25 Years Later, The 9/11 Attacks Still Feel Surreal

It was a few minutes before 9 am and my roommate was shaking me awake. I wasn’t due in the office until 3 pm, but my roommate told me the public editor had called, said there was a terrorist attack, and asked me to come in ASAP.

When you get a call like that from the public editor instead of the city desk or someone else in the direct news loop, you know the newsroom is in chaos. And it was, worse than I’d ever seen it in my short time there.

At the time I was a glorified newspaper intern and as the low man on the totem pole, I got the crappiest assignment. My editors sent me to wait until the subways and trains started up again, so I spent almost the entire day stuck on a platform with a group of people, listening to their panicked chatter and participating in it myself.

I will never forget when a guy came running onto the platform out of breath and shouted “They hit the Pentagon! They hit the f—ing Pentagon!”

There was a low murmur of disbelief among the people on the platform, with one or two loudly expressing skepticism. The Pentagon? Surely that cannot be possible.

Reality was smashing against the aura of invincibility Americans had enjoyed for half a century. We were not prepared for it.

Smartphones wouldn’t be invented for another seven years and the phone lines were overloaded that day, so all you’d get when trying to dial was a busy signal on repeat. Combined with the utter confusion at ground zero and news anchors who could do little more than speculate for most of the day, rumors were flying and we didn’t know what to believe.

I remember someone else announcing that there were hundreds of passenger jets still in the air, the government did not know how many had been compromised, and we should prepare ourselves for waves of hijacked planes smashing into skyscrapers, bridges and, God forbid, nuclear reactors like Indian Point just north of the city.

At the same time, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave a sober assessment that potentially “tens of thousands” of people could have been killed, because no one knew how many people made it out of the towers.

Another indelible memory: an enraged woman pacing the length of the platform, screaming that “this bulls–t” had interfered with her plans for the day. She was shaking with anger, grumbling to herself with occasionally louder outbursts, and apparently she believed the heliocentric model had been replaced with one that placed her in the center of our solar system and the universe itself.

Finally the first train arrived in the afternoon, and a crush of zombies stumbled out covered in the pulverized concrete, silica, steel dust, asbestos and human remains that blasted through Manhattan in two powerful kinetic waves as the towers collapsed.

They were dead-eyed and in shock as they clutched their briefcases, Blackberries and messenger bags.

I spoke to one man whose office had a direct view of the towers. He sobbed as he told me his story. His building was evacuated shortly before the first tower collapsed and he’d been caught in the blast, caking his suit, his face and hair in the toxic mix of debris.

Others were almost mute with shock or a mix of relief and survivor’s guilt. Most were commuters who worked within a block or two of the World Trade Center. Others had appointments that day, including a woman who survived because she was a few minutes late to a meeting on one of the upper floors.

Another woman shook with emotion and horror as she described watching desperate people jumping out of the skyscrapers to escape the flames inside.

I gathered as many quotes and details as I could, returned to the newsroom and made my small contribution to the events of the day. I wasn’t a first responder, I wasn’t digging people out of the rubble, I didn’t cook meals for the firefighters or guide bewildered survivors away from ground zero.

I told the stories of a handful of people who directly lived through the attack, and I hope I told them well.