrance