WTC bomb survivor: `I always knew they'd be back'
Thirty years ago today, terrorists left a bomb weighing more than half a ton in a rented van parked beneath the World Trade Center, a workplace for tens of thousands. Its smoldering fuse took about 12 minutes to close the gap between the everyday and the horrific.
The lunchtime blast left a crater several stories deep, sent acrid smoke up the center's north tower and killed six people. More than 1,000 others were injured that day, including a darkhaired trader just yards from the underground detonation.
Eight years later, that same man, Tim Lang, fled lower Manhattan as terrorists struck the World Trade Center again, this time with jetliners. He saw the first of its two towers buckle and fall in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, including those dear to him.
Lang is 69 now, with shock-white hair and photos of grandchildren stored in his smartphone. He describes himself as an unremarkable man.
Yet he is also an everyman throughline between two remarkable events: 9/11, which upended world politics, and the bombing of Feb. 26, 1993, which is less indelibly burned into collective memory but stands as ominous prelude.
“Just about everybody forgets about it,” he said.
Not Lang. He continues to process what happened — while working to push against feelings of hate that might consume him as easily as the burning hole left by the bomb. “There's a saying,” he said. “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.”
Still, that February Friday and that September Tuesday have become part of him.
He dreads the anniversaries.
“In the days leading up to it, I don't sleep,” Lang said. “And that's already begun. February's here. So I have trouble.” second blind bagpiper in his pipe band. boot illuminated by a flashlight appeared before Lang, and he grabbed it. Finally: connection.
The hope that he might survive competed with the fear that he couldn't breathe — and what he was breathing was toxic. He clutched Cuneo's hand.
“I would not let go of his hand,” Lang recalled. “I was shaking and crying and would never let go of his hand.”
With two supporting one, the men stumbled and banged their way through the murk. Finally, they reached a stairwell, and daylight and Liberty Street, where the soot-covered man in shock gently was lowered to the sidewalk.
After several hours in the hospital, Lang returned to his isolation along the Jersey Shore. “It was the darkest time of my life,” he said. “Now I can look back and say, you know, the Lord can nudge you along, or he could have you blown up to make it right.”
Lang would sit at water's edge, grateful to be alive — glad just for the coffee in his hand — but grieving, too, for the loss of other lives, for the state of things, for his own state. He thought about that line from Genesis and about that driver of the Taurus who had cut him off, turned right and was killed. Sometimes, he cried.
“Whatever my priorities were, they changed when I came out,” he said.”
He learned that the mastermind of the bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, had been disappointed with its death toll and had hoped that the north tower would topple into the south tower.
“I always knew they'd be back,” Lang said.
Yousef, who fled the United States hours after the bombing, would team up with his maternal uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had sent money by wire transfer to one of Yousef's co-conspirators. Plots of terror continued.
Yousef was captured in 1995 and eventually convicted in the trade center bombing and a subsequent plot to down several American airplanes. He is serving life without parole.
But his uncle continued to elude capture. And on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Lang and his brother Richard were walking into their lower Manhattan building when someone said a plane had hit the World Trade Center's north tower. Hustling out to Rector Street, they saw the point of impact and the ensuing fire — just below where their sister Rosanne worked as an equities trader.
The brothers raced up to their high-rise office and tried telephoning her. No answer. They then heard a tremendous ground-rattling sound and looked out to see the second jetliner fly past and into the south tower. Fearing more attacks, the Lang brothers made it to Pier 11, at the eastern end of Wall Street, and boarded one of the first ferries evacuating people to New Jersey. As the vessel pulled away, they saw the south tower fall. south tower's collapse. And as their ferry approached the dock in Highlands about 40 minutes later, the captain announced that the north tower had fallen as well.
Four of the Lang brothers — Tim, Richard, Donald and Marty, a just-retired New York firefighter — headed out the next day to lower Manhattan, hoping to find their loved ones alive. But they knew.
Rosanne Lang, 42, was the divorced mother of a teenage son. A glimpse of her effect on others came when Tim Lang and a brother went to collect her Mercedes at her usual parking lot in Jersey City. He pointed out the car and the attendant burst into tears.
Federal authorities have identified Yousef's uncle, Mohammed, as the principal architect of 9/11. Captured in 2003, he has been held since 2006 at a military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In 2019, Lang was part of a group invited by the federal government to observe proceedings at Guantánamo Bay. Seeing Mohammed up close, in custody, he felt no hate, he says — only a deep sadness over lost lives, wasted lives and belief systems that allow for the killing of innocent people in retaliation.
“There's a complexity to other people's lives that is beyond my own understanding,” he said.
These days, Lang runs an equity trading company, Global Liquidity Partners, from an office near his home in Monmouth Beach. He golfs, attends a men's prayer group, plays the bagpipesand enjoys the company of his seven grandchildren, all boys.
A few days ago, on Ash Wednesday, Lang went to a Catholic church and received the gray smudge on his forehead to remind him of, among other things, his mortality. Two other days on his calendar do the same.