Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, conservative columnist Deroy Murdock, later the co-founder of Louisian’s Pelican Institute for Public Policy, was drinking coffee on the balcony of his fifth-floor Manhattan apartment when he was startled by the rumble and shadow of a bizarrely low-flying airplane.
“The roar of the engines was so loud, it set off car alarms all along the street,” Murdock said. “It was terrifying.”
Fourteen seconds and two miles later, Teddy Conway, born and raised in New Orleans, was in a meeting at his Lehman Brothers office directly across the street from the World Trade Center when he was stunned by a huge explosion. Rushing to a window, his group saw the hole in what was the “egress point” of what they didn’t even know at the time was a plane crash in the North Tower. Remembering the 1993 truck bombing of the Trade Center, his crew quickly assumed a bomb had exploded and they walked the 23 floors to the building exit.
It was a bit like deja vu for Conway, who walked down 37 floors of a building that swayed and even appeared to “ripple,” but didn’t fall, near the epicenter of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. Anyway, at the exit of his Manhattan building, a security guard told them firmly that everything in his building was fine but that falling debris made it unsafe to go outside, so they should return in the elevator to their offices.
Similar orders were more deadly for others.
From an office in midtown Manhattan, a close college friend of mine literally was on the phone with a friend working in the Trade Center when the first plane hit, and my friend distinctly heard a loudspeaker telling his friend and workmates not to leave, but to stay in place. That friend of my friend ended up perishing.
As for Conway: Back on floor 23 when the second plane hit the towers, this time the security’s guard’s orders meant nothing. Walking down the stairwell again, Conway exited and began briskly walking northward.
Conway couldn’t bear to look back as colleagues said they saw bodies landing. He did turn in time, though, to directly observe the first building collapse. One of the two towers scraped the edge of Conway’s 3 World Financial office building, leaving it structurally unsound for use for eight full months.
Much longer story made short, Conway eventually made his way home to Darien, Connecticut. He still works in finance in New York.
“I was never at risk of harm,” he said. “So many other people didn’t make it home. … And it feels weird to even be talking about this relative to people I know who were in the World Trade Center and got out, made life-and-death decisions (and barely survived, while others had no chance).”
Alas, Leo Russell Keene of Sulphur, didn’t make it. Nor did Louis Williams of Mandeville and Betty Farmer of New Orleans, both at the twin towers, or Kevin Wayne Yokum of Lake Charles, Bobby Hymel of Norco and Scotty Lamana of Baton Rouge, all lost at the Pentagon.
The Murdock, Conway and college-friend stories, along with the six hns who didn’t make it, are not unique. But telling them illustrates a key point: While only 20% of Americans personally knew someone at the scene of the attack, several show that of us had just two degrees of separation from someone directly affected, either a victim or a survivor.
This was personal.
Most of us will remember burning up the phone lines that day, checking with friends or relatives of people we knew near Ground Zero or the Pentagon or in Pennsylvania.
But even if we didn’t worry about individuals, we took affront specifically as Americans. Almost all of us loved our country then. When video came of , we were infuriated.
When, 10 days later, nationally broadcast musicians led by “My City of Ruins,” told us to “Rise Up,” we donated $200 million for relief and we did rise up, together. When President George W. Bush almost nonchalantly threw a perfect strike to open a Yankee Stadium World Series game six weeks later, we all cheered and perhaps cried.
We were unified. We remained unified, as Americans, for about another year.
We were grateful for our principles. We were thankful for our history — and for our freedom. And we knew we comprised, in a world full of villains, an overwhelming beacon of light.
Today, of us say we are “extremely proud” to be Americans. How sad.
How, without another godawful tragedy, can we recover the immediate post-9/11 sentiment? It was the right sentiment then, and it ought to animate us still.