story2160.xml

story2160.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-10

I was hungover; that's the first thing. The Giants had played the Broncos the night before, and my cousins and me went out and watched the game at a bar.
I work at Dow Jones, on the newswire, in an office in Jersey City, N.J., that is directly across the Hudson River from the twins towers. I was hoarse, and tired, and two editors were on vacation; it was just me and Sharon. I don't know what time the phone rang, it was my sister, who also lives in Jersey City, down on the waterfront. "Go to the window," she said. "Jeanne-Michele, I got work to do, what? Why?" "Because the Trade Center's on fire!" she yelled. She had heard the first plane strike, then ran to her back window. She watched everything from there.
I went over to the window, and saw the smoke coming from the first tower. A bunch of us were standing there, looking out. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I made some joke about the idiot who couldn't fly a plane. I remember at the time thinking it was pretty clever.
I was back at my desk when the second plane hit. It was weird, my friend Sam was over, and we were watching it on TV, even though we could look across the river. There was one girl standing by the window, and she screamed so loud the whole newsroom heard it because she saw the second plane coming, and Sam and I saw the explosion on TV and heard it from outside. I can't explain how surreal that was. People started screaming; we all knew then what was really going on. I remember hearing somebody screaming Oh, my God, Oh, my God; strangely enough, a friend told me the other day that he heard me screaming that. I'm sure a lot of us were.
We tried to keep working, but it was madness, people were genuinely terrified, and the newsroom was totally chaotic. We stuck around for a while, filing headlines to the wire, trying to write whatever we could. Months later, Sharon said she heard from a reporter at the New York Times that Dow Jones had printed the first headlines on the attack. Sharon said, God, I wonder who took the headlines? I said to her, you did. Our boss, Paul Ingrassia, was on the ground, saw the plane hit, and phoned in headlines on his cellphone. Sharon had totally forgotten it. She broke the news to the world.
There was a headline on my screen, "One Tower collapses," or something like that. I remember changing it to "One of Two Twin Towers Collapses." For some bizarre reason I felt it necessary to point out that there were two towers; totally redundant. I hit the button on that headline, and then my bosses came through the newsroom, yelling "get out, go, get out, leave everything, go, get out of your seat and go." When that first tower collapsed, we could see it and hear it and feel it; it shook my building, across the river. To me it sounded like trees snapping, that building collapsing.
Outside was total bedlam. People were running in every direction; nobody knew if more planes were up there. The police were screaming at people to walk away from the river. "Just go," they said, "go that way." and they'd point inland. I ran around the block, to a street that ended at the river, right across from the Trade Center, a view I'd never, ever gotten tired of. Every day I saw those buildings and that skyline, and every day it just amazed me. I used to think of those buildings as modern Pyramids, and it always seemed to me that the whole financial center, with its glass atrium, was like the entranceway to the modern Rome, to the new world capital. I guess I wasn't the only one who felt that way.
I snuck into Liberty State Park after we left the office. It's a large open field on the river right behing Ellis Island and the Statue of Libery. As I was walking in, there was a constant stream of people covered in soot walking out; people were evacuated to the park. All sorts of emergency crews were coming screaming in. The park has this great view of the city and of course the statue and all that. A lot of pictures you see with the skyline and the statue are taken there. And what we saw that day, all day, and for the next two weeks or so, was the city in smoke. I just couldn't get over how it wouldn't stop burning.
So anyhow I started going up to anybody in a uniform and asking if I could do anything. I was told no a few times. They were still bringing people over from the city. This one boat landed at the pier and these people rushed by me with a stretcher and on the stretcher was a fireman, burned badly and not moving. Not an inch. And I remember I looked at his hand, laid across his stomach, and I don't want this at all to sound callous, but it looked like a slab of meat, dead the way a slab of meat looks. Somebody was screaming into a walkie-talkie for I can't remember what, so I think maybe he wasn't dead but I don't know and I never found out. There was another fireman behind him, and he came off the boat and he was kicking the rail, furious, yelling in just pain and frustration.
So finally I said to somebody, look, I'm an American, I want to do something. I told him I'd do anything, anything. They let me stay for five or six hours, there were about eight of us that were in the park, civilians, while they set up a triage for the victims they thought they were going to get. I lugged ice and cots and first aid kits and blankets and got firemen and EMTs drinks and I can't remember what else I did, and the whole time we had this view, this spectacular view, I mean people come from all over the world for this view. I'm in the park all the time and I hear different languages constantly. And we just watched it burn. The smoke had to be as high as the towers were. It wouldn't stop burning, and the smoke trailed south as far as we could see. Finally they kicked us out, they said look thanks but we don't know who you are and they're gonna start bringing people over here and it's going to be bad. So we left. But they never brought anybody over to the park. I guess the New York hospitals never got to overflowing. Everybody either got out or died.
So for a few days people were dropping supplies off in Jersey City and they'd get ferried them across the river. I was down at the waterfront, loading boats, and also storing supplies in the warehouses. I mean we got eighteen-wheeler after eighteen-wheeler, trucks from all over the country. We couldn't store it all. And there were tons of people around, from all over the state, there was a father who brought his daughter along, there was a marine, there was me, there was tons of people and everybody worked hard and didn't complain about a damn thing and worked until they had to tell us to go home. I was never prouder in my life to be an American than then.
I woke up for work the next morning, we went back the next day, and at first I didn't remember it. I swear I didn't, I was only half-awake and for a minute I forgot about the whole thing. Then I heard the radio, and they were talking about it, and I remembered everything, and I curled up into a ball in my bed and screamed and howled and cried uncontrollably for I don't know how long.
What strikes me the most now is the futility of it all. Did those guys do what they thought they were going to do? Did they achieve any goals? They didn't bring about the end of days, or even the end of America. All they did was kill 3,000 totally innocent people and insure that they were going to get all their comrades killed. The whole thing is such a waste of life and I can't understand how they couldn't care about that and just selfishly and madly did it anyway.