(Photo via 911memorial.org)
1. “The cloudless sky filled with coiling black smoke and a blizzard of paper—memos, photographs, stock transactions, insurance policies—which fluttered for miles on a gentle southeasterly breeze, across the East River into Brooklyn. Debris spewed onto the streets of lower Manhattan, which were already covered with bodies. Some of them had been exploded out of the building when the planes hit. A man walked out of the towers carrying someone else’s leg. Jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly.
“The air pulsed with sirens as firehouses and police stations all over the city emptied, sending the rescuers, many of them to their deaths. (FBI agent) Steve Bongardt was running toward the towers, against a stream of people racing in the opposite direction. He heard the boom of the second collision. “There’s a second plane,” someone cried.”
— Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower.
2. “Anyway, so we went down. People were very calm, and I think everybody in the stairwell was like this determined, but also aware that—unconsciously aware that something very dangerous was happening, and remain calm because it was the best thing we had to do. They were three flows of people, the regular people like me going down, the people who were coming down from the upper floors, and who were very badly injured. No skin, no hair, just burn. And they were walking or carried down by people, helped by people. And then the third flow of people was of course those security personnel and Fire Department people. Now, those people were exhausted. In some of those eyes you could see that they knew something, that it was dangerous. While there was no panic whatsoever in the stairwell, those people were concentrated, focused on doing their job. And while I was walking down, they were going up to their death. And I was walking down to live. I exited onto the sidewalk that was on Church (Street). I turned around and looked, and I saw the World Trade Center in flames, and those flames were very, very dark orange. The smoke was very, very black against this beautiful sky, and they were big. Suddenly, darkness fell upon us with an unbelievable violence. I looked around a second time. I didn't see the tower. Instead, I heard a sound that today, I cannot remember. It was so powerful, such a huge sound that I blocked it. It scared me to death, and I cannot bring it back up to consciousness. And when I said, darkness, what was a beautiful day became darker than night. You couldn't see anymore. Even more striking, there was no more sound. Sound didn't go through anymore because the air was so thick that it wasn't vibrating anymore. So after this unbelievable sound of the building collapsing, everything in few seconds turned to be darker than night with no sound, and you couldn't breathe. I was convinced I was dead, because it's so big that your brain cannot process something like this.”
— Bruno Dellinger, whose office was on the 47th floor of the North Tower of The World Trade Center.
3. “I got up and turned on the TV, and there was just this big black hole in the World Trade Center. And there was just smoke billowing out of it. I called my sister Cathy I said, "You might wanna wake up, turn in your TV and take a look at what they're showing." The commentator's saying that it's an American Airlines plane. And I casually asked Cathy, I said, "Do you know where Betty is?" And she says, "Betty's supposed to be flying out of Boston." And I said, "Do you think Betty is on that plane?" We just didn't know. So I left a phone call on her cellphone, just asking her when she's landed or anywhere you're on the ground, to just give us a call and tell us you're okay. And there was no call from Betty. I called American Airlines, and it was only then that it was confirmed that Betty was on the flight. I just want to add, through your passing, Betty, our family's gotten very very close. Dad, who's quite stoic, doesn't really say a whole lot, man of the family, one day told us that he cries himself to sleep. Even to this day, he just keeps staying up watching TV, hoping somehow that you'll reappear. And we're all still waiting for that phone call from you to tell us that you're okay. We just miss you a whole lot.”
— Harry Ong Jr., transcript from the 9/11 Memorial Museum Oral History.
4. Answering machine: "Message one."
Brian Sweeney: "Jules, this is Brian—listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you, I want you to do good, go have good times, same to my parents and everybody, and I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I hope I call you."
--- 9/11 Memorial Museum, Gift of Julie Sweeney Roth
5. "A San Francisco husband slept through his wife's call from the World Trade Centre. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again. We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you.
"She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers."
— Ian McEwan (9/15/2001)
6. “This is what a day means. Like the day an archduke was shot in Sarajevo, when no one knew in the morning what the afternoon would have proved. Like the day of the first blitzkrieg into Poland, when denial in the dawn ceded to dread at dusk. Like the day in November 1963 when the same sense of numbness and grief swept through Americans in an instant. Like the beautiful September day, when a man heard a sound and looked up into the sky in curiosity and calm and saw the end of something we never truly appreciated until in one short day, it had already disappeared.”
-- Andrew Sullivan (9/23/2001)
— Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris. Mr. Knopfler wrote the song after reading Ian McEwan’s column, excerpted above. (via youtube.com)