9/11 @ 10: COURAGE

For eight or nine months after 9/11, I felt pretty depressed about the mass murder of people who were exactly like me and who on another day could easily have been me, and about the brutal attack on the city where I had made my home. Sometime in the spring, however, I read an article about a deputy fire chief named Orio Palmer, a marathoner who on 9/11 ran up eighty-some flights of stairs to reach a sky lobby that had been the point of impact, and who took charge of the scene and began directing rescue operations until, quite terribly, the building collapsed.

I cannot say why, but my mood was lifted when I learned about Orio Palmer. His magnificent courage, his steadiness, his calm determination to do what he had trained his whole life to do, just uplifted my entire spirit, and the terrible gloom I had felt for months fell away.

Later I began to collect stories of other acts of courage that day. Like that of Welles Crowther, a 25 year old kid who went to the floor of impact and rescued survivors. Only a handful of people who had been on that floor survived, but all of the ones who survived where helped by Welles Crowther, who himself did not survive. And Rick Rescorla, the old soldier who was head of security of Morgan Stanley, and who got nearly every one of the 500 people in his company out safely, singing as he went the ancient battle song Men of Harlech (amended to reflect his birthplace in Cornwall). He did not survive. Ed Beyea, a quadriplegic who was being carried down the fire stairs in his wheelchair because the elevators were out, and who took himself off the line because he was causing a back up. He did not survive, and neither did his friend Abe Zelmanowitz, who stayed with Ed with rather than leave him to face his fate alone. Dave Karnes, the retired marine from Wilton, Connecticut, who walked out of his office, went home and put on his old uniform, drove down to Ground Zero, and started climbing the wreckage, and who, on that night of 9/11, located two Port Authority officers buried in the rubble, two of the last people to be pulled out of the rubble alive. Bill Feehan, a fire chief who led his men from the front, and like Davey Crockett fighting to his last breath at the Alamo, was pulling rubble off of people with his bare hands when the second collapse overwhelmed him. Jan Demczur, a Polish immigrant window washer who was trapped in an elevator with some other passengers, and who used the handle of his squeegee to scrape through the drywall of the elevator shaft, creating a hole through which he and the others escaped. Bryan Clark and Stanley Prainmath, two men who found themselves alone in an stairwell, and who helped each other escape. What amazed me at the time, what amazes me to this day, is that so few people know these stories.

We cannot help but get swallowed up in the terrible tragedy of the 3000 people who died that morning, but maybe 10,000 people or more survived, thanks to courage and resolve of people like those whose names I’ve mentioned, and many, many more. We think of the event as a tragedy, and it manifestly was, but it was also our Dunkirk. Our inability to allow that view, our inability to recognize the acts of heroism, left us feeling weaker and more fearful, and frankly more vulnerable to the manipulations of our government. But we should not forget: Under the most terrible of conditions, courage emerged. Grace emerged. Determination emerged. Orio Palmer and Rick Rescorla and Welles Crowther rose up and wrestled the lives of thousands from the grasp of our enemies.

(For a time I tried to tell these stories in a screenplay and then later in a graphic history. An artist named Paul Maybury did these sample illustrations. At top, Rick Rescorla, wearing a black suit, leads his people to safety. Below, a triptych showing an isolated Stanley Prainmath escaping to safety with the help of a stranger on the other side of a pile of rubble, Bryan Clark. Thanks once again to Paul for his work and enthusiasm for this project.)