San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Cary Clack: Think about what we may lose if we’re not vigilant.
“To speak to you, the dead of September 11, I must not claim false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say — no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older, or more elegant, than the ancient atoms you have become.”
Toni Morrison, “The Dead of September 11”
The blueness of the sky and the beauty of the day. So many accounts of Sept. 11, 2001, begin with the blueness and beauty of that New York City morning. It’s recalled as a prelude to the approaching horror, an ordinary but lovely remembrance of a time before terrorists cleaved history into “before 9/11” and “after 9/11.”
Memories of the beautiful blue of that Tuesday morning are cherished, because at 8:46 a.m. and 9:03 a.m. the sky would be the backdrop for the airplanes that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Combining the casualties — not the 19 terrorists — from the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pa., nearly 3,000 people were murdered in one of the darkest days in our nation’s history.
When Billy Forney III recounts his escape from the 85th floor of the north tower, he begins by saying, “It was a beautiful Tuesday morning after ‘Monday Night Football.’ A beautiful blue sky.”
Forney, from Houston, was 27 and had moved to New York with his wife at the beginning of the year. He worked as an assistant options trader for SMW Trading. He was at his desk at 8:46 a.m. when he heard a “horrific explosion.”
“The building was swaying significantly, like a roller coaster,” says Forney.
He opened the door to a dark hallway.
“I remember seeing this thing and thinking it was a creature,” he says. “It was smoke crawling towards me.”
Forney says that colleagues who’d lived through the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center remembered the dark stairwells and wanted to wait for help, but the younger ones like himself said, “We’re getting the (expletive) out!”
With the help of firefighters they met on their way down the stairwell, they did get out.
Twenty years later, where the towers once stood, sits the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Covering most of the central wall of the museum is a homage to the blue sky.
“Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning” is the creation of artist Spencer Finch and is made up of 2,983 individual squares of Fabriano Italian paper. The squares represent each person killed in the 9/11 attacks and the 1993 bombing, and each square is hand-painted a different shade of blue.
On the wall is an inscription whose 15-inch letters were forged from the steel of the twin towers. It’s from Virgil’s “Aeneid”: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.”
‘Where were you?’
There are tragedies that stop time for a nation or the world. Tragedies that will never be erased from the memory of all who experienced them. These are the “Where were you when?” events.
I was too young to remember the assassination of President John Kennedy and not old enough to comprehend the assassinations of Martin Luther
King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. The great “Where were you when?” tragedies in my memory, before 2001, were the Challenger explosion and the murders of John Lennon, Marvin Gaye and Selena.
9/11 surpasses all of them, not just because of the ferocity and scale of the attacks or the enormity of the death toll. It stands out because we will always remember where we were the first time we felt doubt the survival of the United States was guaranteed.
That morning, I’d been to the barber, and from there I drove to the newspaper. On the radio, Tony Bruno, a national sports talk show host, was saying a second plane had flown into the World Trade Center and another had crashed into the Pentagon. He then said something I never imagined I’d ever hear and that, 20 years later, remains surreal: “It is now clear,” said Bruno, “that America is under attack.”
I’d taken only a few steps into the newsroom when Kym Fox, an assistant city editor, said, “Go home and pack. You’re going to New York.”
At 10:40 a.m., photographer Ed Ornelas and I were in an Express-News jeep headed for New York, the plan being to drive until we came across an airport that was open, which wasn’t going to happen.
Ed did most of the driving, allowing me, for most of the nearly 2,000 miles, to collect images of a stunned nation trying to comprehend what was happening. As Ed drove, I punched the radio buttons looking for any news about the latest developments.
We were amped on adrenaline, sharing the same fears as the disembodied voices coming from the radio — fears and voices that grew more ominous as we went into our first night as a nation under attack. When New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that the casualties “would be more than any of us can bear,” we sat in silence before trying to comprehend what those numbers would be.
On National Public Radio, a young mother, desperate to get home to her child, cried out what so many were feeling in those first hours after the attacks: “Will there be a tomorrow?
Will there be a future for my baby?”
Hurtling down the highway, we wondered the same thing, the certainty of our nation’s future not extending beyond the darkness pierced by the headlight beams. I kept clicking stations for more news, skipping any playing music. Except once.
Sometime after midnight, somewhere in Tennessee, I clicked onto a station that was about halfway through “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Without looking at each other or saying a word, Ed and I spontaneously began singing, our voices rising at the song’s end.
We drove for 31 straight hours, reaching New York City around 5 p.m. on Sept. 12. (Arriving the next day from the Express-News would be photographer William Luther and reporter Jeanne Russell.)
From the New Jersey Turnpike we saw the large space where the twin towers had stood. Spiraling from the rubble were thick, white plumes of smoke that crossed, yes, the blue sky.
Ed went to ground zero, so he dropped me off in Union Square Park, where I sat in a shop window, called the news desk and dictated a column to reporter Vince Davis, the first of the 13 columns I would file on consecutive days.
It was the next day, Sept. 13, when the scope of the lives lost became palpable and, in Giuliani’s words, “more than any of us can bear.” That was the day flyers of missing people, all of whom were in the World Trade Center, began to cover the city. Two have stayed in my mind.
The first I saw and would see the most often was of Giovanna “Gennie” Gambale, a 27-year-old vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald last seen on the 105th floor.
Walking down the Avenue of the Americas, I followed a trail of flyers until I was at St. Vincent’s Hospital, an impromptu command post for media and family and friends of the missing. I felt the gravity of so many pictures of the missing. When I saw a flyer on a Univision truck of Janice J. Brown, a 35-year-old accountant, holding her young son and the words, “Help her only child find his mother” I cried for the first time since the attacks.
Holding photographs of their missing loved ones, the families spoke in floors. “What floor was he on?”
“The 91st. What floor was your sister on?”
“The 102nd.”
Anthony Luparello was on the 101st. His son, Anthony Jr., held a picture of him as he told me he and his father were working in the World Trade Center in 1993 when it was bombed.
What none of us knew then was the last person to be pulled alive from the rubble was rescued Sept. 12. None of the people on the missing flyers, none of the people whose families held vigils at St. Vincent’s, had survived. They were all gone.
Place of remembrance
Yet not all the victims are gone from the ground hallowed by their deaths. Twenty years later, at the Sept. 11 memorial are a pair of acre-size recessed pools where the towers once stood. Water continuously flows downward from each wall into a bottom that can’t be seen. Around the pools are bronze panels into which have been engraved the 2,983 names of the victims from the 9/11 attacks and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
The museum’s exhibit center is below the grounds, under what would have been the twin towers. An already solemn tour through the museum becomes more so when the guide tells us that behind the “Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning” exhibit is a special storage repository of the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office containing thousands of human remains from the attacks.
More than 1,100 victims have yet to be identified and many never will be, either because there’s nothing left, some families didn’t submit DNA tests, or some families don’t want to be notified until all the remains of their loved ones have been recovered. Other families just want to leave it in the past as best they can.
Last month, I went back to New York hoping to reconnect with some of the people I met in 2001 and 2002 at the one-year anniversary.
I reached out to the girlfriend of a young man who was on the 96th floor of one of the towers. She was gracious in her refusal: “I’m trying to maintain a healthy and calm mindset these days and reopening Pandora’s box isn’t a path I’d like to walk down.”
At FDNY Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9 at 48th Street and 8th Avenue, the 15 firefighters killed on 9/11 are memorialized on a wall. Three weeks ahead of the 20th anniversary, it was the most visible reminder of that day.
Billy Forney III, back in Houston and CEO of Palace Social, was to give two speeches this weekend about his experiences. His public speaking began after his daughter came across numerous inaccuracies and conspiracy theories while researching a paper on 9/11. He wants to keep alive the memories of the first responders who saved his life and the memories of all who perished.
“We should be remembering and not forgetting every year,” he says.
Today, a chilling threat
On the day of the 9/11 attacks, members of Congress from both parties stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and sang “God Bless America.” That was to symbolize how the nation came together in the aftermath of the disaster. Those were fleeting moments, more so if you were Muslim, or assumed to be a Muslim, and subject to scapegoating, harassment and assault.
But the unity feels especially distant now, following Jan. 6, when insurrectionists stormed those Capitol steps and tried to overturn an election. Twenty years ago, the greatest threat to our nation’s security came from afar. In 2021, our greatest terrorist attack and the greatest threat to our democracy comes from within.
9/11 made us love and cherish our country, and each other, a little bit more. As we remember the lives lost on that day and the families destroyed, let’s think about all we may yet lose if we’re not vigilant.
Let’s dedicate ourselves to protecting our democracy and each other.
Let’s commit ourselves to doing better protecting each other from harm, whether that harm comes from violence or through virus.