Boston Center, they said they have a hijacked aircraft.
NEADS, as the Air National Guard installation is known.
A full-scale training exercise.
Normally there would be only a handful of military fighters on duty across the U.S.
We had 14 aircraft on alert.
Seven sites, two aircraft at each site.
At a command center at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, Major General Larry Arnold hears
about a bogey, an unidentified aircraft.
First thing that went through my mind was, is this part of the exercise?
Is this kind of a screw up?
Back in upstate New York, Master Sergeant Maureen Dooley is supervising radar operations.
We have a real hijack going on, so then, you know, boom, we're all in the urgency.
Lieutenant Colonel Dawn Deskens is the mission crew chief for the exercise.
And I picked up the line and identified myself to the Boston Center controller, and he said,
we have a hijacked aircraft and I need you to get some sort of fighters out here to help
us out.
So what I did was call General Arnold and said, boss, I need to scramble Otis.
And I said, go ahead and scramble them and we'll get the authorities later.
At Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts, two F-15 fighters are at their battle stations.
Engines quiet, cockpits empty.
Right about that same time that I was making that call, American Airlines Flight 11 Heavy
was crossing the border from Massachusetts into New York and he turned off his transponder.
Top guns with the code names Duff and Nasty wait for orders.
The radio crackles.
He said, it's Otis Tower, something about a hijacking.
He said, this looks like the real thing.
The pilots fire their engines and roll under the runway.
At NEADS, radar operators desperately search for American Flight 11.
At this point, we don't really know where the aircraft is.
We just know that the FAA has lost contact.
Its transponder is off, so the airliner no longer signals its identity, altitude or speed.
The 767 is lost amid the clutter of more than 2,500 planes in the air this morning over
the northeast alone.
We were going by the old fashioned method of what was his last known speed, his last
known heading, his altitude and we were trying to kind of map it out on the scope.
I hate to say it, but that was probably a perfect tactic because it's a perfect arrow
right to lower Manhattan.
It is 846 a.m.
This is an ABC News special report.
Morning America was in progress in the east coast and the Midwest, but we're joined by
the entire network just to show you some pictures at the foot of New York City.
This is at the World Trade Center.
Pretty dramatic picture we're looking at right now.
Fire in one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.
As I look at it now, there's a diagonal angle across the building at about a 45 degree angle
and it looks like just a definite gash.
The upper right hand side looks like it's the corner of a wing that just went straight
into the building.
There's quite a lot of damage.
If it was an airplane, it had to be huge.
Breaking news now on 1010 winds.
This just into our newsroom, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
At that exact moment, the president's motorcade arrives at an elementary school in Sarasota,
Florida for a long planned event.
Simultaneously, the pagers of his aides erupt in a cacophony of beeps and tones.
It goes into the school.
Carl Rove and I and some others were standing there and informed him of this in which he,
being a former pilot, had kind of the same reaction going, was bad weather?
And they said, no, apparently not.
President was surprised.
He thought it had to be an accident.
The president ducks into an empty classroom and calls National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice back in Washington.
He said, what a terrible, it sounds like a terrible accident, keep me informed.
In the command center in New York, a TV set shows the World Trade Center on fire.
The immediate assumption is that that guy that we couldn't find probably hit the World
Trade Center.
But the FAA still lists American Flight 11 as unaccounted for.
They told us that they showed the American Airlines Flight 11 was still airborne.
So now we're looking at this, well, if an aircraft hit the World Trade Center, who was
that?
Whoever it is, Colonel Deskens knows she needs to call NORAD operations in Florida to inform
the public affairs officer, Don Arias.
And his reaction to me at that point was, my God, my brother works in the World Trade
Center.
And I said, well, you have to go call your brother.
Arias hears the shock in his brother's voice.
So not the typical phone voice I expected, you know, and he was just like, hey, you know,
he's just heard a lot of background noise.
He says, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on here now.
The Air Force officer is a former New York City firefighter, so he knows what his brother
is up against.
He says, you're not going to believe what I'm looking at here.
I said, what?
He says, people are at the windows.
I said, there's a guy falling out of the building next door.
He says, there are people jumping.
And I said, you know, I think I just got a call from the Northeast Air Defense Sector
as a hijacked plane.
I think that's the plane.
At that same moment, three blocks from the White House at the St. Regis Hotel, two old
friends meet for breakfast at a window table.
George Tennant is the director of Central Intelligence.
His companion this morning is David Boren, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee.
And out of the corner of my eye, I could see several people converging on our table.
And I remember one of them said to George Tennant, Mr. Director, the World Trade Tower
has just been attacked by an airplane.
And I was struck by the fact to use the word attacked.
An aide hands the CIA director a cell phone.
And after he handed the cell phone back to his security person, he said to me, you know,
this has been Laudin's fingerprints all over it.
At their air base in Massachusetts, Duff and Nasty rocket into the air at 8 52 a.m., just
six minutes after the first tower is hit.
As we're climbing out, we go supersonic on the way, which is kind of nonstandard for
us and Nasty.
He even called me in the oxygen and said, hey, Duff, you're super.
I said, yeah, I know.
You know, don't worry about it.
I was kind of wondering why I was going so fast.
We really didn't have verbal authorization to go super.
The fighters are hurtling toward New York at Mach 1.2, nearly 900 miles per hour.
They are one hundred and fifty three miles from the World Trade Center.
I just want to get there quickly.
We're going as fast as we could.
I call for Bogey to open.
They say your contacts over Kennedy.
So, OK, I know where that is.
So we start hitting right down Long Island basically.
Ten more minutes pass.
There's a great deal of smoke billowing from the tower.
Still, we can see flame coming out from at least two sides of the building.
I can't see around to the other side.
Brian, could you were you able to tell us the size of the airplane was a small plane,
a commercial plane?
Do you have any idea at all?
I will tell you from the size of the gas, the wingtip had to be at least one hundred
and fifty to two hundred feet wide.
Oh, my God.
Oh, the next building is another one.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
That looks like a second plane.
We just saw another plane coming in from the side.
The second tower has exploded from about the twenty stories below in a gargantuan explosion.
So this looks like it is some sort of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that
is underway.
Jet fighters are still 60 miles away.
It is just 16 minutes since the attacks began.
Kofi Boga began trying to get some information.
And at that point, they said the second aircraft just hit the World Trade Center.
That was news to me.
I thought we were still chasing American 11.
There was smoke from fire blowing southeast towards New Jersey.
I had had my head down basically looking at the radar scope and we're about 60 miles out.
I could see the smoke from the towers.
So at that point, obviously everything changed.
When the second aircraft flew into the second tower, it was at that point that we realized
that the seemingly unrelated hijackings that the FAA was dealing with were in fact a part
of a coordinated terrorist attack on the United States.
At the Pentagon, Brigadier General W. Montague Winfield is in the loop with the Air Defense
Command and he alerts the Pentagon brass.
The senior military and civilian leaders in the building began to filter into the National
Military Command Center to get a situation update.
And as you can imagine, the reports were numerous and conflicting.
We would get duplicate reports and we would get bogus reports.
In Florida, President Bush is in the middle of a reading lesson with second graders.
He doesn't know about the second crash.
Ann Compton is covering the president this day.
It all came to a blinding moment of realization when the president's chief of staff walked
over to the president and whispered to him, nobody interrupts the president, not even
in front of a second grade classroom.
I tried to be very efficient with my words.
I knew that this was not the place to stand and have a conversation with the president.
I said a second plane hit the second tower.
America is under attack.
And then I backed away from the president.
And the president's eyes got wide and the face told it all, something terribly grave,
something terribly, something beyond imagining.
I think there was a moment of shock and he did stare off, maybe for just a second.
So much so that I wrote it down in my reporter's notebook by my watch, 9.07 a.m.
The president stays calm and lets the students finish.
The president thought for a second or two about getting up and walking out of the room,
but the drill was coming to a close and he didn't want to alarm the children.
Instead, Bush pauses, thanks the children.
And heads for the empty classroom next door.
He came back into the holding room.
We had found a television, so we brought a television in so we could see TV and they
were replaying the crash over and over again.
And next to him as he's walking by in the classroom, you can see on the TV monitor the
building's burning.
White House photographer Eric Draper is with the president this day.
His job is to chronicle Bush's every move in public and in private.
We're seeing the video of the second plane hitting the second building for the first
time.
And that's why you see Dan Bartlett pointing to that video.
You almost can't believe what you're seeing and just instinctively just pointed at it.
But at that point, the president briefly looked back at the images.
The president said, I'm going to need to make a statement before we leave here.
He was red and I seen that he had tears in his eyes, so I knew something bad had really,
really happened.
His face was just red and his lips were just trembling.
He kind of said it when he talked and he kind of said it all slowly.
Today we've had a national tragedy.
Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack
on our country.
Quick goodbyes and then a race to the Sarasota airport.
At that moment in the White House.
I was in my West Wing office.
Secret Service had come in to his office.
I think it was two or three agents, which is very unusual.
David Borer is another White House photographer assigned to Vice President Dick Cheney.
And agents came inside the office and said, sir, you have to come with us.
Put his hand on the back of my belt, grabbed me by the shoulder and sort of propelled me
down the hallway.
And to an underground bunker, the president's emergency operations center, PEOC they call
it.
It's got blast doors on each end.
It's a secure phone there as well as a television set.
Up above, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is trying to find the rest of the president's
team.
Secretary of State Colin Powell is in Peru.
Attorney General John Ashcroft is in the air.
And Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Albaugh is at a conference in Montana.
As I was trying to find all of the principals, the Secret Service came and said, you have
to leave now for the bunker, the vice president's already there.
There may be a plane headed for the White House.
There are a lot of planes that are in the air that are not responding properly.
In the bunker, the vice president is joined by Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman
Mineta.
Someone came in and said, Mr. Vice President, there's a plane out 50 miles.
Mineta confers with Federal Aviation Deputy Chief Monte Belger.
And so I said, Monte, what do you have?
He said, well, we're watching this target on the radar, but the transponder's been
turned off.
So we have no ident, we have no identification.
At the FAA's Air Traffic Control Center near Washington's Dulles Airport, Danielle O'Brien
is at a radar scope.
It was an unidentified plane to the southwest of Dulles, moving at a very high rate of speed.
Someone came in and said, Mr. Vice President, the airplane's 30 miles out.
We caught on the radar scope a few blips, maybe seven or eight, just enough to kind
of go around in a half circle and then fade right over, losing radar contact right over
Washington.
I said, my God, what is that?
He was fast.
And it was just, it would be unprecedented for a commercial plane to come screaming through
your airspace at that kind of speed, unidentified, without making some type of communication.
We knew that he was headed in that direction, and we were calling Washington Center.
Oh, my God, you've got, he's coming towards you.
The fellow came in and said, it's 10 miles out, assuming that it was coming into National
Airport, Ronald Reagan National Airport.
At Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, F-16 fighter pilots Brad Derrick and Dean Ekman
scramble into the air.
They are 105 miles, 12 minutes south of Washington.
It is just 930 a.m.
We're directed to go in what's turned out to be Reagan National, which is right by the
Pentagon.
Our supervisor picked up our line to the White House and started relaying to them the information.
We have an unidentified, very fast moving aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, eight
miles west, seven miles west, and it went six, five, four.
He said, oh, we just lost the bogey, meaning the target went off the screen.
So I said, well, where is it?
And he said, well, we're not really sure.
I happened to look up to my left, and there is the airplane.
The airplane is about 25 feet above the ground, and it's about 150 to 200 yards away and coming
at us.
It is 938.
Almost 52 minutes have passed since the first attack.
Firefighter Alan Wallace is on duty next to the helicopter landing pad on the west side
of the Pentagon.
I look up and see the airplane.
I hear the noise from the airplane, and bang, the airplane hits the building.
And that's how fast it happened.
The whole building jumped.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, around the
corner from the impact.
The table shook, and the building shook.
And it sounded, it felt like a bomb had hit the building.
352.
I think we just had an airplane crash east of here.
It must be in the business area.
The House of Claire Shipman is on the phone.
Claire, what's that we're looking at?
Well, that's what we're trying to figure out right now.
I'm direct, and there is visible smoke coming from that area.
High, visible smoke.
Any unit responding to check the area of the Pentagon, advise on channel one.
An airline plane headed east down over the pike.
The Pentagon, a plane has crashed into the Pentagon.
I don't believe I was knocked down, but I did at a certain point when I thought I was
on fire.
I thought I had ran as far as I should run, and then I hit the ground.
I went downstairs and went outside and around the corner, and of course there it was.
Everything around the fire truck and the fire station, including the blacktop that surrounds
the fire truck, was on fire.
There were trees along the side of the Pentagon that were, the leaves were on fire.
There was metal all over them.
The grass and there were people coming out of the building hurt, and people were assisting
them.
Almost directly behind the fire truck, there are people trying to get out of the building
and there is someone back there who is trying to help them.
Other firefighters from nearby Fort Meyer and Arlington, Virginia join the rescue efforts.
From the time we first assembled there, I would say 30 seconds later there were probably
30 people there.
And 30 seconds after that there were probably 100 people there.
Among those helping the wounded and injured is the 69-year-old Rumsfeld himself.
There was a young woman bleeding, sitting on the ground, and I think she said to me,
she didn't know who I was, she said she could see people holding drips going into people,
IV of some kind.
And she said something to the effect, if someone could bring that person over, I could hold
it.
The Secretary of Defense is outside the burning building while inside the Pentagon.
For 30 minutes we couldn't find him.
And just as we began to worry, he walked into the door of the National Military Command
Center.
Very, very quickly he is in there in his shirt sleeves as I recall.
In 9-11, General Richard Myers steps in as acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It was, from my viewpoint, a very professional scene.
There was no panic, no undue alarm.
High overhead, jet fighters arrive, just moments too late.
We get in closer and I can start to see smoke coming up.
I looked down and started seeing the landmarks and it was obviously the Pentagon was on fire.
Looking down and actually seeing the Pentagon burning, you know, big black billowing smoke
out of it.
Just looking back, I'm thinking, we're at war.
In the Pentagon Command Center, General Winfield is juggling a secret conference call.
We added the White House and we added Air Force One to the conference.
All of the governmental agencies that were involved in any activity that was going on
in the United States at that point were in that conference.
Rumsfeld orders U.S. forces to DEF CON 3, the highest alert for the nuclear arsenal
in 30 years.
The smoke got intense at one point.
I actually recommended the secretary, you know, maybe we ought to think about an alternate
location.
They wanted to evacuate us in the building and I decided I'd prefer to stay.
Instead, Rumsfeld sends his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to a secret remote bunker where there is a
duplicate of the Pentagon's command and control system.
We flew them out by helicopter to Site R. The deputy DEF flew out there and he was in
charge of our alternate site.
Just moments earlier on Capitol Hill to testify before Senator Edward Kennedy's education
committee, the First Lady learns about the New York attacks.
Our hearts and our prayers go out to the victims of this act of terrorism and that our support
goes to the rescue workers.
We had walked down the corridor and just as we were about to get in the elevators, the
Secret Service said, is there some place we can go right away?
We heard that the Pentagon had been struck.
The Pentagon crash literally reverberates in congressional corridors.
In under an hour, three hijacked planes have struck buildings in New York City and Washington.
Police warn the leaders of Congress the Capitol building could be next.
Well, they said, we think there's a plane heading for the Capitol.
Some Capitol policemen broke into the room and said, we're under attack.
I've got to take you out right away.
As I looked up, hung up the phone and looked back down the window, out my window and down
the mall, this huge cloud of rolling black, blue smoke was coming across.
When I looked out that window of my office and I could see the smoke billowing up from
the Pentagon and my immediate impression, you know, we're fixing to be hit too and let's
get out of here.
People were just as fearful as I've seen.
I saw looks and senators faces, looks and staff faces I've never seen before.
Get off the sidewalk.
Workers, tourists, senators scattered as word spreads of another hijacked plane.
The Senate chaplain offers a prayer.
So Lord be with us.
Moving everybody back, moving everybody back.
I'm thinking to myself, here I am, speaker of the house, something I never dreamed would
ever happen to me and we're evacuating the Capitol.
It just can't be happening to us.
Speaker of the house, Dennis Hastert is third in line of succession to the presidency.
I was put in one of our secure automobiles and the next thing I knew I was hurtling through
the back streets of Washington.
The other leaders jam into a room two blocks from the Capitol.
We were in a vulnerable position.
We were all in one place and I started asking, you know, who's in charge here?
We were like everybody else.
We were in complete chaos.
I think it might be a good idea if we got out of this crowd.
Some leaders rushed to the west front of the Capitol where military helicopters await.
Then we flew over the Pentagon and we saw the remnants of an airplane into the side
of the Pentagon with this whole facade caved in with black smoke and thousands of people
gathered around.
It was a terrible sight.
While in Florida, the president hurries aboard Air Force One.
He was virtually shoved on board the plane.
The rest of us being forced to move faster, faster, faster to get on board.
President sat down in his chair, motioned to the chair across from his desk for me to
sit down and before we could both of us sit down and put on our seat belts, they were
rolling the plane.
And they stood that 747 on its tail and got it to about 45,000 feet, but as quick as I
think you can get a big thing like that up in the air.
It is 955 a.m.
It seemed we were wheels up in nanoseconds.
Ellen Eckert is a White House stenographer.
The chatter in the press section of the plane where I was sitting was where we going, where
we going and we were looking out the windows trying to see if we could figure out geographically
where we were going.
That's what the president is trying to decide up front.
I was focused on getting the president in a safe environment which meant on the plane
and the plane should be in the air and then it came a question as to where should the
plane go.
He said I'm coming back and I said you may not want to do that Mr. President because
Washington is under attack.
We don't know where the next attack is coming.
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer is keeping notes.
I turned to the head of the Secret Service detail and he said I want to go back home
ASAP.
I don't want whoever is doing this to hold me outside of Washington and the head of the
Secret Service detail said to him our people are saying it's too unsteady still.
There was a little bit of pulling and pushing with him to suggest that we should fly to
a secure location where we could have good communication and then make a decision when
he should return to Washington.
When I got to the bunker the president was talking to the vice president on the phone
and the vice president was saying the same thing you can't come back here.
At that point I urged him not to return to Washington because it was clear then that
an attack included Washington as well.
So it was on the basis of that third plane that you said at that point to the president
you can't come back here.
Right we don't know what's happening.
On board Air Force One we seemed to be flying forever and one of the Secret Service agents
leaned over to me and said look down there we're at 44,000 feet and we're not going
back to Washington.
Deep beneath the White House Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta issues an unprecedented
order.
If their planes are coming into the eastern seaboard turn them around and get them going
west.
If they're going west have them land at their destination but in any event if they're not
too far away have them land.
More than 4,000 planes are in the skies over the U.S. FAA policy allows pilots to use their
own discretion to decide where and when they land in an emergency.
But on this morning.
I said screw pilot discretion get the damn planes down.
Up above the Secret Service orders the White House staff to evacuate.
As soon as we were outside Secret Service agents told us to run and they kept yelling
to run and if you looked at their faces they wanted us to run.
Everybody out.
One of them yelled women take off your heels and run take off your heels and run.
So I did I took them off and I started running as fast as I could.
The gates opened and we all went pouring out.
Dozens of fighters are buzzing in the sky.
F-16s scramble at Andrews Air Force Base in nearby Maryland.
We were told to get airborne and protect the capital.
I believe there's over 20 fighters plus tankers AWACS you know the other support airplanes.
Total military in the area I'd say was probably 30 plus airplanes.
Never in my wildest dreams occurred to me that one day I'd be orbiting over the Pentagon
that had just been hit looking for possible incoming aircraft.
In the Pentagon Command Center there's a report of another hijacked plane United Airlines
Flight 93.
We received a report from the FAA that Flight 93 had turned off its transponder had turned
and was now heading towards Washington DC.
We rapidly developed some rules of engagement for what our military aircraft might do in
the event another aircraft appeared to be heading into some civilian large civilian
structure or population.
I said if we get one another one of these you're gonna have to shoot it down.
You heard the speaker of the House of Representatives say there it can't be happening to us so much
now that we didn't know then.
In the next half hour you will see how this crisis led the nation's leaders to create
rules of engagement for something never before done in American history ordering the military
to shoot down a civilian aircraft.
When we come back life and death decisions in the skies over Washington.
This is the first time in my career that I ever actually wanted to go out and use my
airplane to kill someone.
ABC's coverage of 9-11 will continue in a moment.
This woman is in hiding because of the stories she has to tell about Saddam Hussein.
Thursday, Saddam's secrets and the woman who says she was his secret mistress on primetime.
He never saved another's life.
He never ruled a nation.
He never led men in desperate battle.
And yet his whole life is a story of heroism and his victory will thrill your heart.
Christopher Reeve, Courageous Steps, next Wednesday at 10-9 Central on ABC.
Good evening, I'm Juliet Dragus.
And I'm Lee Vanamate and we will return to network coverage of America.
November, September 11th in just a moment but first we want to show you what's happening
here in West Michigan.
Tonight special ceremonies continue across West Michigan.
More than 100 people attended a service at MLK Park in Grand Rapids.
A prayer vigil was held to bring the community together.
This morning hundreds showed up for a ceremony at a Novoen Park.
Included were dozens of uniformed firefighters and police.
And unlike last year, as you just heard, airports stayed open today but few passengers were
seen.
The Newport International saw a 25% drop in passengers and in fact some flights were canceled.
Spirit Airlines tried to counteract the expected drop by offering free tickets.
But a spokesman says many of those with free tickets just didn't show up.
Our exclusive WCZM 13 News poll taken by SurveyUSA shows 62% of people in West Michigan do feel
more safe traveling now than they did last year.
And we will have more local news coverage throughout the evening and tonight at 11 o'clock.
So stay with us.
We turn now to ABC special coverage of Remembering 9-11.
ABC News.
9-11 continues.
Once again, Peter Jennings.
Welcome back to our coverage of the first anniversary.
In this half hour we will continue our extraordinary look behind the scenes on the day that America
was attacked on board Air Force One with the President at the site of the crash of the
hijacked plane in rural Pennsylvania and in the secret bunkers where the government leaders
took shelter.
Here again is Charles Gibson.
It is just before 10 a.m.
Jet fighters swarm around the capital.
One whole side of the Pentagon is just completely burning.
There's ashes falling.
There's fumes in the air and the smoke is billowing around.
Only minutes before the Pentagon was struck by a hijacked airplane.
It was the first time in my career that I ever actually wanted to go out and use my
airplane to kill someone.
Only an hour has passed since the attacks began in New York City.
In the defense of the nation's capital we would have done what we had to do.
But there is little the pilots can do even though another hijacked aircraft, United Flight
93, is heading for Washington.
At that point we had no authorization to shoot anyone down.
The President is in his cabin aboard Air Force One.
I was there when he was talking with the Vice President and Secretary of Defense and this
was not an easy thing.
It's a decision that can't be made by others other than the President.
Just earlier, in a hardened bunker beneath the White House, the Vice President is with
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta.
He's just methodical in the way he goes about doing things, but he's very effective in terms
of his cool, collected way of getting things done.
I had a yellow legal pad with a list.
Chaney personally compiles a list of possible threats from the air.
Had tail numbers, Jim.
Of the flights that you didn't know where they were.
That we couldn't account for.
At first it was one of a few planes that they had questions about.
White House photographer David Borer watches the tense moment and records it on film.
Eventually it narrowed to Flight 93.
That was the biggest threat at that point.
If you take the trajectory of the plane, Flight 93, after it passes Pittsburgh and draw a
straight line, it's going to go to Washington, D.C.
You just had to do something instantaneously.
There was a PEOC staffer who would keep coming in with updates on Flight 93's progress towards
D.C.
Did you have any thoughts at the time as to what the target of that airplane might be?
I thought probably White House or Capitol.
We found out later from interviewing people who were detained, Al Qaeda members, that said
the fourth plane was intended for the White House.
The decision was made to try to go intercept Flight 93.
The significance of saying to a pilot that you were authorized to shoot down that plane
full of Americans is an order that had never been given before.
Very very tough decision.
And the President understood the magnitude of that decision.
The President did give the order to shoot down a civilian plane if it was not responding
properly.
And it was authority requested through channels by Secretary Rumsfeld, the Vice President
passed the request.
President said yes.
It was a totally different circumstance for our country to the thought of having to shoot
down one of our own civilian aircraft.
Do you remember your own thoughts as to what you were thinking?
Yeah, that this was a very difficult proposition but it had to be done.
If we had been able to intercept the planes before they hit the World Trade Center, would
we?
And the answer was absolutely yes.
The President gave the VP authority to make that call.
It was that chilling moment.
Chilling moment.
The Vice President briefed into the conference that the President had given us permission
to shoot down any civilian aircraft that threaten Washington D.C.
Again, in the National Military Command Center, everything stopped for a short second as the
impact of those words sunk in.
The rules have changed.
We could do something about it now.
Colonel Bob Marr is in command at the Northeast Air Defense Sector base in Rome, New York.
I got the call and the words that I remember as clear as day was we will take lives in
the air to preserve lives on the ground.
Marr orders his air controllers tell the pilots to intercept Flight 93.
Having any controller would ever want to pass to a pilot to shoot down an airliner filled
with innocent people.
And we of course passed that on to the pilots.
United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington D.C.
The closest fighters are two F-16 pilots on a training mission from Selfridge Air National
Guard base near Detroit.
So we were able to get hold of them on the radios and say, hey guys, we may need you
to come down south and try and head off United Airlines Flight 93.
But there's a problem.
The real scary part is that those guys are up there on a training mission.
They don't have any weapons on board they can use.
We started receiving reports from the fighters that were heading to intercept.
The FAA kept us informed with their time estimates as the aircraft got closer and closer.
First question that came from my mission crew commander, the individual that's in charge
of the operations floor said, well sir, what are they going to do?
I said we're going to put them as close to that airplane as we can get in view of the
cockpit and convince that guy in that airplane that he needs to land.
And if that doesn't work, without any weapons, what can the fighter pilots do except crash
into the hijacked plane?
Well as a military man there are times you have to make sacrifices that you have to make.
And at some point the closure time came and went and nothing had happened.
So you can imagine everything was very tense in the NMCC.
We had basically lost situational awareness of where this airplane was.
Flight 93 is about 175 miles north and west of Washington, flying over Somerset County,
Pennsylvania.
At about 10 o'clock I called my sister Jody.
I hadn't heard anything from her that morning.
And we were talking about what was going on in New York and at the Pentagon.
Rick King is the assistant chief of the Shanksville, Pennsylvania volunteer fire department and
the proprietor of IDA's country store.
She said to me, Rick, I hear a plane.
And I said yeah and she said it's really loud.
Just outside Shanksville, Valencia McClatchy is startled by the noise.
Just as I had heard the roar, I glanced out my front window and just caught a glimpse
of a reflection of the sun hitting on something.
And I could hear the engine screaming and seconds later it hit.
And I remember the ground just shook.
It almost jolted me to the point of losing my balance.
My sister said to me, oh my god, Rick, it crashed.
And I said I know.
And I said I gotta go.
I had my camera right by the doorway.
I grabbed my camera as I was going out the door, opening the door.
It was very startling against that clear blue sky to see that huge ball of smoke coming
up.
I placed a phone call then to our 911 center in Somerset.
Terry Schaefer is the Shanksville fire chief.
Pulling into the crash site, I remember just seeing vehicles everywhere, firefighters'
vehicles, other fire department vehicles.
Just a lot of confusion.
When I got there, I wondered to myself, where is it?
The plane was just totally disintegrated.
It's a smell that you'll never forget, a smell of jet fuel, burnt flesh.
After about the first five or ten minutes, we realized that we didn't have any survivors.
My role is to determine the cause and manner of death, recover the remains, identify the
remains, and return the remains to the families.
That's my role in every case.
Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller arrives at the crash site.
So everybody's just kind of walking around.
And after a few minutes, I did run into Rick.
He wanted to see what I had seen.
And as we were walking through, I remember looking up into the hemlock, into the trees.
You could see all kinds of stuff hanging out of the trees, like socks and pieces of suitcase
and luggage and seat covers and seat belts.
The only thing we didn't see were people.
Nothing to indicate that there was even anybody on the plane.
We're trained to help people.
We're trained to rescue people.
And we couldn't do any of that.
Up above, a fighter jet streaks by.
It was about, you know, 10-03 that the fighters reported that Flight 93 had crashed.
Eventually, of course, we never fired on any aircraft.
When you heard the plane was down without a shot being fired at it, do you remember
what you said?
We just witnessed an act of heroism.
In Washington, you see the smoke.
It's down on the mall.
There is little information.
We just had a few bombings here.
Just rumors.
We know there was a car bomb at the State Department.
The day just in the end, at 93, we were responding to possible hijackings.
We had a car bomb reported at the State Department.
It ran on the crawler on the TV that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department.
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is a former Navy SEAL.
I went out and looked with Diplomatic Security and didn't see anything.
I called my colleagues around town on the video conference screen and said there was
nothing to it.
It was frustrating.
We flew seven hours and the worst part of it was that because of the communications
problems that existed during that day, I couldn't talk to anybody in Washington.
Secretary of State Colin Powell is in the air on his way back from Lima, Peru.
There were rumors that the fourth plane might have been heading either to the White House
or to the State Department.
We didn't know.
Who could have imagined?
At that moment, you have to worry about the continuity of the United States government.
It's very clear that Washington was under attack.
We arranged for the evacuation of the Congressional leadership, especially Denny Hastert, the
speaker who was in the line of succession for the presidency after me, whatever was
going on, that the government of the United States would survive.
Congressional leaders are safe.
Aboard military helicopters, they fly to a top-secret bunker.
There was granite-like stone on the sides.
I mean, literally there it was, like a cave.
The bunker, part of a nuclear survival plan equipped with food and phones.
A secret State Department report says there are 19 emergency operating facilities for
dispersing federal officials located within a 300-mile radius of Washington.
Well, the hope was that the government could go on, but the feeling was that if there was
a group of people who would be in a position to make the decision about how the government
goes on, it ought to be the leadership, Republican and Democratic, Senate and House.
The president, too, is safe in a protective cocoon at 45,000 feet.
The fear ran so deep that a concept that was a Cold War concept that I had never heard
of actually came into play that day, and the fear was that this was an attack whose intent
was to decapitate the government.
In other words, to take out the congressional leaders, to take out the president, to take
out the vice president, so our government could not function.
Decapitation.
Was there any talk in the PEOC about the fact that they may be trying to decapitate the
United States government?
Certainly, that was a thought that occurred to me, and I assume others as well, too.
That's in part why, number one, I urged the president not to return until we could find
out what was going on.
It was important that we not bunch up in Washington.
It was very clear that they were going for symbols of power and for the seats of power.
And to bring the president back and to put him in the same building with the vice president
would have been foolhardy, frankly, because decapitation then of the U.S. government is
quite easy.
But no one in the back of the plane knows where Air Force One is going.
Everybody was looking out going, eh, the plane just took a sudden left.
We're definitely not going back to Andrus.
At one point, Ari Fleischer, the press secretary, came back and said, this is off the record.
The president is being evacuated, the president being evacuated for his safety and the safety
of the country.
TV monitors aboard the president's plane show flickering images of the destruction in New
York and Washington.
Some stations would fade in and fade out, so we weren't getting complete reports.
It's kind of pieces bit by bit.
It is just 50 minutes since the second tower of the World Trade Center was struck.
You can see the firemen assembled here, the police officers, FBI agents, and you can see
the two towers, a huge explosion now raining debris on all of us.
We better get out of the way.
It is 9.59 a.m.
The second building that was hit by the plane has just completely collapsed.
The entire building has just collapsed.
It's holding down on itself and it is not there anymore.
The whole side has collapsed.
The whole building has collapsed.
This building has collapsed.
This is what it looked like moments ago.
My God.
Another 30 minutes tick by.
It's a very strong building, as you remember from the blast the last time.
What does it take as an engineer to do the job?
The second and last tower has just collapsed.
The second tower.
Both trade towers have now been attacked and destroyed with thousands of people either
in them or in the immediate area adjacent to them.
Duff and Nasty watch from their jet fighters, eye overhead, as the towers collapse.
I kind of just look back over my shoulder and look and say, man, I called it right away
and said, I can't see lower Manhattan.
I didn't know what to think.
That might be some sort of other attack.
So I went up to take a look at it.
So I was right over the top of it looking down.
And as I was looking at it, all of a sudden it just started getting smaller.
And to me it didn't make sense.
And to see this thing just falling away from me and then I realized what was going on.
It's absolutely the sickest feeling I've ever had in a plane.
Meanwhile in the White House bunker.
The mood was very somber at that point.
I've seen pictures as we sat there and watched on television as you could see that first
building collapse.
On Air Force One, reporters recoil in horror.
It's worse than any disaster movie.
We'd been in the air for two hours.
And as the plane was beginning to lose altitude, Ari Fleischer came back and told us the President
is going to keep moving.
We didn't have a full load of fuel.
They said the nearest secure facility that we can refuel the plane is Barksdale, headquarters
of the Eighth Air Force.
And so we flew into Barksdale.
Air Force One touches down at the air base in Louisiana.
It is just before noon.
On the tarmac, Fleischer holds a brief news conference.
I said for the credibility of this President, not only for the American people but for the
world, you need to have press with you to say this is where the President is and what
he's doing.
It's not enough to have Air Force One jet off into the sunset and have none of us know
where he is.
Surrounded by armed guards, the President goes inside to call the White House bunker.
Got on the phone with the Vice President and he said to him, I can't wait to find out who
did it.
It's going to take a while and we're not going to have a little slap on the wrist crap.
Air Force One is refueled.
President Bush records a statement to the nation.
Well, there's no question he was angry.
He was hot.
It was reflected in his words.
I'll never forget it.
His first reaction is we are at war.
Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended.
I swear his eyes were red-rimmed.
Not the crying kind of red-rim, but a stress and a tension.
The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.
Air Force One lifts off again with a lighter load.
Aboard are just a few key aides and Secret Service agents.
The press pool has been trimmed from 13 to 5.
When Ari Fleischer told us, I can't tell you where we're going, and you got the distinct
feeling is because he didn't know, because they didn't know.
I remember thinking it was like being on the Twilight Zone plane because there was nobody
around anymore.
The fear was palpable.
Fear for the country, fear for the structure of the government, agents fearful of protecting
the chain of command, the line of succession.
Jet fighters appear just off the wing.
This fighter jet was so close.
It was so close I could see the pilot's face.
And I had my face just pressed right up against the little portal window.
And I can't tell you, I was instantly calm.
In his cabin, the president wants to get back to the Capitol.
And finally he just basically said, I'm not going to let whoever did this keep the President
of the United States out of Washington, D.C.
We're going.
At first, another stop at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha, Nebraska.
The president and his aides disappear into a tiny brick building and descend to a blastproof
bunker.
It is now 3.30 in the afternoon.
Well, you go downstairs and you go downstairs and you go downstairs and you go downstairs.
I mean, it's a long way down.
And then you emerge and go through a series of hallways and special doors, blast doors
and so forth.
And then you enter into a conference center, which is several stories underground.
I do remember going underground.
White House photographer Eric Draper records the moment as the president convenes a meeting
of his national security team on a video teleconference.
Well, Secretary of Defense, the director of central intelligence, the vice president,
myself, Dr. Rice, who was with the vice president.
And we sat down and the president said, first of all, let me tell you that whoever did this
to us, we're going to get them.
George, you get ready.
Don, you get ready.
He was ice cool.
And I thought very appropriately so.
I remember he, the president was saying, we're going to find out who did this.
We're going to seek them out.
And then we're going to destroy them.
And then he said, and I'll be back tonight.
I'm getting, I'm coming back tonight.
And he said it in a way that it was pretty clear that there was no arguing with him this
time.
The Secret Service didn't want him to come back.
And he asked me then what I thought.
And I said, I think it's OK to come on back.
Just before 5 p.m., Air Force One is readied for takeoff.
A few moments later, in the air, the president walks to the rear of the plane.
He just like leaned in and said, hey.
And I said, hey, sir, how's it going?
He goes, I'm all right.
How are you?
And he pointed at our notebooks.
Said no.
Meaning this is off the record.
You can't report this.
So I said, were you able to reach Mrs. Bush?
And he came over and actually put his like pat of me on the back and he said, I just
talked to her.
Thanks for asking.
There was an ansiness about him.
He couldn't wait to get back to Washington.
He couldn't wait to do something, say something.
It is late afternoon.
Congressional leaders stream back to Washington and gather on Capitol Hill.
More than 200 members are waiting.
Congress will convene tomorrow.
As we started to leave the lectern and the area of the steps, somebody on the house side,
someone began to sing God Bless America.
The president arrives at Andrews Air Force Base.
At approximately 642, produce sports Marine One looks very somber but does salute.
On the way to the White House.
The helicopter flew a path this day over the mall and off the left side window you could
see the Pentagon.
So it was the president's first eye to eye connection with the attack on our country.
And he said aloud to nobody in particular, the mightiest building in the world is on
fire.
That's the 21st century war you just witnessed.
At the White House, government officials wait with Vice President Cheney and Laura Bush.
The first lady was there when he arrived and they embraced.
When you first saw the president that day, when he arrived back, can you describe what
he was like, what his mood was like?
Well, for all of us it was somber.
It had been a very emotional day.
Was he angry?
Determined, I would say.
I could tell he was angry.
I could tell he was as emotional as any of us about the day.
Darkness falls across the east.
In New York, exhausted rescuers desperately search for survivors.
Although tower two was the second tower to be struck, it was the first to fall down and
that's where my brother was.
Air Force Public Affairs Officer Don Arias last talked to his brother Adam moments before
the second tower was struck.
I knew that night that he didn't, when he didn't come home from work, that he didn't
make it.
I just knew in my heart that he didn't make it.
And in Washington, National Guard Humvees patrol the streets.
And the city was just different.
It was so quiet here, so quiet.
There were the helicopters above, but it was still very quiet.
In the White House, the President prepares to address the nation.
The word war crept into the language and then it went out again and we argued whether it
was the right word.
Well, he used the word during the course of the day that we were at war.
My recollection is that he was concerned about that his speech that night needed in part
to be reassuring to the American people.
He made a number of edits and suggestions.
And he finalized his words and he addressed the American people from the Oval Office.
The President's sitting at his desk on the other side, just moments away from addressing
the nation.
And in the frame you can see the opening words to his statement.
It is 8.30 in the evening.
Good evening.
Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack.
From the bunker below, CIA Director George Tenet and members of the President's Cabinet
and National Security Team watched the speech.
It was one of those moments where you can hear a pin drop.
We had watched him downstairs in the PIOC and then he came and joined us and we graduated.
It was the first time we were all together.
And it was a tense time, but I recall it also as being a calm time.
The President's normal routine, particularly in a large setting like that, is to start
with the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and go on through the members who
were present to get the latest report.
We really began to hand out assignments for the next day to begin to think about response.
He made it clear that this was not to happen again.
I think he used words like, don't ever let this happen again.
There was a task ahead of us.
There was a serious job ahead of us.
The President was ready for it and we were there ready to help him.
And that's where they started planning for what would become war.
I mean the order was get the troops ready.
It was that simple, it was that direct.
Get the troops ready.
It is 9.30 p.m.
Only 12 hours have passed since the attacks began.
A day that dawned full of possibility and promise ends on the eve of war.
So much in just 12 hours and who among us ever imagined that we would see the country
go into sort of a lockdown.
But that's what we did that day and we haven't really come out of it yet.
Symptomatic of that, the fact that the Vice President right now back in a secure facility.
Thanks very much.
That's extraordinary to relive it in that fashion.
Charles Gibson.
When we come back this evening we'll relive something else.
I hope you'll stay with us for our primetime coverage on this anniversary of 9-11.
From ABC News, this is 9-11.
Tonight, how critical decisions meant life or death for those inside the Twin Towers.
An exclusive ABC News USA Today report.
What really happened after the planes hit?
My bottom wing is hung in my office door 20 feet from where I am.
I'm saying to myself, Lord, this plane is gonna explode and I'm gonna die.
Miraculous stories of survival, told by those who escaped death when so many others did
not.
An ABC News investigation.
How vulnerable is our nation's security one year later?
We are vulnerable to covert delivery of weapons of mass destruction.
You will be shocked to see what we discovered, what we tested the system that's supposed
to protect us from nuclear terrorism.
If they're really on top of it, they should pick this up.
ABC's Brian Ross with an exclusive report that you cannot miss.
Barbara Walters with an intimate look at the grieving families struggling to rebuild their
lives after the worst of tragedies.
This is their father, this is our husband and we're talking about ashes and body parts
and other people's ashes and it's just sick.
ABC News has followed their progress for the last year.
An exclusive look at how far they have come.
And Diane Sawyer with 63 symbols of loss and love.
The widows and babies of 9-11.
Your stories will touch and surprise you, the renewal of life.
Now reporting, Peter Jennings.
The former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, who helped this city get through September
11th said recently what many people in this city feel.
Whatever the terrorists were trying to accomplish, this city is stronger, not weaker for their
murderous actions.
It could also be said for the country as a whole.
We've all worked very hard in the last year to comprehend the details of what happened
in those buildings in less than two hours from the time the planes hit until they collapsed.
And no one has done, we think, a more comprehensive job than USA Today.
And it was a huge job to document what was happening in the trade towers after they were
hit because so many people died.
We've been working with the newspaper and you will see that with some astonishing computer
renditions, we've come to realize that very often the tiniest decision meant the difference
between living and dying.
I might add that some of those who survived have been very generous with their time so
that we could understand.
I was on the phone talking to one of my colleagues in another office, heard a loud roar and I
had to turn 90 degrees to look out the window to look north and right there coming right
at me was this large passenger jet, maybe just two or three plane lengths away from
me.
I just ducked my head and prayed to God to save me because I thought this was it.
Eight floors below George Slay, Fred Eichler was standing at his window.
He saw it too.
I mean we were staring into the cockpit, we could not recognize anything.
I mean it did happen kind of quickly but we saw the entire plane and then watched it crash
into the building.
Right out of the elevator I heard a whoosh and I looked up and the three elevators directly
across from me were on fire.
They were just, they had exploded and the doors on the elevators were ajar.
I immediately decided I just have to go where I don't see flames.
I ran out of the elevator into the first office I could find.
It was an insurance company called Accelera, a gentleman there named Fred Eichler told
me that he had actually just seen an American Airlines jet fly into the building while he
was sitting having his breakfast.
Strangers thrown together in terrible circumstances.
They would need each other to survive.
The hallway burst into flames outside of our door so we were trapped in our office and
we could not get out.
We believed that people knew we were up there but I'm not quite sure if anybody really,
really did know.
On an express elevator Chris Young was alone headed for the North Tower lobby.
I was in sort of a good mood and so I started sort of just like jumping up in the elevator
to see if I could get that lighter than air feeling or whatever when the elevator is speeding
down.
It was just at that point that there was just a huge massive shaking of the elevator that
made it screech to a stop and it was quickly followed by this just huge gust of wind that
pushed into the elevator and sort of pushed in all this fine yellow dust into the elevator.
And I mean it was rational as it was or whatever.
I had been jumping in the elevator and it was like oh my god I've done something.
Ninety one floors above George Slay struggled to recover after the plane hit a few feet
over his head.
And everything came down around me, my ceiling tiles all collapsed around me, light fixtures
came down, all the books on my bookshelf tumbled on top of me.
So I didn't really feel the impact, I was distracted by all of this and we got out of
our office space into the hallway.
There was some smoke on the floor but we headed to the third stairway.
We looked up and there was debris in the stairwell above us.
There was some debris in the form of sheetrock on the stairs.
We just lifted that against the wall and we were able to walk down the stairs from that
point.
There was no one coming down when we entered into the stairwell.
And no one ever would.
The 92nd floor would become the bottom of the North Tower tomb.
The upper floors were sealed off.
The plane's impact had collapsed all three escaped stairwells.
Elevator shafts were destroyed or had become infernos.
The rescue would prove impossible.
Those people trapped in the upper 19 floors would not survive.
The South Tower was 125 feet from the North and on the 105th floor a large meeting had
assembled in the offices of Aon Insurance.
Joe Dittmar was at the meeting.
The lights flickered.
A gentleman came into the room and said that there had been an explosion in the first tower
and that we had to leave because we were being evacuated.
Throughout the South Tower the alarm spread and evacuation began.
Most of the people had little idea of what had happened to the North Tower or how severe
the damage was.
People on the 105th floor began down through the stairwell and on the 90th floor they noticed
a door open.
They filed out of the stairwell.
We went out onto the 90th floor.
I don't even know whose offices were there and that's when we first had the chance to
experience what was going on.
Worst 30 seconds of my life.
The first thing that I noticed was screaming, a man, a very distinct voice of a man screaming
oh my god, oh my god and a woman just shrieking.
So obviously I had to look.
I looked out.
You could see that the first tower was engulfed in flames.
There was a gaping hole in the building and then things just coming out of the building
just falling out of the building, the furniture and the papers and the people.
Person just wandered to the side of the building obviously choking and blind from the smoke
and since the floor had been blown away was jagged probably didn't realize where the end
of the floor was and just fell right out of the building.
And as you stand there at the window you just watch this body drop and your stomach and
your knees drop right along with that and then another and then another.
That just scared the daylight out of me.
I just immediately started telling people you need to leave, whatever it is we'll find
out when we're downstairs.
Florence Jones worked for a baseline financial with offices on the 77th and 78th floors of
the South Tower connected by an escalator.
She remembers pleading with Jill Campbell, a receptionist on the 78th floor to leave.
I could tell she was scared and I just kept saying get in an elevator, get in an elevator.
She wasn't going to leave until someone more superior in charge told her to leave and she
didn't do that until the chief financial officer said to her look if you want to leave go ahead
and leave the last I saw of her she went out to go wait for an elevator to go down.
If the boss stayed the staff stayed.
Today your fate was sealed if you stayed too long.
In the South Tower workers from most floors were heading down through the three emergency
stairwells and using the building's 99 elevators.
Thousands of people went steadily out of the building.
But in the North Tower the conditions were getting steadily worse.
Fred Eichler and Jonathan Judd were still trapped in offices on the 83rd floor.
I don't know if it was metal or glass but you could see glittering things coming down
here big crashes you could hear big crashes and everyone said stay away from the windows.
You could see tons and tons of papers flying like a like a ticker tape parade and it continued
to get smokier and smokier.
My wife my parents and one of my daughters called and I never told them what the real
situation was I never told them that there was an inferno right outside our door but
realistically I really believe that was the last time I'm going to speak to them.
Somewhere near the North Tower lobby Chris Young's elevator was still stuck.
Young alone was desperately pushing emergency buttons.
This computer voice came on saying that your call had been received that someone would
be there to that someone would be with you shortly and it just kept repeating that message
over and over and you couldn't there was no way to make it stop.
It was it was about 15 minutes or so and then someone did come on to the intercom a live
person and the first thing they said was anybody in here?
I sort of yelled out yes.
I asked him what what had happened but he really wouldn't give me any specifics he just
said you know it's an emergency situation and that someone would would be there shortly
to get me out of the elevator.
The mortal peril of those trapped in the North Tower's upper floors was becoming increasingly
clear.
Desperate for air windows were broken.
People clung to the side of the building a hundred stories up.
People in the South Tower looked at them from just feet away.
To see these young people doing the sign of the cross and jumping you're like oh my god
it's got to be awful up there for people to make that choice to want to jump and know
that you're going to die and you can't pull your eyes away as much as you'd like to just
out of sheer dignity for them you'd like to but it's very hard to do that.
I kept saying to myself this is not a movie this is real these are real human beings that
are smashing.
It's just that's an awful thing to see.
Florence Jones had gone to the 78th floor elevators but they were now packed.
I was like you know we're not getting out this way we have to go downstairs make sure
everyone is off the floor and we got to leave and that's the only reason why I'm here today
is because I ran down the escalator with them to make sure everybody was off the 77th floor.
On this day the smallest decision would be crucial.
Seven floors above on the 84th floor of the South Tower a similar scene was playing out.
Brian Clark worked for Eurobank.
One woman in particular Susan Polio did not know she was about to see what she saw and
as she looked up all of a sudden she spun in horror and ran back to me the five yards
back from the glass I was and Brian Brian she said it's people are dying she said and
I said Susan I know it's a terrible thing and I put my arms around her I said come on
let's get you composed and I walked her off our trading floor down the center hallway
to the west side of the building which is where the ladies room is and I said you know
get your get yourself together and it really is that walk I think that saved my life.
Throughout the South Tower people were going down through the stairwells or using the elevators
and then just before 9 a.m. there was an announcement broadcast throughout the building.
The statement was it appears that Trade Center 2 is now safe you can go back to your offices
and at which point a lot of people stopped in the stairwell.
Really saw people going back in the other direction people going back to their places
of work they were you know hey going back I remember clearly saying where you going
and he says I'm going back to work I said God you're more dedicated than I could ever
hope to be.
78 is a sky lobby there's express elevators that go from 78 to 1 so me and five of my
friends decided you know okay let's walk up a couple of flights why walk down it was really
hot so we walked up back to 78 figuring on catching an elevator.
The 78th floor sky lobby had a bank of 12 express elevators and 24 local elevators to
the upper floors.
The lobby had become packed with people some heading out of the building some back to their
offices.
That's where I saw Mary and she said you know in words that I shouldn't use here that there
was no conceivable way she was going to walk down 90 more flights of stairs or 78 more
flights of stairs she was taking the elevator the elevators were running come on.
And just had a again a gut feeling I can never really explain it 100% something that just
told me now keep walking.
Whether to use the stairs or wait for an elevator another fateful decision.
One floor below Florence Jones looked south from the 77th floor windows.
I could see straight across the floor which was all glass and I could not figure out on
a bright sunny cloudless day what this black thing was that was approaching the building.
Four floors above Stanley Primnath saw the same thing and for no apparent reason I just
raised my head watching towards the harbor the Statue of Liberty and what I saw was a
giant aircraft come in eye contact eye level towards me and I drove under my desk.
This impact was so great that I got temporarily deaf.
I couldn't hear anything.
It looks like a demolition crew came in and just knocked everything flat steel doors were
knocked off all the walls were flattened all the desks and every piece of furniture was
damaged all the computers were like smithereens.
The ceiling caved in and part of the 82nd floor collapsed and I'm hiding under a steel
desk the only one that stood intact my Bible was on top of that desk.
Stanley Primnath had survived the direct hit the nose of the plane had come right through
the windows of his floor.
And the bottom wing is hung in my office door 20 feet from where I am and the wing starts
to burn I couldn't see the rest of the plane and I'm saying to myself oh Lord this plane
is going to explode and I'm going to die I have to get out of here as fast as possible.
Three floors above Stanley on the 84th floor Brian Clark's decision to walk a colleague
to the bathroom had taken him out of the plane's path.
Nearly 50 people died on the east side of the floor on the west there was a handful
of survivors.
Brian Clark and Ron DeFranchesca were two of them.
I got knocked flying and you know the false ceilings all came down and debris and dust
and all the lights went out and it was louder than you could imagine.
For the next 10 seconds I experienced terror and the building swayed the building just
went went went a long way it seemed like for 10 seconds one way.
This felt like it was going yards and I thought we were going over I thought we were falling
to the west into the outside but it stopped and didn't move and then came back to vertical.
My colleague and I we just he was screaming and I grabbed him and I led this man into
the stairwell with me and we proceeded on our journey.
Now the people in the North Tower stared at the South Tower to see the horror that mirrored
their own.
Jonathan Judd was on the phone to his wife who saw the plane hit on television.
And as I was speaking to her she said oh my god look out the window and the other plane
had hit the South Tower and all I saw was flame.
My entire field of vision was flame it was like hell.
That's when I really really got scared and my legs started to shake like I've never felt
them before like almost like I couldn't stand up.
We heard this massive explosion and we thought that the floors above us were collapsing on
us.
At that point we made a decision to try to get out as we got to maybe five ten feet to
where we thought we were going all the lights went out and we could not see anything.
So we decided to go back to our office and it wasn't a word that was spoken it was dead
silent.
The only noise you heard was the ceiling tile falling all around you.
Neither be rescued or die.
Those were the choices.
Such choices.
Joe Ditmar chose not to take an elevator and walk down the stairs.
Brian Clark chose to help a distressed colleague to the bathroom away from the windows and
a floor that exploded on impact.
Florence Jones chose to go down a floor to 77 to organize the evacuation of her offices.
All of them survived.
For me that decision was crucial because everybody practically on that floor died on 78.
And where I would have been standing there would have been no way no way I could have
gotten out of the way of that airplane.
The United Plane had devastated the South Tower from the 78th through the 84th floors.
Hundreds of people had been standing in the 78th floor sky lobby waiting for elevators.
Only ten of them are known to have survived.
They were standing at the far north end of the lobby very near the only stairwell that
had not been destroyed.
Mary Jost was there.
So were Kelly Ryre and Donna Spera.
There was like six of us and I says, you, is anybody going up?
My friend just turned around and said, I'm not going back up.
As soon as she said that the plane hit.
As I woke up I turned and I saw fire and my face felt like it went on fire.
And then I turned and I felt like my back was on fire and I rolled.
But I couldn't roll far because there were people around me.
And I remember walking into the elevator and then just feeling a blast like nothing I'd
ever felt before.
Just a wave of heat and just I was smashed into the back wall of the elevator and just
crumpled to the floor.
When I regained my senses there was a inferno in the elevator shaft that was coming into
the elevator.
The fire was coming in, the hot embers were flying into the elevator and it was filling
up with black smoke.
I realized then what the people in Trade Center One, the choice they were making, which was
you'll do anything but burn to death.
It's the most horrifying experience that I've ever faced in my life.
And I remember thinking, well, if I can stand up long enough to breathe in the hot smoke,
I'll die of smoke asphyxiation and I won't know that I'm going to burn to death trapped
in this elevator.
I remember seeing my friend laying on the floor.
My pocketbook had fallen on her.
She wasn't conscious.
None of my friends that I was with on 78 made it.
I just couldn't see.
It was so dark.
It just couldn't see anybody.
I couldn't help anybody because I was hurt.
I knew there was a stairwell and I crawled until I was blocked by the elevator banks
and I stood up and fortunately the door opened to touch and the lights were on in the stairwell.
So I basically yelled back that if anybody could hear me, as far as I knew, there was
nobody alive.
And nothing, heard nothing back.
And I proceeded to go down.
I then, I guess, started to look around and realized that the doors hadn't closed all
the way and that maybe I could get out of the elevator.
And I start pulling, but the fire is coming up from the floor and it's singeing my arms
every time I'm trying to do this.
And as I opened the door and I looked forward, what I saw was the whole floor was on fire.
The people that were in the sky lobby, most of them appeared to have been killed instantly.
There were some people who seemed to be alive.
Those that were alive, as we're crawling along, as I'm crawling along, you're touching each
body to see if the person's alive or not alive.
And that's when I met up with Kelly.
That was a miracle because there wasn't many people that made it on that floor.
The first thing I said to her was, I guess, God wants us to live.
Because there's no other explanation for why we were alive that I could see from what we
walked through.
I just held onto Kelly for dear life.
I held onto his belt buckle.
And we just started going down the stairs.
And there wasn't many people going down the stairs.
Kelly and Donna, who was badly wounded, were on their way down out of the smoke and the
flames.
Just below, Mary Joes was about to fall into the arms of a stranger, Eric Thompson, who
was looking up the shattered stairwell.
All I could see was blackness behind her.
The door looked like it was wedged open.
The pipes were down.
There was water running.
The ventilation had fallen.
The sheetrock was laying crumbled.
She was soot on everything.
I just heard someone before.
I heard her before I saw her.
And she's like, is anyone down there?
Can you please come and help me?
I'm hurt.
I don't think I really ever knew how badly I was hurt at all.
I didn't know I had a blow to the head.
I mean, I just didn't know the part of my arm was gone.
I didn't.
I had no idea.
I guess part of it is your systems just take over, adrenaline just keeps pumping, and you
just go.
On this day, strangers rescued strangers.
In the South Tower, on the highest floors, only 17 people are known to have made it safely
out of the building.
Virtually no one made it unassisted.
There would be no emergency help from below.
We entered the stairs on the 84th floor, stairway A, and only went down three floors when we
met a woman and a smaller man, but a very heavyset woman coming up.
And she was insistent, stop, stop.
You can't go down.
We've just, we referring to our associate, we've just come off a floor in flames and
we've got to go higher, get above the smoke.
You can't, and she just wouldn't stop talking and said, no, you got to go up.
And very quickly, 15, 20 seconds into that conversation, conversation, or the debate,
if you like, I was distracted and I heard this banging on the wall and a voice yelling
in the darkness on the 81st floor.
Help, help, I'm buried.
I can't breathe.
Is anybody there?
Help.
And I was able to push the drywall back and get onto the 81st floor.
Just feet away, Stanley Premnath, who survived the plane's impact under his desk, was still
alive.
But he was trapped behind the burning and collapsed walls of his former office.
And I started to crawl and I'm saying, don't leave me to die.
This is Stan from the loans department.
Please help me somebody.
But I could see through this opening.
I said, now you must jump.
You've got to jump over this.
That's the only way out.
He just grabbed me around the shoulder and the neck and he just pulled everything he
got.
I yanked me through that wall.
And what an impact.
I just fell on top of him.
And I hugged that man.
I gave him the biggest kiss and I said, you are my guardian angel.
And he gave me the biggest hug imaginable.
And to break the clench, more or less, I said, I'm Brian.
He said, I'm Stanley.
You know, we're going to be brothers for life.
Back in the stairwell, all the other survivors had decided to go up, including Ron DeFranchesco.
Down was the fire, right?
So we started climbing and climbing and looking for a way out.
And all the doors seemed to be locked.
To go up or go down, Stanley and Brian had the same decision to make.
And we looked at each other and I just instinctively went down.
It was in my mind that, regardless of what that lady had said, that I needed to test
what was below.
I would go down and if we were stopped by something, we were stopped.
But if not, we'd just keep going.
66 floors below, Joe Dittmar was close to the safety of the streets.
There was a guy, a security guy, around the 15th floor.
And he was singing.
I don't even remember what he was singing.
But he was in the middle of singing and then he'd stop and he'd say, you're going to remember
this day for the rest of your life.
Be proud to be an American.
You're going to remember this day for the rest of your life.
No one would know, of course, that time was short and the towers were about to fall.
And as we've seen, complete strangers were thrown together in the most desperate of circumstances.
They would help each other survive.
When we come back, they survived the plane's impact.
But how would they survive the unthinkable, the collapse of the towers?
I just thought that this was going to be a tomb.
I prayed, please God make it quick.
ABC's coverage of 9-11 will continue in a moment.
They were American heroes fighting the war against terror.
But did they bring terror home?
Four soldiers accused of killing their wives.
Friday, what you don't know about the Fort Bragg murders.
John Miller investigates on the season premiere of 2020 Friday.
George Stephanopoulos.
He's never done anything just the same old way.
And Sunday mornings will be no exception.
Starting this Sunday.
It's a new This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Sundays, this is where the news will be made.
Good evening.
I'm Juliet Dragost.
And I'm Lee Van Meet.
And we're back with the 9-11 network coverage of America.
Remember September 11th in just a moment.
First, we want to show you what's happening in our area.
Veterans in West Michigan are paying tribute to all victims and heroes tonight.
This salute was part of a Patriots Day observance at Veterans Memorial Garden.
Veterans laid a wreath on a monument for the September 11th terrorist attack victims.
The gardens now hold the only permanent memorial to September 11th in our area.
Congress signed an amendment to make September 11th Patriots Day back in December.
Most people in West Michigan say they are more patriotic since the September 11th attacks
in our exclusive WZZM 13 news poll taken by SurveyUSA.
77% of people from West Michigan say they do feel more patriotic.
One percent say they feel less patriotic right now.
And 22% say they feel just about the same.
And we will have more local news coverage throughout the night and tonight at 11 o'clock.
We return now to ABC's special coverage of Remembering 9-11.
ABC News.
9-11 continues.
Once again, Peter Jennings.
Welcome back.
In the next half hour, we're going to continue our moment-by-moment reconstruction, which
we did with USA Today, of what happened inside the Twin Towers in the final moments before
the buildings fell.
The fires in the highest floors were out of control.
Rescue to those floors was impossible.
No skyscraper had ever collapsed because of fire, no matter how severe.
So how could anyone expect it now?
In the South Towers 78th floor sky lobby, those survivors nearest the stairwell who
could walk were now heading down.
But many more people lay there in shock and in need of help, including Ling Young.
We can't find the stairs.
We're afraid to move because I don't know how safe the floor is, so we decided, you
know what, we're just going to sit around.
We're going to wait for help.
And that probably is a good 10, 15 minutes.
Into this desperate place, another stranger arrived wearing a red bandana.
There's a man who came up out of nowhere, say, hey, I found the stairs, follow me.
So we walked down about maybe, I don't know, maybe like 10 or 15 floors.
And I really turned around, I saw him carrying another woman in his back.
He dropped the woman down and he said, you know, you got to walk because I'm going back
upstairs.
And that's the last time I saw him.
There was just this guy and I don't know who the guy is that was just in the doorway.
And all you heard him say was over here.
The door was open and you could see a light.
Over and over, there are reports of one man systematically pulling people to their feet
and heading them down the stairs.
The man in the red bandana, that would be Wells.
That would be the way he would react.
Wells Crowther, a securities trader on the 104th floor.
He had been a volunteer firefighter since he was 16.
He always carried a red bandana in his back pocket, like his father.
When Wells' parents heard the stories, they knew.
When I heard the man in the red bandana, it went straight to my heart and I just knew
inside.
Stepping in out of nowhere and rushing and calling for a fire extinguisher and carrying
a victim down to clear air, it just, I just knew it was our son.
In the months afterward, a photograph was circulated among the 78th floor survivors.
At least two people identified him.
His face is always in my mind.
A young kid, short hair, husky.
When I saw the pictures, that's it.
In the last hour of his life, Wells Remy Crowther, he was a firefighter, which is what he wanted
truly to be doing.
Months later, Wells Crowther's body was found in the remains of the South Tower lobby with
a group of lost firemen.
The stairwells above the floors where the plane hit were now thick with smoke and virtually
impassable.
Ron DeFranchesco, who had climbed up seeking clear air, was now desperately climbing down.
On the 78th floor in the one stairwell that had not been destroyed, he laid down gasping
for air.
Somebody lifted me out of there.
I got up and, you know, felt my way towards the stairwell.
And at that point, I saw all the drywall down there was on fire.
And once I ran past that, the stairwell was clear.
I was by myself.
Though no one could know, the Twin Towers were both perilously close to collapse.
For those still in the building, time was short.
On the 83rd floor of the North Tower, a group including Jonathan Judd and Fred Eichler was
still trapped in the office.
I don't think we could have survived another five or ten minutes in our office.
That's how bad the smoke was getting.
I just did not figure we were going to get out.
And we were just prepared to die, you know, in the office.
I mean, that's what was going through our heads.
I was sitting on a chair and I was facing the door and about 9.30, I spotted this flashlight.
And you could see the beams of light going through the door and it was like a godsend.
And it turned out to be a fireman and a building worker.
I jumped up, signaled them and they did come in and basically rescued us.
Saved by rescue workers who reached the 83rd floor of the North Tower.
Saved by the glass office doors that let them see the flashlight.
Just down the hall, a group of 13 people were trapped inside the offices of General Telecom.
The front doors were wood.
They couldn't see the flashlight.
They were not discovered.
All would perish.
83 floors below, Chris Young, still stuck in his elevator, is desperately trying to
pry open the doors.
They will not budge.
He still has no idea what is going on.
I sat back down on the floor.
I started just humming to myself.
I mean, it did get very boring in there and I would sit there and while I start, I would
start running through, you know, scenarios of what might have happened or whatever.
And I could vaguely hear, not very well, but outside the elevator, I could vaguely hear
sirens.
I heard occasional screams.
I could never make out voices or anything or hear people talking.
Those people who would survive were moving quickly now down to the streets and strangers
encouraged strangers, assisting the wounded, comforting those in shock.
I think we sort of got through it by just kind of calling out floor by floor, you know,
okay, we're at 66, okay, we're at 65, you know, only 63 more to go, you know, 50.
See how many we made.
Floor 20.
I just remembered it was the 20th floor and I just said, I can't do this anymore because
I was hurting so bad and I stopped.
Her arms were severely burned.
Her face appeared to be burned.
She was limping.
Both her wrists looked to be broken.
And Kelly just said, come on, he said, we did all these flights, you got 20 more.
And we just, I says, okay, we just did it.
I knew I was growing tired at times and Eric would, Eric would tell me, you know, he said,
why don't you just sit down?
I think I'd sit down and I go, no, we have to go because there was just something inside
of me.
They kept saying, we have to get out of here.
As we were going down the stairs, I mean, I remember I had tears in my eyes and Fred
Eichler was putting his arm around me, trying to calm me down and he's saying, you know,
what's wrong?
Are you okay?
He really thought, you know, he was never going to, you know, see his baby again.
And I know going down the steps, I, many times I put my arm around them and I said, we're
going to make it, you know, we're going to be okay.
And the people who were going down stayed to the left and the firemen were on the right
side of the stairwell coming up.
And that's, that is a very haunting memory, seeing all those firemen going up the staircases
who were going down, knowing that probably they did not survive.
There was a look at both determination and fear in their faces that I'll never forget.
I see it every day.
Think about it every day.
You know, we definitely wished him Godspeed.
And, but that was like down in the thirties and they were huffing and puffing and I'm
like, you know, we're near where you need to be.
He says, be happy you're going down instead of coming up.
Workers would finally reach the 78th floor of the South tower in time to find people
trapped and alive, but too late to get them out.
On street level, people from some of the highest and most devastated floors were finally out
of the building and into the arms of waiting rescue workers.
I remember as people see us coming, I guess because of the way we looked, you know, Donna,
you know, bleeding, you know, clothes are shredded and blood and debris all through
our hairs and on our feet.
They just part like the Red Sea to let us through.
So when I came out of the building, I think I was just collapsing at that point.
And I remember Dominic carrying me and telling me it's going to be okay.
And I just said, don't worry about it.
You're out now.
I've got you.
I said, if it hurts, just squeeze me.
And she held tighter.
And I said, you'll see your family today.
Don't worry about it.
You're out.
You're going to see your family.
You'll go home.
You'll be okay.
I don't even remember who took me.
I just remember it being someone uniformed.
Mary Joost was immediately put on a stretcher, but not without saying goodbye to Eric Thompson.
And I remember giving him a hug and telling him, thank you for saving my life.
Hang in there, lady.
Ling Yong made it out to the curb escorted by a fireman from the 51st floor down.
All the wounded were quickly loaded into ambulances.
Stanley Premnaf and Brian Clark stared back at the burning buildings.
And he looked through the trees and he said, you know, Brian, he said, I think that tower
could come down.
And Brian had this look in his eyes.
Stan, I told you, steel don't bend.
I'm an engineer.
And we heard this train sound.
It was like steel bending and creaking.
It was like a horrible ghostly sound.
And his building started to sway from side to side.
And I didn't finish the sentence.
And we watched the tower start to slide down into its own dust.
As the South Tower began to fall, Ron DeFranchesco was just reaching the exit.
He is one of the last people to make it out alive.
I looked out to Liberty Street and saw a big fireball coming.
That's all I remember.
Ron DeFranchesco was blown across the street.
He regained consciousness days later in a hospital.
He had a fractured skull and burns over 67 percent of his body.
Inside the North Tower, Fire Chief Rich Picciotto had worked his way up to the 35th floor when
the South Tower went down.
All of a sudden this noise starts, this horrendous, powerful noise.
Kind of just freezes everyone in their tracks.
And we're just looking up because it's coming from above us.
What is that?
The building is shaking.
We're looking up.
We're all just looking at the ceiling.
I'm just waiting for the ceiling to explode.
And then the noise kind of just goes through us.
And then the noise just blows and then it stops.
Out of silence.
George Slay had just come down all the way from the North Tower's 91st floor.
All the lights went out and I was blown across the concourse.
Just the force of what I imagine a tornado would be.
He was able to stay on my feet and was enveloped in a huge cloud of dust.
And I thought my life was over at that point.
And again I just prayed to God to spare me and in his mercy he did.
Within the space of a hundred minutes, George Slay had survived the crash of a plane just
20 feet over his head and now the collapse of a skyscraper at his feet.
Chris Young was still in his North Tower elevator.
He did not know what had just happened, but he had heard it.
First it started just as a rumble.
I could sort of feel it shaking into the elevator.
It made the elevator just increasingly shake and shake and shake.
And then it was followed by this gust of wind that started just pressing in just these massive
amounts of dust and through the side cracks of the doors.
And at that point I did just sort of ball up totally on the floor with the shirt around
my head because I didn't know what was going on.
When the South Tower collapsed, the fire department ordered the evacuation of all rescue personnel
from the North Tower.
I took the bullhorn and I went to all three stairwells and yelled up and down, we're evacuating,
we're getting out, this is the fire department, we're getting out.
Finally the power just goes out.
There was no particular event that preceded it, but just the power goes out in the elevator,
goes dark for a second and then emergency lights do come on.
For one last time, Chris Young goes to the elevator doors and tries to pry them apart.
And suddenly they open to the lobby of the North Tower.
It was just, well, I mean, I didn't know what to make of it at the time, but just a very
surreal scene with everything of the lobby just completely debris strewn and just inches
of this sort of grayish pinkish dust was everywhere all over the place.
And there was no one in the lobby, but then outside the building I saw two firefighters
and I just yelled out to them, you know, where do I go?
And one of them turned back and looked at me and just sort of motioned me over with
his hand.
And then I took a look up the tower and all I could see was the smoke coming from the
upper floors and fire shooting out.
And I just let out, oh my God.
But the firefighters just sort of jerked me then and said, come on, we've got to go.
Just as Chris Young got out of the building, the North Tower began to collapse.
The fire chief, Rich Picciotto, was still on the sixth floor.
All of a sudden that noise starts again.
That horrendous noise from the last time, this noise, now it's intensified a hundred
times.
The building is shaking like crazy now.
You just knew it was going to be on you in a matter of seconds and it was.
I tried to run down the stairs and fell down and tried to get up and fell again, tumbled
and then I had this falling sensation.
And then a couple of seconds later, deathly silence again.
Black, silent, black, and I'm covered with dust, debris.
But I realized I was alive.
So I just called out, is there anyone else here?
And I started hearing, yeah, I'm here.
I'm here too.
You know, from both above me and below me.
In the rubble of the North Tower, part of one stairwell had remained intact.
Fourteen people, twelve of them firemen, had survived there.
But they were trapped, including Captain Jay Jonas, who was on his radio.
I said Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, lot of six to command post Mayday.
And Deputy Chief Tom Harring answers, go ahead, lot of six.
This is a lot of six.
We are in the North Tower, Tower number one, in the B stairway, and we are trapped between
the second and fourth floor.
I get choked up every time I talk about this, but I remember Cliff Stapner in particular
getting on the radio and saying, we're coming for you, brother.
We're coming for you.
And they were.
The Army of the New York City Fire Department was coming to get us.
Being realistic, I said, well, there's no way they're ever going to find us.
There's a hundred stories of debris on top of me.
I just thought that this was going to be a tomb.
I prayed, please God make it quick, and it didn't happen.
For three hours, the firemen waited in the darkness.
And then the smoke and the dust of the collapsed tower began to settle.
I'm just laying on my back there and looking up, and all of a sudden I could see a little,
like from black, I could see a gray area.
And then it's getting a little bit brighter and a little bit brighter.
And I called up, I said, you know, do you guys see that?
What is that?
All of a sudden, a beam of sunshine broke through the dust and it came into the stairway.
And it almost looked like a light from the heavens, literally.
And it just hit me.
And I said, guys, I see sunshine.
There used to be 106 floors above us, and now I see sunshine.
This isn't as bad as we thought.
And I said, we're going to get out of here.
And then I said, Jay, you know, I'm climbing up further to the light.
And I climb up, and all of a sudden I'm on this pile of debris.
But I'm out.
You can see the sky.
All I could see was devastation, what you would picture a nuclear attack to be like.
Just burning buildings and just steel and rubble.
They still had to climb out, a dangerous journey that would take hours.
You have all this twisted steel and ripped steel, which is all very sharp and jagged.
And all of it's coated with this dust, which makes it very slippery.
It's almost acting like talcum powder.
Every once in a while, I say, come on, boys, keep going.
Keep going.
I says, you don't have to move fast, but you got to keep going.
The final obstacle, a three-story deep trench of twisted steel that they must cross.
And they were like, oh, we got to climb up the other side of that.
I says, yeah, your wife and kids are on the other side of that trench.
Just keep going.
Keep going.
I was able to see all my guys go up over that hill.
And I got to send them home that day.
None of the survivors who gave us their time claim they have fully recovered.
The past year has been harder than they imagined.
It's like my shadow.
It's never going to go away.
It goes with me every place I go.
It's the first thing I think about in the morning.
It's the last thing I think about at night.
Every time that I've looked at a plane, every time that I've seen an aircraft, I have to
watch that plane until it's passed and it's gone.
Every day is a struggle.
I miss laughing the way I used to.
As I walk to work every morning, the first thing I do is look at the skyline and see
if all the tall buildings are standing.
And then not walk by them.
I went to war and I didn't ask to.
I wasn't trained for it.
I wasn't prepared for it.
And to be thrown into that, you know.
It's tough to live with every day.
The lives of most of the World Trade Center survivors we met have returned to normal as
much as that is possible.
Most of them are back at work and pursuing careers that were so horribly interrupted
a year ago.
After eight operations, Ling Young is still working full time on her recovery.
Mary Jost has had three operations so far, as has Donna Spera, who has never set foot
back in New York City.
Fred Eichler's insurance business did not survive the destruction of that day and he's
still unemployed.
Kelly Ryre is now married.
His first child, a baby boy, is due at the end of November.
The fire department captain, Jay Jonas, was promoted to battalion chief five days after
the Trade Center disaster.
John DeFranchesco tried to continue working in the shadow of ground zero this year, but
he has recently moved with his family to Canada.
Been a tough anniversary.
We want to thank all those people who took the time to share their stories with us.
It meant a great deal to us.
Our coverage will continue.
ABC News, 9-11, will continue.
I pray you'll be our eyes And watch us where we go
And help us to be wise In times when we don't know
Let this be our prayer Let this be our prayer
When we lose our way Guide us through each day
Lead us to our place Guide us with your grace
Give us faith so we'll be safe
From ABC News, this is 9-11, an ABC News investigation.
How secure are America's borders and ports?
We're doing everything we possibly can to keep terrorists and terrorist weapons out
of this country.
We put them to the test.
This shouldn't get through.
It's just been working.
ABC's Brian Ross with an exclusive report on the threat of nuclear terrorism.
What he discovered will astound you.
The questions Americans want answered.
Where is Osama bin Laden?
And how dangerous is Al-Qaeda one year later?
Now reporting, Peter Jennings.
The commemoration continues here in New York City and many other parts of the country.
Earlier this evening in Lower Manhattan, the New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and a New
York firefighter lit the eternal flame at the sphere in Battery Park City down at the
southern end of the city.
And the Secretary of State Colin Powell was there with the Secretary General of the United
Nations Kofi Annan.
The General Assembly of the United Nations is of course meeting here this week.
All sorts of international leaders have gathered here and have been here in part for this commemoration
and will be there at the United Nations on Thursday when the President speaks to the
world in the General Assembly.
President is now going to talk to the country.
He has been, if you've seen much of the coverage today, he's been everywhere.
He was here in New York late this afternoon and has stayed here for this evening.
He was at the Pentagon today.
He began the day with a moment of silence at the White House.
He went out to Shanksville in Pennsylvania.
He has done today to the applause of everybody who has watched him what the Commander in
Chief has called on to do on occasions like this and that is to comfort people.
He spent an enormous amount of time here in New York and certainly in Shanksville, particularly
in Pennsylvania with the families of those people who died.
And now he has gone in this nation of immigrants to Ellis Island, which seems suitable this
evening to make a brief address to the nation, helping us of course recall how essential
he was to the national recovery exactly one year ago.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President.
Good evening.
A long year has passed since enemies attacked our country.
We've seen the images so many times they are seared on our souls.
And remembering the horror, reliving the anguish, reimagining the terror is hard and painful.
For those who lost loved ones, it's been a year of sorrow, of empty places, of newborn
children who will never know their fathers here on earth.
For members of our military, it's been a year of sacrifice and service far from home.
For all Americans, it has been a year of adjustment, of coming to terms with the difficult knowledge
that our nation has determined enemies and that we are not invulnerable to their attacks.
Yet in the events that have challenged us, we've also seen the character that will deliver
us.
We've seen the greatness of America in airline passengers who defied their hijackers and
ran a plane into the ground to spare the lives of others.
We've seen the greatness of America in rescuers who rushed up flights of stairs toward peril.
And we continue to see the greatness of America in the care and compassion our citizens show
to each other.
September the 11th, 2001 will always be a fixed point in the life of America.
The loss of so many lives left us to examine our own.
Each of us was reminded that we are here only for a time.
And these counted days should be filled with things that last and matter.
Love for our families, love for our neighbors, and for our country.
Gratitude for life and to the giver of life.
We resolved a year ago to honor every last person lost.
We owe them remembrance, and we owe them more.
We owe them and their children and our own the most enduring monument we can build.
A world of liberty and security made possible by the way America leads and by the way Americans
lead our lives.
The attack on our nation was also attack on the ideals that make us a nation.
Our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious because every life is the
gift of a creator who intended us to live in liberty and equality.
More than anything else, this separates us from the enemy we fight.
We value every life.
Our enemies value none.
Not even the innocent.
Not even their own.
And we seek the freedom and opportunity that give meaning and value to life.
There is a line in our time and in every time between those who believe that all men are
created equal and those who believe that some men and women and children are expendable
in the pursuit of power.
There is a line in our time and in every time between the defenders of human liberty and
those who seek to master the minds and souls of others.
Our generation has now heard history's call, and we will answer it.
America has entered a great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve.
Our nation is patient and steadfast.
We continue to pursue the terrorists in cities and camps and caves across the earth.
We are joined by a great coalition of nations to rid the world of terror.
And we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass
murder.
Now and in the future, Americans will live as free people, not in fear and never at the
mercy of any foreign plot or power.
This nation is defeated tyrants and liberated death camps raise this lamp of liberty to
every captive land.
We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying
to murder their way to power.
They are discovering, as others before them, the resolve of a great country and a great
democracy.
In the ruins of two towers, under a flag unfurled at the Pentagon, at the funerals of the lost,
we have made a sacred promise to ourselves and to the world.
We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure.
What our enemies have begun, we will finish.
I believe there is a reason that history has matched this nation with this time.
America strives to be tolerant and just.
We respect the faith of Islam, even as we fight those whose actions defile that faith.
We fight not to impose our will, but to defend ourselves and extend the blessings of freedom.
We cannot know all that lies ahead.
Yet we do know that God has placed us together in this moment to grieve together, to stand
together, to serve each other in our country.
And the duty we have been given, defending America and our freedom, is also a privilege
we share.
We're prepared for this journey.
And our prayer tonight is that God will see us through and keep us worthy.
Tomorrow is September the 12th.
A milestone is passed.
And a mission goes on.
Be confident.
Our country is strong.
And our cause is even larger than our country.
Ours is the cause of human dignity, freedom guided by conscience and guarded by peace.
This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind.
That hope drew millions to this harbor.
That hope still lights our way.
And the light shines in the darkness.
And the darkness will not overcome it.
May God bless America.
President Bush speaking from Ellis Island and beneath the shadow of the Statue of Liberty,
which has welcomed so many millions of people to America as he referred to it in this harbor.
Tomorrow is September the 12th, he said.
A milestone is passed.
And the mission goes on.
And certainly life goes on tomorrow.
Tomorrow the President is going to speak to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
That will be the policy speech, if you will.
He'll speak at 10.30 Eastern time.
And we will be covering it live.
President talked about the mission.
Let's talk a little bit more about the American response.
The American response to September the 11th began, of course, in Afghanistan.
There was the highly visible air campaign.
And then there was the war on the ground that was fought for the most part in secrecy.
And it was a stunning military campaign unlike any other in the country's history.
In essence, a group of only 200 American soldiers on the ground guiding massive American air
power defeated an army and toppled a government in less than two months.
To review that portion of the last year, here's ABC's John McCarthy.
October 19th, on a moonless night, U.S. ground forces draw first blood in Afghanistan.
Under the direction of the President, special operations forces, including U.S. Army Rangers,
deployed to Afghanistan.
They attacked and destroyed targets associated with terrorist activity and Taliban command
and control.
It's a highly visible show of force, grabbing for just a few minutes a lightly guarded command
post and airfield 60 miles from Kandahar.
That is, in part, a diversion.
That same night, 300 miles to the north, two special forces aid teams, each with about
a dozen men, are secretly dropped onto remote mountainsides to establish the U.S. military's
first contact with a group of Afghan warlords.
They are known as the Northern Alliance and have been fighting the Taliban for years.
Only now are these American soldiers telling their stories.
They still insist we not use their full names to protect their families from possible retribution.
Everybody knew that as soon as they stepped off that helicopter, you just made history.
Like, man, I can't believe I'm doing this.
I initially thought we may have been off more than we could chew because if you got into
any type of trouble, you weren't getting away.
There's nowhere to go.
Tell them Alpha Team's going up to the top, Robert Team's staying back.
It is the beginning of an amazing military operation, fought mostly in the shadows by
soldiers who grow beards and dress like natives to protect themselves.
What they accomplish will repeatedly surprise both the enemy and American commanders.
While the president was willing to send tens of thousands of troops if necessary, the goal
was to try to fight this war with just a few hundred American soldiers on the ground.
They would work with scattered bands of Afghan militia, trying to forge them into an army
strong enough to topple the Taliban regime.
We are facing somewhere in the magnitude of 50 to 60,000 opposition fighters of all flavors
and stripes that included Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Colonel John Mulholland ran the operation from a base just outside Afghanistan.
We very much understood that this could be a very, very difficult fight against a tenacious
foe.
These elite U.S. troops have never set foot in Afghanistan.
They do not know the languages or the leaders.
Only a handful of CIA operatives are on the ground ahead of them.
But these soldiers, mostly Army Special Forces, make an immediate impression on skeptical
Afghan allies.
What they have is a direct link to American air power.
We were like, where do you want the bombs?
And they were like, yeah, right, like you'd have a plane here in ten minutes.
Ten minutes later, a plane was coming overhead, dropping bombs on them.
You want to talk about immediately establishing rapport with these people.
November 5th.
Just 17 days after U.S. soldiers arrived, the first major offensive of the war begins,
high in the mountains south of the strategically important town of Masarisha Reef.
The terrain was so forbidding and high, you simply couldn't cross it with vehicles.
So we wound up moving on horseback and horseback alone with small donkeys carrying a heavy
American equipment.
Sitting on mountain ridges a mile or less from the enemy, special operations teams using
lasers and GPS coordinates begin calling in airstrikes, methodically shredding the Taliban
front line.
It turns into a rout, a mixture of modern and medieval.
They are amongst the bravest people I've ever seen.
You see guys walking along ridgelines in the snow with no shoes to go to a fight and have
one magazine of ammunition, that tells you something about their level of commitment.
November 10th.
That commitment pays off after five days of intense fighting, Masarisha Reef falls.
News of this victory energizes anti-Taliban forces across the north who have spent years
sitting in trenches begging the U.S. for help.
By now half a dozen Afghan factions in the north have been joined by American teams.
There are still only 75 U.S. soldiers on the ground.
November 13th.
In one incredible 24 hour period, just three days after the collapse of Masarisha Reef,
three major cities fall.
Not in the west, Talaquan in the north, and finally the capital, Kabul.
We pretty much continuously bombed 24 hours a day.
As soon as one left, another one come in.
Sometimes we'd have them stacked up seven deep, you know, just bombing.
November 14th.
The day after Kabul falls, the U.S. sends its first small team into the mountains of
the south, near the town of Tarin Kow.
This is where the Taliban has its roots and greatest strength.
The team is to help a Pashtun tribal leader named Hamad Karzai, who unlike other warlords,
has no army.
We wouldn't have been able to fight with them on our own.
There were about 1,000 Taliban troops, Arabs and non-Arabs and everybody else with them,
and about 100 vehicles that they had.
And we didn't even have 10 vehicles, all of us together.
November 17th.
U.S. aircraft being directed by American soldiers with Karzai, rain bombs on Taliban attackers.
Karzai's small force takes the town of Tarin Kow, the first Taliban defeat in the south.
That really cemented both our rapport with the local Afghanis, and I think it also established
Hamad Karzai as both a leader of the people and as a military leader.
November 25th.
After their sweeping victories in the north, anti-Taliban forces surround the city of Condos.
It falls, creating the largest mass surrender of the war, but it almost leads to a disastrous
setback.
It was difficult to convince our counterparts that these soldiers need to be disarmed, searched,
segregated.
The prisoners, mostly Al-Qaeda, are trucked to an old fortress near Masarisha Reef, but
not all of them are disarmed.
As CIA agent Mike Spann and special forces begin interrogating them, suddenly there is
gunfire.
Spann is killed.
A bloody three-day gun battle erupts.
Most of the Al-Qaeda fight to the death.
I think we're all a little bit amazed at the tenacity that they had displayed and the skill.
It would have been a catastrophic blow, at least at that time, had Masarisha Reef been
recaptured by the Taliban.
The prison revolt is put down, with U.S. airstrikes pounding the prison fortress.
Hundreds of Al-Qaeda and Taliban die, remarkably one surviving prisoner as an American citizen,
John Walker Lynn.
This is the last major battle of the north.
December 9th.
After four days of heavy fighting, Condohar finally falls.
Hamid Karzai, now interim president, enters the city.
People wanted to get in on the fun of the parade or just to see Mr. Karzai or be a part
of this momentous event.
And so by the time we entered Condohar, it was over 100 vehicle convoy.
It was just a madhouse.
Condohar is the last major city in Afghanistan to fall.
The U.S. still has fewer than 200 special operations troops scattered across the country.
1,000 Marines recently arrived have not yet been called upon for any major battles.
It turned out that destroying the Taliban was the easy part.
Finding Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda leadership turned out to be a much more difficult task.
But in less than two months, the Taliban army had been destroyed and the Taliban government
replaced with transitional leaders eager to work with the West.
You should be down like this.
Never before had special operations teams played such a huge role in an American war.
They turned ragged bands of Afghan militia into a conquering army.
What these U.S. soldiers did, promises to reshape how America goes to war for decades
to come.
John McQuethy, ABC News, the Pentagon.
Well, John really said it there as far as Osama bin Laden is concerned because that's
turned out much differently than people had anticipated.
Today, even on the anniversary, there were rumors, on again, off again, he's alive, he's
dead.
As nobody really appears to know.
A year ago, bin Laden was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list.
He was in Afghanistan.
He was moving between a series of bases.
He was protected by the Taliban, guarded by his hundreds of followers.
But now here we are a year later.
And as we said, the situation inside Afghanistan is very different.
But what becomes, sorry, what became of bin Laden is still very much a mystery.
Much more, however, is known about Al-Qaeda.
So a year later, this question, is the terror network to which everybody refers still capable
of hurting the United States?
Here's ABC's John Miller.
With its camps destroyed, its leaders on the run, Al-Qaeda is down but not out.
Just look at the number of attacks since last September 11.
In Tunisia, a synagogue bombing kills 19, including 14 German tourists.
A suicide bombing in Pakistan kills nine French naval technicians.
Also in Pakistan, an attack on a church near the U.S. Embassy kills five.
Last week, a car bomb outside an Afghan government building kills at least 15.
Hours later, an attempt to assassinate Afghan President Karzai by a member of his own security
team.
Officials in Afghanistan believe elements of Al-Qaeda are behind each of the attacks.
If bin Laden's control of the terror network has been broken, who is calling the shots?
Control and command has taken a different form.
Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside Al-Qaeda, has interviewed dozens of Al-Qaeda operatives.
He warns of what he calls super cells that don't need to wait for orders.
Al-Qaeda cells outside of Afghanistan have become semi-independent and independent.
These cells are mostly operating on the principle of opportunity, not on the principle of planned
and prepared attacks.
And it is these cells that pose the maximum risk.
In fact, while speculation on bin Laden's fate continues, there is no doubt that the
most dangerous men in Al-Qaeda, men who have already carried out major attacks, are still
out there.
Like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected designer of the 9-11 plot, Abdulkarim al-Nasser,
the suspected boss of the cell that carried out the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen,
Fasool Abdallah Mohammed, the man who organized the simultaneous bombings of two US embassies
that left 224 dead, Saif al-Adl, bin Laden's chief training officer and part of Al-Qaeda's
top command, all still at large and with an army of supporters in cells around the world.
In Europe alone, Al-Qaeda cells have been broken up in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the
French, France, and Germany.
But Al-Qaeda cells have been identified in virtually every part of the world.
And since 9-11, 2,400 Al-Qaeda suspects have been rounded up in 95 countries.
How many more are there out there and in what countries?
I've seen estimates from the few thousands to several thousands, tens of thousands.
The fact is we don't know.
And how many of them are here?
ABC News has learned that national security agency intercepts of suspected Al-Qaeda communications
show a significant number of telephone calls coming from the United States to suspected
Al-Qaeda telephone numbers overseas.
The callers are using public telephones and prepaid calling cards, making tracing their
identities virtually impossible.
The calls have come from cities across the country.
When Al-Qaeda identifies the gaping holes in the post-9-11 security architecture, then
they will penetrate and they will strike again.
Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff is running the Justice Department's investigation
of Al-Qaeda.
What has the government learned from all the searches?
From all the seizures of Al-Qaeda documents and films and tapes.
First of all we get specific intelligence.
We learn about the identities of people who are part of a network.
We learn a little bit about how they've obtained weapons or the kinds of communications, techniques
they use and things of that sort.
At another level we learn about tradecraft.
These Al-Qaeda training video tapes recently obtained by ABC News offer a chilling example
of that tradecraft.
The tapes were reportedly made at the Mir-Bakat training camps an hour north of Kabul.
They show Al-Qaeda members training to conduct assaults on buildings, to take hostages, to
plan and then conduct attacks on motorcades.
Almost more disturbing than the content of these tapes is the fact that to date Al-Qaeda
has not used any of these scenarios.
The tapes were made just a few months before September 11th, which raises the question,
do these tapes show the actual training for an attack that has not yet been launched?
You have to be concerned about people who may have gotten their orders six months or
a year, two years ago and are now in the process of operating almost on their own trying to
execute their plans.
So the good news Peter is their bases have been destroyed, their command and control
interrupted.
The bad news of course, their forces are scattered and now harder to track.
I sometimes wonder to be just a little bit skeptical, maybe even cynical, whenever officials
talk about terrorism these days everybody gets under the Al-Qaeda umbrella.
A lot of that is wrong and then a lot of it is right because even other independent groups
who have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda's command and control as you go through them you find
many of their members trained in the camps and that's how they get lumped together.
Some progress today in Baltimore.
Very interesting developments being watched very closely by the FBI and Baltimore police,
eight men found in an apartment, a search warrant executed on their computer today shows
not only were they dealing in false identification, forged passports, but they spent a great deal
of time on the internet looking into flight lessons and renting small planes.
Thank you John.
Thank you.
Which brings us of course to the overall question which it's obviously appropriate to ask on
the anniversary, are we safer now?
Listen to John's report, you listen to other terrorism experts, you hear government officials
telling us that what worries them most is this threat of nuclear weapons or dirty bombs,
radioactive bombs in the hands of terrorists.
We're told in the course of the last year that Osama bin Laden has been trying to obtain
nuclear material.
Our investigative unit wanted to conduct an important test.
They have spent several months carefully designing a safe and yet valid test of the system that
is supposed to protect us.
I have to tell you, you will not like what you see.
Here's ABC's Brian Ross.
On the 4th of July in a train station in Europe, this suitcase was being carried down the platform
to begin a secret journey.
Its destination, the United States.
Its contents shielded by a steel pipe with a lead lining, this black cylinder, 15 pounds
of uranium.
It is the kind of material that if highly enriched would by some estimates be half enough
for a crude nuclear device and more than enough for a so-called dirty bomb, the nightmare
scenario for American authorities.
The single most urgent threat to Americans today is the threat of nuclear terrorism.
This uranium was not highly enriched and therefore not dangerous, but similar in many other key
respects.
In other words, what scientific experts told us would be perfect for an ABC news investigation
of whether American authorities in fact could stop a shipment of radioactive material that
to the human eye or to an x-ray scanner would give the same signature and would look no
different than the real thing.
A perfect mock-up.
It replicates everything but the capability to explode.
Our project was designed with the help of three of the world's leading authorities on
nuclear terrorism.
Dr. Thomas Cochran of the environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which
loaned us the uranium.
This is what they're looking for or should be looking for and this is what they absolutely
have to stop.
Dr. Fritz Steinhausler of Stanford University and the University of Salzburg in Austria.
We're talking of uranium.
It should be detected for the amount of material that is being shipped.
And Dr. Graham Allison of Harvard University, a former assistant secretary of defense in
the Clinton administration.
What I hope your program will help people do is say, my God, this could really happen.
If this could really happen, there's things we could do to prevent it.
Starting in Austria on July 4th, our test package began its secret journey by rail,
moving through Europe along a route well known to smugglers and police.
First across the border to Hungary.
No checks, but no inspection of the suitcase.
Into Romania through the Transylvania Alps.
No inspection.
Across the fields of Bulgaria, no inspection.
And then in the middle of the night into Turkey, no inspection.
This is precisely the route and the method authorities say has been used in the past
to transport radioactive material smuggled out of the former Soviet Union.
But throughout the 47-hour European rail trip, our suitcase, packed with uranium, sat untouched
on a rack in our cabin.
We saw no evidence of radiation detectors in use anywhere.
That's a pretty good test.
I would have wished or hoped that you would at least have gotten some look.
But there was nothing.
All the way to Istanbul, a city considered a crossroads of the world's nuclear black
market.
A crossroad between a leaking Central Asian region and possibly a receptive Middle East.
And in the last few years, Turkish authorities say they have detected more than a hundred
cases of such attempted smuggling.
Hours after we arrived in Istanbul, our suitcase of radioactive material was being prepared
for shipment to the United States.
Placed inside an ornamental Turkish chest, carefully marked as containing depleted uranium
should inspectors discover it.
The chest was locked and ready to go.
And in the middle of a busy Istanbul street, the chest was then crated.
We ordered a large metal shipping container from a company that arranges shipments to
the U.S.
The crate with our radioactive material was then nestled alongside crates of huge vases
and Turkish horse cars.
If it were a real weapon, you know, that you had managed to get out of the Soviet inventory,
some would fit in this container.
Some actual nuclear weapons.
Battlefield nuclear weapons, an artillery shell would fit fine there.
So it could have just as easily been that as our depleted uranium.
I'm glad it was your depleted uranium.
The company we hired to handle the shipping did not know, nor did they check to see, what
was inside the crate.
The company told us this week they are re-evaluating their practices in light of our report.
Then only five hours after our material arrived in Istanbul, it was in a sealed container,
being trucked across the Bosphorus to the port, a major shipping port to the United
States.
All of this would not teach terrorists a thing.
In effect, we were simply doing what law enforcement officials say Al-Qaeda terrorists have known
how to do for years.
For a decade they've sought nuclear weapons.
I think they're actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
Mr. Bin Laden has said it is his and Al-Qaeda's religious duty to acquire nuclear weapons.
In fact, documents in Arabic seized from one of Osama Bin Laden's top aides five years
ago show how he apparently planned to use shipping containers packed with sesame seeds
to smuggle high-grade radioactive material to the United States.
How long has Al-Qaeda been thinking about this?
A long time.
So your concern is that what we did as a test, they may have already done for real.
They may.
There's no reason to think that they haven't.
The container with our suitcase inside left Istanbul on July 10th, bound for the port
of New York, where U.S. Customs officials very publicly claim they've made huge improvements
to prevent anything radioactive from getting through.
We're doing everything we possibly can to keep terrorists and terrorist weapons out
of this country.
At two in the morning on July 29th, the ship carrying our container, the Singapore Bay,
cleared the Verrazano Bridge and entered New York Harbor.
What looked to be our container, which had changed ships at a port in Italy, could be
seen on the top of the deck, the orange one, second from the top.
Already far too close for comfort for Professor Allison.
A weapon could be armed and ready to fire.
The ship could be the delivery device.
The ship, I think, is one of the most dangerous delivery devices.
Weapon or material in the belly of a ship has been one of the nightmare scenarios for
people that think about how nuclear weapons might arrive in the U.S.
Our ship tied up at the Staten Island dock, where U.S. Customs says it has a state-of-the-art
system in place to detect any radioactive material.
We're doing whatever it takes to screen the high-risk containers.
U.S. Customs Inspector Kevin McCabe, the chief of the contraband enforcement team, did not
know what we had done when he gave us the same demonstration he gave President Bush
earlier in the summer, showing a small radiation pager used by inspectors, which he said could
detect even a shielded, low-level radiation shipment like ours.
So by using this as a prop, we can show you that the radiation pager will detect that
low level of radiation.
In addition, the customs inspector demonstrated a second screening device, an X-ray scanning
machine on wheels used on suspect containers to detect even small items, again like ours,
which look out of the ordinary.
The inspectors should see, even if it was something small, unusual density, unusual,
something not right, and would lead us to strip that container and look.
If we can't tell exactly what's in that container by those screenings, we're going to get into
the container and find out for ourselves.
Yet our container left the port without ever being opened by U.S. Customs.
It had been targeted for special screening, but sailed right through.
And a few days after its arrival in the United States, from a place known for its connection
to the nuclear black market, the container was on the back of a truck headed for New
York City.
Since the material in the container had left Austria 25 days and seven countries ago, it
had gone entirely undetected even after going through the most rigorous screening U.S. Customs
says it has.
We ran it for radiation detection, and we also did a large-scale x-ray.
U.S. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner, who's been pushing for increased scrutiny at the
ports, said his inspectors correctly singled out our container and would have found anything
truly dangerous.
Nothing appeared that would indicate that there was a potential for a nuclear device
to be in the container.
A large piece of metal in the shipment of Turkish horse carts didn't stand out?
Look, I'm not going to get into it.
We have the x-ray pictures.
Could we see those pictures?
Yes, I have.
Could we see them?
I don't think I'm going to share them with you.
So we took our own x-ray pictures with a machine much less sophisticated than that of U.S.
Customs.
And this is what our suitcase looked like.
Like a pipe bomb was inside.
The determination was made that that container did not pose a threat for having, let's say,
some sort of nuclear weapons-grade material in it or a nuclear device.
But the experts we consulted say that without opening the crate, there would be no way for
Customs inspectors to know whether it was low-level safe uranium or the highly enriched,
dangerous uranium used in nuclear weapons.
If you didn't detect this, you wouldn't have detected the real thing.
He missed it, and he's covering up.
Dr. Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council says our test demonstrates an important
shortcoming of the Customs screening process, that the radiation pagers are essentially
useless against well-shielded uranium unless they're right on top of the material.
If you get very close to the device...
That goes off.
It goes off.
You can hear it.
You move away.
It's background levels.
You're not going to hear it.
So, from your point of view, this test stands up, and U.S. Customs just missed it.
U.S. Customs, absolutely.
U.S. Customs missed it.
They missed that.
They would miss the real thing.
Absolutely.
Finally, our container was taken to a New York Port Authority warehouse, Pier Number
1, just across the river from Lower Manhattan at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
When the crate with our material was pulled out, it was easy to see it had never been
open since leaving Istanbul.
Port Authority police are assigned to this warehouse facility, but there are no radiation
detectors here, and no one asked even the first question about the unusual shipment
in a container full of Turkish horse carts.
If that were a weapon and you blew it up, you would have very, very substantial consequences.
You provided an illustration, a vivid illustration, of the fact that this could happen tomorrow.
We're not safe.
Not safe in that way.
Our assignment was to break no law and reveal nothing terrorists don't already know, and
with surprising ease and at a cost of no more than $10,000, we found out just how easy it
would be for terrorists to defeat the system designed to keep dangerous nuclear material
out of the country.
Peter?
It's not a word I use easily, but that's a truly chilling report.
I have a couple of questions.
Customs said, didn't want to talk about it, but said they didn't catch it.
In some respects, given the challenge of all these containers coming to the country, you
can't expect Customs to catch it.
You really can't.
The last line of defense, and what the Customs Commissioner says is needed to do is to push
the line of defense back overseas, where poorly guarded facilities and ports make it easy
for terrorists to do exactly this.
And just to review, there was enough radioactive material in there to do what?
To do nothing.
That was harmless material, but it mimics in many ways the signature you would have
had from the dangerous material, which could be shielded and brought down to the same radiation
level.
So it would have been registered on machines in a similar fashion.
It would have been registered pretty much the same way, and that's why we used it for
the test.
We didn't want to use anything dangerous.
We didn't want to put anybody at risk.
When we first started this project, I remember thinking to myself that, God, they don't want
us to break any laws, and you've made that perfectly clear.
But then in watching it again, I've watched it several times, how do you feel going through
Bulgaria?
What if somebody had stopped you in Bulgaria or Romania, which are very tough countries?
We thought about that.
We thought there'd be a lot of explaining to do.
And were you nervous along the way?
We had documents that would have proven, I suppose, that we were legally entitled to
carry this material, but it was of concern, particularly in Bulgaria and Romania.
Closest call?
No close calls.
I wish I could say there was a close call.
There doesn't seem to be a close call anywhere along the way.
We sailed right through.
Nobody seemed interested.
Thanks, Brian.
Thank you, Peter.
Twenty-five days, seven countries.
Amazing.
When we come back, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, stories from the women and the children.
Left behind.
I'm in a New York state of mind.
And good evening everyone, I'm Lee Vanemene. And I'm Juliet Dragus.
Coverage of America, Remember September 11th on the network will continue in just
a moment, but first we have a look at what's happening in West Michigan. In
Southwest Grand Rapids, a giant cross of light paid tribute to victims of the
September 11th tragedies. This memorial service at the First Assembly of God was
just one of the events held tonight. GVSU also hosted a candlelight vigil on its
Allendale campus. Area police and firefighters were honored tonight in
Walker. The ceremony at the Deltaplex paid a solemn salute to the civil service
workers killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacks. After the
attacks, Walker police raised $50,000 to help a New York City firehouse that lost
many of its men. This morning hundreds remembered September 11th at a ceremony
in Grand Rapids and Navajo Park. The crowd heard music, observed a moment of
silence and laid out mums for those who died. In a recorded message, former
President Ford said the attacks have made the U.S. stronger. And we will have
more local coverage at 11 o'clock. We return now to ABC's special coverage of
Remembering 9-11.
ABC News 9-11 continues. Once again, Peter Jennings. We actually don't know how
much television you have seen today but suspect like many people you've dipped
in and out. Some people we know have been with us for the almost 14 and a half
hours that we've been on the air already. I think what's caught our attention in
the ceremonies today in New York and in Washington and out in Shanksville and a
variety of others around the country that we caught glimpses of was how many
small moments there have been and we want to continue in some respect in that
vein now with small moments. One day at ground zero, ABC's Robert Krowich came
upon a small moment that really does speak volumes. This is about an artist and
the musician and one particularly poignant goodbye.
Last September, New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz came to ground zero with
his big old-fashioned camera and he stayed for months. I'm making a record
artfully, I hope, but nonetheless a simple record of what it looked like to
me. Why was I so trembling when I stood in front of these things? Because the
enormity of it and the complexity of it left me weak and I thought that's the
thing I want to communicate. Joel has taken maybe 4,000 pictures by now. Okay
here's a long shot right now. But there was one in particular that he wanted me
to see. This is one night in October. I was down there, these shadows are some of
the guys from the Austin Explosion Squad. Dusk had just sort of faded, the sky was
kind of plummy and we're standing around. You hear the clanking and banging in the
distance and smoke is rising and it's this kind of drama. We're on a little
hill looking down into the site and suddenly we hear from far away taps.
But the most plaintive wailing taps. I look down there, way down in, there's a guy.
He's got a little American flag stuck to his back. Yeah, this guy right here. And he's
blowing taps on a bugle and it was astonishing.
Because in that amphitheater created by the by the loss of the towers, there was
this tiny sound going out and it was everything. It said it all. Who was this
guy? Well I didn't know. At the time I figured he's a fireman who's come to do
it for his fallen comrades. Turns out he wasn't a fireman. He's a musician.
Dominic De Rossi, born in France, moved to New York. In September he was working on
a Broadway show, Kiss Me Kate. And I freelance with orchestras in New York and
do recording work and your instrument is trumpet. Dominic had this notion. When it
became clear that most of the people who died in this place would not be found, he
decided it would be fitting, even an honor, to come as close as possible to
ground zero with his trumpet and very quietly play taps as a kind of
consolation. But Dominic's a shy man. When he got there he realized it was
embarrassing. He couldn't do it. It felt too pretentious to him. Because you
wanted to make your own private statement, but you didn't want to do it too
loudly. That's right. That's correct. So Dominic with a trumpet in his backpack
carrying an American flag, he looked around for a private place, a little
corner near the site that he could hide in. I was just gonna sort of put myself
in that corner and point my trumpet towards ground zero and play taps there.
But there was no hiding place, none that he could get to, so he went to a couple
of police. And I just said to the officer there, I started telling the story, I said,
you know, I'm a musician. I currently play on a Broadway show. I was in service
and I feel compelled to play taps for the victims. And the cop
responded in the best way. He said, no, I'll take you into the site. Instead of
saying no, you can't come in, he understood. He brought him in, he brought
him all the way down here. To the edges of the pit. And then the cop said, well,
you can play, but first I'm gonna ask some workers on a break to turn down
their radios so you can have some quiet. I said, no, no, forget it. Let's not
bother anybody. I just didn't want to bother them. And he said, well, just
hold on. Just stay right there for a few minutes. And he went over there and talked
to them. Next thing he knows, the workers come up and point to a buggy, like this
one you see right there. And the police officer comes back and he says to me,
said, get in this one. And he gets in the other one. And then some of the other
guys would come up, get in the back on the flatbed. And you're wondering, like,
where are we going? And he says, he said, well, we're gonna take you right in.
Right into the site? Right, right into the site. Had you any expectation? No, no, no,
not, not so ever. And is there smoke all around you? Right, right, we're driving
right through smoke. It's unbelievable. I couldn't believe that there was still so
much. I mean, I could believe you see on TV, but it's, it's, it's nothing could
compare to being there. And it sort of cut my breath away. And then they stopped.
And he said, okay, it's all yours. It's all yours. That's how, that's what he said.
And, and I just, uh. And there he is standing where he never in his wildest
dreams imagined he would be, beside the buggy, the flag off his back. And Joe
Meyerowitz, at that very moment, just happened to be aiming his camera across
the pit.
Just as the place got very quiet.
The men stood and put their hats over their hearts.
Yeah.
From ABC News, this is 9 11. In this hour, extraordinary journeys through
heartbreak and hope. Barbara Walters with an exclusive and intimate look at
the women and children who were left behind. I regret not waking up to say
goodbye. The struggle to rebuild their lives in the midst of a national
tragedy. And Diane Sawyer with the babies of 9 11, 63 children and 61
widows with the courage to go on. My heart will never be complete again.
There'll always be that void in my heart. Their stories will inspire you. The
legacy of the fathers. Life begins again. Now reporting Peter Jennings. As we were
preparing for this anniversary and the anniversary was getting closer, we
wondered, and perhaps you did as well, how it would be for the families. Would
they feel manipulated, violated in some way by all the tension that the media
was going to give them on this given day? Would they feel enriched by all the love
and affection which we have certainly seen the nation offer to them today? As
it turns out, it's a mixture. Some people were deeply moved by the
attention and the appreciation of the country by the president's visit and
felt much better as a result of the day. At least so they told us. And other
people were still very much enmeshed in their grief. Some people simply didn't
come into public at all. Remind me that the British poet Philip Larkin once
wrote, if grief could burn out like a sunken coal, the heart would rest quiet.
If only. Which brings us to Barbara Walters. Thank you Peter. Well we have
seen today report after report on families and survivors of September
11th, but we're going to show you a report now that may have more raw emotion
and rough edges than perhaps we used to. With their permission, we took our
cameras to a blazingly honest group counseling session, sessions more than
one, at the North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center on Long Island. And we
taped sessions at different times with widows and with their children. And then
I interviewed them. It's very rare that groups like this allow cameras. But
these people said that they wanted us to understand what life is really like for
them one year later. What mistakes some of us make in dealing with these
survivors and how their children have been affected. So now firsthand you'll
hear their anger, their humor, and most of all their love.
25 miles from ground zero, a group of women come regularly to a Long Island
Guidance Center. They gather here to talk about the men they lost and the event
that upended their lives. I think I was in denial because it sucks now. Yeah. I
was, I think I was just kind of in a fog and definitely denying it. And now I'm
like out of that denial stage and now it's real and really not coming back.
And that's the worst of it. Somebody asked me what do you miss the most? And that I said,
oh my god, the intimacy of, and I don't mean, well I don't mean the sex, but I don't
mean the sex. I mean just the intimacy to be that close with another person.
All 11 women around this table are mothers and widows. Every one of their
husbands was at work at the World Trade Center a year ago today. I can't
understand. I mean did he jump? Did he fall? Did he burn? Did he scream? I mean.
Can you believe we're talking like this? This is their father. This is our husband.
And we're talking about ashes and body parts and other people's ashes. It's just
sick. You can't, you can't ever get away from those thoughts. I mean you can try
and put it aside, but I find it's always there. I'm always thinking, I wonder what
was happening the last minutes or seconds of Rich's existence. Was he in
pain? If he was in pain, you know, it kills me, you know.
Here at the North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center in Roslyn Heights, New
York, families of September 11th victims get together for something therapists
call grief counseling. By expressing feelings to others that have shared the
same trauma, they can possibly receive comfort and begin to heal. Well, it's worth it.
It'll stay straight. These families are suffering from traumatic grief, which is
different from general bereavement in that they have to not only handle the
distress of separation, but also the distress of the trauma, the way in which
their loved one died. There's the horror of it as well. That's correct. That's
correct. A lot of the women said we had healthy husbands. They went off to work
healthy and they were gone. It's not like losing someone from an illness. This was
also part of an event, a disaster, that changed the reality of this country so
that it isn't like you're grieving for somebody who died in a natural way and
that happens because death is part of life. Now we are living in a country
where not only have I lost someone, but I don't feel safe. The women whose lives
were shattered by that moment in history say that a year later things have only
gotten worse. A friend of mine said, oh we miss you. I said, oh I miss me too. Don't
don't be looking for me anytime soon.
I spoke with these women at the center less than a month ago. And this was a
global thing and we're part of this history. We spoke about the things that
still bother them most. I want to talk about the scenes, the video that's run
again and again of the Twin Towers. How does it affect you now when you see it?
Would you rather they didn't show it anymore? What's your feeling? Don't show it.
No, you just see it all over again. You're watching the moment your husband was killed.
I look and I think, oh my god, my husband's in that fire. I have a picture of him
struggling to open doors that were an opening and that's a horrible picture.
Some people jumped from those burning towers. Would you want to know if your
husband jumped? My husband was afraid of heights. It's kind of funny and ironic
that he worked in the World Trade Center but he didn't like, you know, driving on
the right lane of a bridge or any of that kind of thing so I think he probably
did not jump. I know mine jumped. I guarantee he jumped. How do you know?
Because he was not the type of person to stand around and wait for something to
happen. Does that make you feel better or worse? I don't know. These women say the
rest of us can't really understand what they and their children still deal with
every day. They wanted you to hear their story and for the past six months they
led us into their grief sessions and their personal lives. It's an amazing
emotional journey told largely in their own words.
Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Andrew! Happy birthday to you!
I can sort of push away the grieving for a little while but then it's always
there. I think about my husband constantly throughout each day and I
think the kids do as well. Rob was the kind of guy that just made a point of
being with the kids at all times and birthdays were really
important. He would have loved to have been here.
The Circle Line is taking a group of families out into the harbor and I think
at seven o'clock they're turning on these tribute of lights.
Careful.
Oh there, there.
I forgot your head cover.
Daddy would have liked it. Wait.
My husband Richard worked into World Trade Center, 84th floor. I'm a huge
family man, just wonderful, wonderful person. This might sound strange but I've
been feeling some sort of like shame or embarrassment lately like because of
this situation. I can't, I don't know if it's like ashamed that my husband died
in this way. I go to a cocktail party and I feel like everyone knows that he
died that way and it's, I don't know.
Some sort of injury you feel labeled for.
Right, that you're gonna make people feel sad.
That makes you feel very uncomfortable.
Do you think it's shame?
Maybe that's the wrong word.
Just open.
Everyone knows everything.
There's no shield.
And I find now that I'm saying no to more social situations.
And the isolation is almost a comfort. I find, I find I don't mind being isolated.
I'm more comfortable with that and if nobody else is comfortable with that,
unless they want to see grief, then they don't want to be around it.
You know, that's what you're gonna, you know, at this point, you know,
people think that you shouldn't be grieving, I don't know, because of the time,
but you know.
A lot of people do. A lot of people like, you know, expect, like to go on
and that's it and you know.
Maybe they need to believe that if they were in this situation that somehow
you magically can just get through the pain and go on.
That's it. The only people who know, the people who are going through it with us,
that's really the problem.
My name is Jamie and I'm five years old and my dad's name is Jimmy.
Good job, Jamie. Good job.
Jimmy was a great husband and dad and he loved spending time with the four girls.
Just his big hands on dad.
My dad used to take us to church every Sunday, so we haven't been there since
his memorial, which is in November.
I was just gonna ask you, do you miss going?
Yeah, but my mom doesn't like want people staring at her.
Yeah, she doesn't want everyone staring at her.
All four wearing girls attend counseling sessions with children of the other mothers.
I think everybody in here celebrates Easter.
Let me ask you this, what was different?
Daddy wasn't there.
Okay, but daddy wasn't there, so that means what?
He was kind of quiet.
Oh, he was quiet?
Because daddy wasn't quiet?
My daddy was very loud.
Do any of your dads have a favorite song?
Rock and roll.
Rock and roll?
Do you ever hear Memory Motel by Rolling Stones?
Memory Motel.
I'll sing it if they sing it. You know what it is, right?
I'm not singing it.
I'll sing 3-4-8.
I'm not a Rolling Stone.
You should sing it, Jessica.
You're just a memory
Oh, love, you can see
You're just a memory
What do you have to say?
That it used to mean so much to me
I used to love to look at the skyline.
I don't like looking at it at all anymore.
But it just doesn't look the same.
And now I can't even look at it.
My husband Bruce, who I call Chappie,
had an absolutely incredible zest for life.
His children were incredibly blessed to have had him as a father.
And that day was my 19th anniversary.
September 11th was your 19th anniversary.
It was my 19th anniversary.
So this anniversary of 9-11 would have been 20 years, very hard.
I never thought I'd be traveling to Virginia alone to do this,
but we have to do it.
We're going down to William & Mary just to visit and look around
because I'm thinking about maybe wanting to go there for school.
Pentagon might keep going here.
I don't even know where I'm going.
Wait, this is the Pentagon that got hit?
Oh, wow.
Oh, my God.
I didn't even...
That's where they hit.
Lower the boat.
Oh, my God.
Wow.
Wow.
I always think it's just the world's recent...
Oh, my God.
Wow.
You believe that, Fred?
I always forget about it.
Well, that was really...
That really took me back.
I didn't expect to see that.
I'm getting into that now.
Maybe I'm just overwhelmed with everything.
You get angry when you talk to people that you know worked with him that got out.
I know a guy who worked at Earl Brookes who my husband was friends with,
and he left the minute the first plane, I believe, hit the first building.
And it's very hard for me to talk to him because...
And it's not the guy's fault.
Or even guys that worked lower in that building that he wanted to work with,
and it just didn't work out that he never got to work with them and stuff.
I saw them, and they were doing nice things for me.
They were raising money for my kids, and I was thanking them.
But inside, I was hating them because I just have so much anger,
and it's misplaced, but it's there.
They mean well, but I just like...
I don't want to talk to them.
They're just a constant reminder of what I don't have.
I totally feel it.
It has gotten worse.
Six months came, and I feel like I spiraled downward or took steps backwards.
I don't even know how to describe the feeling, but it just got so much worse.
I can't believe that if there's a God that he could let this happen.
That he would let this happen.
That's exactly it.
I can't believe that.
You have to believe that because there's a God,
he didn't let it happen, but he's given you the tool to deal with it.
It shouldn't have happened.
It shouldn't have happened, and no God wouldn't have let this happen.
He didn't cause it.
I know he didn't do it, but he could have changed it.
He could have stopped it.
I'm sorry.
I know he didn't do it.
I know he didn't do it.
I don't know why God shouldn't stop me, but I feel like the government...
I'm angry at our government.
I feel like Dave.
I'm in the midst of it too, but I'm just going all the way to the top.
I'm just wasting my time.
You're skipping right over, God.
That's weird.
That's weird.
So how about everybody else?
Is everyone else having the same kind of sort of stressful anxiety apprehension?
It's such a hard thing to live with.
It is.
It's constantly in our faces and our children.
They can't escape it.
And your child is taking an SAT test, and every time she looks up,
she sees ground zero and firefighters on the wall
because they're posted in the classroom.
And how is a child supposed to concentrate,
and how are you supposed to go on with your life
when every day you constantly hear it on the news, you read up your newspaper,
and you can't escape it?
You just never escape this.
Every event, it's going to be hard, because last weekend was our dance recital.
Well, they were great.
They danced fine.
They danced great.
But after the dance recital,
the owner of the dance school decided to do a tribute to the 9-11,
which of course was geared to our family because it was our family show.
Everybody was there.
Well, I hate to tell you that my heart broke for them on the stage
because Jessica, Maria, and Jamie were on the stage.
Maria was hysterical.
She had black all over her face with my makeup.
Jessica was hysterical, and Jamie was looking at them like,
what is going on?
They meant it as a tribute to him, but to see them do that,
that's only one thing.
One thing out of their whole lifetime that they have to,
that he's not going to be there for, it just, it was horrible.
What do you remember most about Daddy?
Daddy, I'm doing sign-a-kins.
Daddy doing sign-a-kins?
Okay.
All right.
What do you remember most?
I remember everything.
Everything.
It was fun.
In general, are you mad?
In general, do you feel anger as well as pain?
Yeah.
What gets me mad is people say, I know how you feel.
That just gets me going crazy.
When people say, I know how you feel, because they don't know.
They don't have any idea.
They don't have to live with this.
Do people say that to you a lot?
Yes.
Christina, do you know what you were angry at?
I was angry about that the people knocked down the buildings.
I see.
Do you think it's important that Osama bin Laden be captured?
Yes.
Definitely.
He just deserves to die slowly and painfully.
Yeah.
I feel like torturing him in the worst possible way.
You would like him to feel some of what you're feeling, yes?
Yeah.
We hear a lot about closure, those of you who are older.
You know what I'm talking about.
Do you feel closure at all?
No.
Too soon.
Yeah.
Much too soon.
I feel like I'm never going to feel it.
You're never going to feel it.
It's not just a normal death.
There's no body.
There's no body.
He was murdered.
We didn't know.
Some people know in advance.
We don't know what happened.
We don't know what he was doing.
We have unanswered questions.
How are we supposed to feel closure?
Ali, where's Jackie?
For their counseling, the children are divided into different age groups.
The youngest are six-year-old Christina Bruehurt and five-year-old Jamie Wurring.
Can I ask you if you could have anything in the whole wide world?
Jamie, what would it be?
Wish number one.
That daddy could come back.
I started to feel really bad because just thinking about how little she is with not having a father.
I couldn't imagine myself at that age without him.
Also, there's the fact that they're so young that they don't completely understand death.
She understands it.
She does?
Yes, she does.
She's a smart kid.
Everyone thinks she's five.
She doesn't know anything.
She puts the TV on.
She goes, why are they showing daddy's building burning down?
And then she goes, is daddy dead?
That was the first question she asked.
Everybody was crying and I didn't want to cry.
Why didn't you want to cry, Jess?
Because I felt that I had to be the stronger one because I was the oldest.
We're going to talk tonight about memories and remembering people and the value of that.
So that's why you're going to work on the stones tonight.
And what we'd like you to do is think about when you're decorating the rock,
think about your dad and how would you like that rock to symbolize him?
When are you missing the most?
Holidays.
Holidays?
For Christmas from here, my dad gave me this doll with the heli-gred hair.
And now I sleep with it.
And I made it colorful because he's a colorful person.
I colored the whole rock gold since my dad was like gold to me.
When I knew he was gone, I tried calling the cell phone number again just to see if the cell phone was not crushed.
So I called and it was definitely crushed.
And shaking the mat.
This is a nice thing you can do in the morning when you get up.
You can do it right in your bed.
This brings circulation.
Shoulders up.
Tight, frown face.
Tight, tight, frown face.
Frown face and let it go.
Hot.
With the children, therapists use everything from yoga to songs and games.
The goal is to get them relaxed enough to open up about what's really bothering them.
I regret not waking up to say goodbye.
I keep wondering how I'm going to get to my aunt Patty's house when my mom dies.
Christina, you asked mommy one day what would happen if anything happened to her and she said you would go to your aunt Patty's.
Yes?
Do you worry about that?
Yes, because I'm worried about how I'll get to my aunt Patty's because I don't know how to get to New Jersey freehold.
If something happens to mommy.
Do any of the rest of you worry about that?
Yes.
You do?
Tell me about that, Brittany.
My mom worked in the city and it's just scary thinking about what would happen if she was to get sick or if anything was to happen at work again.
So I don't know what we would do.
Oh those are pretty.
Hey, Belle.
Happy Mother's Day to you.
You can put them right.
Hi, Robin.
Good morning.
Happy Mother's Day.
Normally my husband and kids and I would, you know, this was the day that you could plant, so we'd have all these flats of plants and go crazy planting them all.
Obviously I want the plants to get done, but it would be something that would be kind of a depressing thing to do it without him.
And then these families at my daughter's school said, you know, we're going to come over and we're going to plant for you.
It would be, you know, kind of a sad thing to do and instead it was turned into maybe a new tradition.
He's extra sweet to me.
Poppy.
Tell me how much you love me.
Always love me.
Always love me with hugs and kisses.
My mom's job's gotten a lot harder lately.
She's had to fill up two positions, not just the normal one.
Here, what do you think those are?
So there's one thing that my mom's always pushed me to do, let's go the extra mile.
That's become a way of life for her.
That's what she always does now.
Happy birthday, Jessica Warren, of mom, dad, step three, Jamie and Jane Bobb.
As the nation's heart went out to these families, the children got special attention.
Jessica Waring got VIP treatment from her beloved New York Yankees.
Happy birthday.
How old are you going to be?
15.
There you go.
Thank you so much.
Nice meeting you guys.
Good luck tonight.
Bye.
Bye.
Oh my God.
Thrilled as she was by that day, Jessica knew it probably never would have happened had her father not died so tragically and so publicly.
I have the picture of us and Bernie and everyone who sees it.
They ask, oh, how'd you do that?
And I tell them, oh my God, you're the luckiest person in the world.
And no, I just snap sometimes.
They say, take that back right now.
And then they think, yeah, I told them to take it back.
And then they think and they're like, oh, I'm sorry.
It's like they should really think before they say things.
And like people don't even apologize sometimes.
They don't get it.
Just don't get it.
And they don't know what to say.
Do you usually worry about people forgetting in general?
Yeah.
It's a big one.
And I signed online one day and I got this email from like my friend.
And it said like it was his forward and it was from this kid who lost his dad.
He was like a firefighter, I think.
And he lost his uncle also who was a firefighter.
And he was starting a thing to make 9-11 a day to remember all FDNY and NYPD, not like anybody else.
So then I wrote this long email applying.
I don't think it's fair that you want it to be only for them because a lot of people died that day.
A lot of people were lost.
So you feel like when they don't mention or include like normal people who were working, ordinary heroes,
then they're forgetting them?
Making money for us.
It seems like that.
I don't know if they are forgetting them.
I can see why you might feel that way.
What do you think about the kids who their dad has died because of a heart attack or because of cancer?
How do you think they might be feeling at this time?
Jealous.
Jealous of corporate.
Because they're going through the same thing as we are, and they're not getting any special privileges.
Yeah.
I mean, we get like these meetings.
We get like more than they do.
They may be feeling like their dads are forgotten too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pedicures for problems by night.
What's up?
You're going to be all over the place.
Mom, shut up!
I don't care.
You have to make it clear that at this prom, everybody goes by themselves.
No one takes it.
Otherwise, she said otherwise it's going to look like there's a bunch of, how many people in the limo?
Ten?
Ten losers that have no dates.
Can you hold my hand?
No.
I was thinking of him because he loved the way she looked.
Of course, every father thinks their daughter's beautiful, but, you know, he would have loved the way she looked.
You want me to leave the house off and you're coming home tonight?
No, we're not going to come in.
He's not the type of father, like if you sat here, he would just nod.
And then he would just say, you know, oh, you look nice.
You know, but I know inside that he would have been beaming, you know, at how beautiful she looked.
She always looked beautiful to him.
Did you get it?
Okay.
I was so proud of her and I thought, oh my God, he missed this.
And I was so proud and so upset at the same time.
And so were my friends who were sitting there.
It was just very tough.
Last thing I wanted to hear is somebody complaining about their husband.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I appreciate them.
Because you just don't know what tomorrow will bring.
That's what I always say to friends when they're complaining.
I look at them and I shake my head and I say, yeah, you stop saying.
You know, I wish my husband was taking the toilet seat out.
Does it give you pleasure or pain to talk about your husband's bittersweet?
I think it gives me pleasure.
It brings up all the good funny, crazy things that happened.
And pain.
And pain.
Yeah.
Has therapy helped?
Yes.
Yes, for all of you to be together, to share experiences.
You never miss a day.
It certainly helps to know that there are other people who are going through the same thing.
And we speak a lot about the children, which I think is why most of us came here initially,
is we were able to come as a family, because you don't know what your children are going through.
As part of their grief counseling, the mothers and children gathered together at the center for a special ceremony.
Come on, guys. Come in a little bit.
They have come to place the stones the children had designed in a memorial rock garden.
Small markers for men who have no graves.
Richard Brewer!
Joy Torino.
Rob L'Onoir.
Dad, there hasn't been a day where I haven't thought of you, and there isn't going to be a day I won't.
Charles Winnis.
Is he wearing?
How is it going?
What's going on?
Can you tell us?
Everything.
No, this was very moving.
It was very moving.
You know, because the kids usually don't say how they feel, you know.
And I know they're all in pain, but they don't vocalize it.
It was just, it just, you know, made me realize how much pain they're in.
It was just so sad to see them putting those stones.
Most of them, they don't even have anywhere to go see their fathers.
They don't have any cemetery anywhere to go.
Well, we've been coming here every other week, and they come in so happy, and it's just like a different spot.
And then you really see why we're here.
There it is, on a rock.
The card says, Dear Dad, Happy Father's Day wherever you are.
Hope you have a great day.
Love, Todd.
I wrote that we loved him very much, and we missed him very much.
And I wanted to wish him a very happy Father's Day.
Now?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Now?
Okay.
Well, there it goes.
It looks funny.
It's great.
Some of you who are younger and have younger children, do you think at all, what about the rest of my life?
Can I remarry?
Oh, girl.
It's almost like we're teenagers all over again, you know, and, you know, what do I become when I grow up?
Who am I going to marry?
You know, it's your limbo, total limbo.
I know I would never remarry because I was with him so long.
He's my whole...
I felt like the left side of my body was torn out.
Yeah, that's how we all felt.
I obviously, I had pictured my life very differently.
I had pictured my life to be with Rich forever and to have more children with him.
But I also like to think that maybe at some point in my life, he'll send somebody to me that he would approve of and be very...
He'd be happy that I find happiness again.
Olga, you're wiping your eyes.
I know I often feel pain not just for myself but for everyone that's affected.
And that's what these therapy sessions bring out in us, I think.
Your own emotions and theirs as well?
Mm-hmm.
One stark and final emotional issue continually comes up in group counseling.
It's something they all fear and which four of them have already confronted.
The first detectives came to my house last weekend on a Saturday at noon when my kids were home in the house.
Knock, knock, knock, ring, ring, ring on the doorbell.
Then I walk out and I see these two suited men at the door and they said,
all we can tell you is that it was a DNA match.
They came to the door and they were very nice and I completely fell apart worse than...
It's probably the first time I fell apart and that was in December. It wasn't that close.
When they come to the house they don't tell you what they found.
No, no, they didn't know.
The detectives know nothing. We're sorry, we don't know anything. They say remains.
Yeah, remains. Remains have been found.
Even the funeral director said they wouldn't even tell him whether he had to go with a hearse or he had to go with a baggie.
Yeah, they did tell him.
He didn't know that he had to take a whole hearse in.
The amount that they found was so little.
I didn't say they found daddy. I said there was a DNA match.
My son said, well, oh, mom, I hope they didn't find his toe.
That was his comment.
And it's horrendous that this is a 12-year-old. This is how they're thinking. Right.
This is the reality of the, you know, amazing.
One, two, and three.
Susan Lenora's family and friends gathered on a Long Island beach, a favorite family vacation spot.
I don't know if they'll stand up.
They had come for a special ceremony.
They were here to scatter ashes, the remains of her husband, Rob.
Can you all join us in throwing your flowers into the water?
One, two, three.
I'm proud of you guys. I'm so proud of you.
Come here, honey.
Give me a hug.
It was a ceremony designed by and for one family.
Daddy would have loved it.
One of more than 3,000 families whose lives were changed forever a year ago today.
Summer days among the fields of barley.
See the children run as the sun goes down.
As you lie in fields of gold.
You'll remember me when the west wind moves.
Among the fields of barley.
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky.
When we walked in fields of gold.
When we walked in fields of gold.
When we walked in fields of gold.
Hey, Daddy.
All right, so let's do it one more time.
When we come back, Diane Sawyer with the 63 babies and 61 widows left behind.
The remarkable stories of love, loss and new life.
ABC's coverage of 9-11 will continue in a moment.
I pray you'll be our eyes.
And watch us where we go.
And help us to be wise.
In times when we don't know.
Let this be our prayer.
Let this be our prayer.
When we lose our way.
Guide us through each day.
Lead us to a place.
Guide us with your grace.
Give us faith so we'll be safe.
Tonight on a special edition of Nightline, their job was to guard the Pentagon.
So when the police was hit, they were the first to respond.
Their story tonight.
This woman is in hiding. She says she fears for her life.
Because of the stories she has to tell about Saddam Hussein.
Thursday. Paranoia. Plots. Body doubles. Torture. And George Bush.
Saddam's brutal secrets. She says she knows them because she was his secret mistress.
A primetime world exclusive. Thursday.
Good evening. I'm Juliette Gregis.
And I'm Lee Vanemey. Network coverage of America Remembers 9-11 will continue in just a moment.
But first we have a look at what's coming up tonight at 11 o'clock.
Today President Bush looked back on the September 11th tragedies.
Tomorrow he looks forward in the war on terrorism.
He is expected to lay out his case for an attack on Iraq.
We will talk to our expert about what he's likely to say.
Plus a show of support and remembrance. Area police and firefighters gathered to pay tribute to victims of the September 11th attacks.
We'll take you to the event and we'll tell you how those who serve say their lives and their jobs have changed forever because of that day.
And what was this anniversary like for young people looking ahead to their future?
Tonight we will return to a class we visited last September 11th and see how the worries of these young minds have evolved.
You just might be surprised to hear just how different these students are now.
All these stories and much more on what has happened around the nation and right here in West Michigan.
Coming up on WZZM 13 news at 11 o'clock.
And we hope you'll stay with us. We now return to ABC special coverage tonight of Remembering 9-11.
We'll see you at 11.
Music.
ABC News 9-11 continues. Here again, Peter Jennings.
It's time to consider the future. We know there are people in the country who dreaded this day.
Certainly members of families who suffered so much dreaded this day.
Some of them didn't want to be in public. Some of them felt a measure of gratification being together, but it was very painful.
It was in some ways a relief to hear the president say tonight at Ellis Island of the country, tomorrow is September the 12th, and it's another day.
And he intended to say that the mission against terrorism goes on around the world, but he might also have added, forgive us if we added, for him life goes on as well.
Time, as I said, to consider the future, which brings me to Diane.
I think every time this year I've seen little children, babies on television.
They have been in the company of Diane Sawyer.
And I don't know how many there are, but I was thinking of that remark that one woman you were talking to at one point said about their children.
There are so many newborn children.
We get out of bed every day because it is about them and it is about the future.
That's right. Well, here's how many there are.
There are 61 mothers, 63 babies. That's two sets of twins.
And the baby's, of course, born after September 11th.
So the room was careening between laughter and sadness.
And the women did say that however much they're bound together by their grief, that their husbands left behind 63 reasons to remember to celebrate life.
Out of the shadow of grief, 63 radiant streams of light, wide-eyed, whether cooing, dancing, tender or tumbling, proof that the future cannot be stopped.
We gather them together at the Palm House of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a reason to smile, even when you forget just why.
It would be very easy to just stop, but she wakes up at six, like clockwork every day, and I can't just let her lie there.
The girls keep me going, and once I'm up, I'm all right.
The same way the rest of us exchange pleasantries about the day, these mothers exchange the secrets of a year of mourning.
If someone asks me how I am, I say I'm fine. But fine to me is not the same thing as it is to everyone else.
You go out on the street and you see the happy families together, and you see the fathers with their kids, and that hits me pretty bad.
You know, the word closure should be banished. It doesn't apply.
But today in this room, nothing disturbs the dreams of our 63 babies.
When we decide to try to line up by age, the littlest ones first, the tiniest babies born in just the last few weeks.
They are sleepers, dug in, flopped over, conked out.
As we go month by month next up, the five-month-old babies. They're the munchers.
Hmm, a blanket. Hmm, a shirt sleeve.
Every month has its howlers. Bellowing so loud and dramatically, some of their pals stop to watch and wonder, was it something I said?
By seven months, they're willing to cooperate a little bit in the seating arrangement to get their picture taken.
But when you get to the oldest babies, they're crawling, so forget about it. We catch and return, catch and return.
Oh no, there goes another one.
These three oldest babies were all born on the same day, September 13th.
And as we look around the room, we notice something startling.
It's true that babies often resemble their dads, but it's eerie how much these faces are the echo of their fathers.
One woman said to her baby, you are the kiss your father left behind.
Little Daniel Sulas not only looks like his daddy, he also looks like his five brothers and sisters.
And you have six. He's my sixth. Yes, he's my fifth boy.
Stop. But back when Katie's husband, Tim, was taking these home movies, they only had four.
Let's go. Merry Christmas. Tim was one of six children and one of the large family.
He's best friends with his brothers and sisters. So I agreed. I thought that's a great number.
After four, I thought I had enough. But once my quirk got out of diapers, I was ready for more. I just love babies.
Tim Sulas knew he was about to get his half dozen at last.
But Francisco Liriano, with all his vitality, asked his wife Shirley to wait a day or two to take her pregnancy test later.
But instead, by then, she would be searching for him day and night.
Every single day. I would leave at eight o'clock in the morning and would get home back until two.
Finally, she took her pregnancy test alone.
I was determined then to find him. I was like, you wanted this, so you have to be here.
We collected the home videos of the newly arrived babies at the hospital, the photos friends and family took instead of Dad.
I had said to all my friends, I think it will be the second worst day of my life.
I had a natural childbirth, so I felt the pain. It was a cathartic release for me about the anger that I have about my husband's death.
I went in alone because I felt that no one can replace him.
I mean, I screamed so loud, I shocked myself.
I felt Tim holding my hand. So he was with me.
On the way to the hospital, I said a little prayer to Pat and I said, don't make this hard on me, any harder than it already is.
I knew he was there. I knew he was there.
Barbara Atwood says she felt her firefighter husband, Gerald, was near.
It was his son being born. He had to be there.
What a beautiful baby.
Hi, look, we have a new baby. Margaret.
The two other children, Gerald Jr. and Maggie, come to meet baby brother Robert for the first time.
What's that?
Gerald, what do we have here? What do we have, Margaret?
Babies.
We have a baby.
Say hi to Robert.
Say hi.
Isn't that a baby? Where's his nose?
Where's his mouth?
What a good girl.
So many of these women told us the hardest moment was bringing their baby home from the hospital.
It was hard.
They were here and they were real excited to see her and they were excited that she was finally home, but it was hard.
Sixty-one doors open with no husband on the other side. Sixty-one hearts breaking.
But again, they had sixty-three reasons to go on.
Nice and clean and warm.
My little boy.
Oh, yes.
I think this is our first walker. I do. I think you are.
Our oldest baby by a few hours, Farhad Chowdhury, is the first one trying to walk.
Yes.
Oh, Mary, good.
Farhad's mother is also trying to take a big step for the first time.
She's a devout Muslim from a traditional family in Bangladesh,
married to a physicist who could only get a job as a waiter at Windows on the World.
But just a few months ago, she learned to drive, a huge break with her conservative tradition.
She took the road test, knowing that her husband would have been so proud.
You did fine. They'll send the permanent license to your home automatically. That takes about three weeks.
So it's not necessary to go into motor vehicles.
Okay? All right?
I'm going to need your signature.
Okay.
That's so funny.
That's so funny. All these women holding babies, everybody swaying.
Back at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, it's the universal dance of motherhood.
Rocking, soothing, comforting, bonding mother and child, uniting mother with mother.
Mother as a cradle, a perfect counterpoint to dad.
Dads like Craig Staub, who was a big, blonde, handsome devil of a guy,
the life of the party who had that certain way of throwing back his head to laugh out loud.
The beginning of August, trading at $31, now trading at something like $26.
The morning of September 11th, he was broadcasting from the 89th floor of Tower 2,
this just minutes before the attack.
Stacey Staub says she'll make sure little Juliet knows her father.
Who's that? Who's that?
Little Maggie Atwood also keeps her dad near in a favorite drawer.
That's the safe place for her to put him away and take him out.
There he is.
That's your daddy.
Daddy.
Daddy.
I've seen their loss as like a stone hitting water.
There's a huge ripple effect that I think we're looking for all the goodness in people that we can find
and that the terrorists truly didn't succeed in their mission in trying to hurt us
because they've made us stronger and more determined than ever.
That peace and courage is foremost over hatred.
Little voice came on the phone.
He said, daddy, when you come home, he said the first thing that came to his mind.
I'm already there.
Take a look around.
I'm the sunshine in your hair.
I'm the shadow on the ground.
I'm the whisper in the wind.
I'm your imaginary friend.
And I know I'm in your prayer.
A legacy of love.
Anyone looking for a monument to the dads lost on September 11th?
Look around.
Take a look around.
The monument is here.
I'm the sunshine in your hair.
I'm the shadow on the ground.
I'm the whisper in the wind.
I'm your imaginary friend.
And I know I'm in your prayer.
Oh, I'm already there.
Oh, I'm already there.
And so we come to the final few minutes of a long broadcast day,
and I want to thank Charlie and Diane.
Particularly, we started with you a year ago on this, on our coverage,
and we started again with you today,
and also John Miller and Barbara Walters for staying around.
When I first heard we were going to do 15 hours, I don't know what you thought,
but I had at first, oh, God, that's too long,
and I'm sure that there's some people out there still who think it's too long.
Then I thought it wasn't enough.
Indulge me if I, and I've read so much,
and you've all read so much and talked to so many people,
indulge me if I ask you to think about and contemplate three quotes.
Time Magazine said in its summary, nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
Charles Krauthammer, writing in The Standard, said, we didn't change.
National character does not change in a day.
And an editorial in The New Republic said, well, how could the country not change?
Diane, why don't you start us off.
Where are we in the final analysis?
I just keep thinking of that famous T.S. Eliot poem,
which is all great journeys end where you started,
but you know the place for the first time.
And in that sense, we've been very far and come back and know ourselves in a new way.
So you think there's a real heightened awareness by Americans of America a year later?
Of American strength.
And, you know, it's very easy in a country,
which has had so much prosperity, to forget the core muscle,
the core sense of what we can do when we are arm to arm and shoulder to shoulder.
And we won't forget that now.
Barbara?
Well, you know, ever since a year ago, we've had a kind of dichotomy.
One is we have to remember.
We have to fight.
We're at war.
The other part of it is we have to go on as we are, right?
We have to live our lives normally.
So I think all of us have been dealing with these two things,
and they're both very important.
Yes, we've changed.
We have fear.
We have some fear of flying.
Some of us have little kits, I don't know, with bottles of water and flashlights, so on.
Some of us don't.
But on the other hand, we are living our lives fairly much,
except for these people that we saw, the way we did before.
I always say when people say, do you have a saying that I always say, this too shall pass?
No, this too shall not pass, and it shouldn't.
John Miller, you have been so involved in the reporting of all this before September 11th.
Of course, what's your own view about whether we've changed or not?
Well, I've said things will never be the same, and I believe it.
And I saw Jimmy Breslin, who is the quintessential New Yorker and writer, give a talk.
He started off by debunking that by saying, everything always goes back to being the same.
The kids go to school.
You get invited to a party, and you have a good time.
The world keeps turning.
We get past anything.
It's just not the same for me yet.
Charlie, I don't want to send you unnecessarily in a particular direction,
but some things have changed.
We have, for one thing, given up some of our civil liberties in the name of security.
Well, I think there's profound change.
I want to come back to the quotes.
You know, the Vice President, Dick Cheney, at the Al Smith dinner here in New York,
which is always a night of levity, but he gave a very serious speech many months ago.
And he said, we're at war, and in this war there will be more casualties on domestic soil
than there will be overseas.
And that's a profound thing to think about, because it is a change in the way we approach daily life.
And it has occurred to me ever since September 11th that whenever you go through a tunnel,
whenever you put your child on a school bus, whenever you get on an airplane,
whenever you go to a football stadium, it is a small act of courage,
because there is always that what if, and it's in our minds.
And it's in my mind every time my youngest daughter who lives here in New York says to me,
Dad, I'm going to get in the subway and go, and I think she's getting on the subway.
Okay? And you breathe a little deeper.
And whenever you hug those kids, you just think, you just think about the way life has changed.
I don't mind who takes this up. Sorry.
I was just going to say, we have an audience at Good Morning America,
and so many times they come on September 10th and September 11th, they've come this year.
So many times they tell us they came because they think they're soldiers in a war, too,
and that by coming to New York, they're also striking their blow.
Two major American newspapers today, I pointed out earlier on the broadcast,
have very, very strong lead editorials about the giving up of civil liberties in the name of security.
Who's going to take this on to start with? John?
Well, it's a pendulum that swings.
Certainly, police are looking at things they wouldn't have noticed before.
Federal agencies are taking people into custody for things they wouldn't have locked them up before.
You can pick up people on an immigration warrant and almost hold them indefinitely
without charges or evidence or information while you investigate who they really are.
A lot of that is going on.
The real tough question, and this is being battled out between prosecutors and judges
and civil libertarians and law enforcement types, is where do you draw the lines cleanly
between doing what you need to do and not losing civil rights?
But you know, even in sort of day-to-day life, perhaps we travel a little more than most,
but you go through the security lines if you're catching a plane.
They seem to be endless. You get searched, and sometimes people will say to me,
hi, Barbara, we like the program, take your shoes off.
You know? So that all, isn't it true?
I always think, why me? Why am I always, but my point is that each of us in days,
we have security guards in buildings that we didn't have.
Driving around New York today, everywhere I looked, it seemed to me, I saw uniformed men, you know, with arms.
Cops and swats and everything.
But I wanted to say, that's not an abridgment of our civil liberties,
and most of us feel, okay, I can live with that.
Charlie, you're going to get the last word.
Well, there's a difference between inconveniences and losses of liberties,
and we cannot allow that to happen.
We'll reach equilibrium after a while in this struggle that exists,
but we cannot allow that to happen, or they will have changed us in ways
that we cannot allow ourselves to be changed, because essentially,
where they go so wrong, this, as we talked about when you were beginning the In Search for America project,
this country is not about people, it's not about buildings, it's about ideas.
And the ideas are what attract people to the ideal that is America.
And we cannot let that in any way slip.
Well, now that I've heard you begin, I rather do wish we had more time.
Thanks a lot. You've made a wonderful contribution to today, all of you.
Thank you very much indeed, Charlie, Diane, John, and Barbara.
And so we come to the end of our program.
There is more later this evening on Nightline, and of course, Good Morning America will begin the day again tomorrow.
I have no idea what they're going to do tomorrow, but as the President said, tomorrow is indeed another day.
We're going to leave you this evening with some, I think we'll all agree,
some fairly unforgettable images of the occasion which we have commemorated today.
But on behalf of all my colleagues at ABC News, I hope this day has,
I know this day has meant something to you in general, and I hope you've spent some of it with us.
It's been a privilege to serve you in this regard today.
I'm Peter Jennings. Good night.
I had to be there. I'm a photographer.
I just, I couldn't believe what was in my frame.
One photographer said to me that this is the story of our lives.
Well, the sky was just black with smoke, just filled, filled black with smoke.
But yet what was so interesting, the opposite direction of the way the wind was blowing,
it was impossibly blue, a blue cloudless sky.
My name is Susan Watts. On September 11th, I photographed the events at the World Trade Center
and saw the most unspeakable horror in all my life.
People start screaming from the buildings that the Pentagon had been hit
and another plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.
And I remember standing there looking up at the sky and thinking, this is it.
I look in my lens and I see the buildings coming down.
My name is Gulnara Samoilova, and on September 11th, I photographed the South Tower collapsing.
I mean, I see it. I saw this frame.
And because I saw the way it's coming down, I was so certain that it was coming down on me.
And I start running and very hard.
That's when we heard this loud explosion.
Like an earthquake.
And I started to hear a roar.
Buildings started to come down on top of us.
I'm a photojournalist. This is my job.
I had to be there.
Tornado.
Lost one camera.
A nuclear winter.
It was very dark and I knew that there was debris coming down on top of me.
Coming right at me and I...
The tights out.
Completely dark.
So I thought, I'm buried alive.
It was our job to get back out there.
It's just Armageddon.
Footsteps go by or someone...
And they look like ghosts.
It's like ghosts going by.
Paper flying.
I got up and was in total shock.
I started shooting again.
Later, when I learned the story about Joe...
My name is Joe Rubito.
I'm a construction worker.
He's a real hero.
The girl whose hand I'm holding...
I didn't even know her name.
She didn't ask me mine.
And I was very, very upset.
And she was screaming.
And she was yelling.
I could have been dead.
I have a new baby at home.
I remember telling her, you're absolutely fine.
You're going home tonight.
You'll hold your baby again.
I felt...
I felt like I wanted to help somebody.
You know?
That's what I went there to do.
I shot this image just before the second building collapsed.
I saw these women coming up the street...
carrying babies and little children.
And they're wearing masks.
The babies don't know what's going on.
But the women have this fierce look in their eyes...
that they're just getting the hell out of there with these kids.
I'm Mario Tama.
On September 11th, I photographed the disaster in the aftermath.
I remember hearing a fireman yelling,
It's clearing, it's clearing, it's clearing.
Can I help anybody? Can I help anybody?
So I get up and I realize...
I have no camera equipment.
There's nothing on my shoulders.
I go back underneath the fire truck...
to start looking for my camera equipment.
Nothing.
My name is Tom Monaster.
I'm a photojournalist.
Oh, what a terrible thing this is.
Here I am, photojournalist, no camera equipment.
A lieutenant from the fire department's photo unit...
was in one of the buildings.
He went down with that building, the building collapse that he was in.
He made his way out through the rubble.
And finds my cameras.
And I got my camera equipment back.
I took this photo as soon as I got home in my bathroom mirror.
I just wanted to remember myself that I've been through all this...
and remember me all covered with dust, bleeding elbow...
and alive.
That's what I wanted to see.
I don't think there's a way to look back on it...
with any insights or any perspective yet.
I still think that the event is so huge...
and it's an event that's still unfolding.
It's as current today as it was on September 11th.
What we did learn is we learned to be stronger.
We learned how precious life is.
Wow, this was a horrible, horrible day in our history.
It was also a day that showed the best of what humans have to offer.
You know, in the midst of the grief...
I felt incredible pride.
I suddenly felt like a soldier in the most important army...
the Army of New Yorkers.
I mean, you know, if it was difficult for us to go back to work the next day...
could you imagine what it was like for the firemen to go back to work the next day?
For the police officers to go back to work the next day?
I felt proud of all of us.
I just felt proud.
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This has been a presentation of ABC News.
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In New York City, somber silence and prayers.
Gordon M. Amat Jr.
The names and faces of loved ones lost.
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At the Pentagon, honoring the victims with words of courage.
The terrorists wanted September 11th to be a day when innocents died.
Instead, it was a day when heroes were born.
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Heroes like those honored today in Pennsylvania,
40 who lost their lives fighting the terrorists.
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Across the nation and here in West Michigan,
Americans gather, remember, and look to the future.
We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure.
And good evening everyone, I'm Lee Vanameet.
And I'm Juliet Dragus.
President Bush addressed the nation from New York City just a couple of hours ago.
He spent the day mourning with those who lost loved ones in the September 11th attacks.
His last stop was at the World Trade Center site.
Victims' family members placed flowers and pictures in a circle at Ground Zero.
While all day, New Yorkers gathered to pray and reflect.
The president also mourned with families who lost loved ones when Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
The first couple placed a wreath at the spot where the plane came to rest.
And at the Pentagon this morning, four F-16 fighter jets soared overhead
in honor of the 189 people who lost their lives when a hijacked plane crashed into that building.
Here in West Michigan, people also gathered to remember those killed on 9-11.
At Anabawin Park in downtown Grand Rapids,
several hundred people observed a moment of silence at 8.46 a.m. the exact time the first plane struck.
Men and women in uniform turned heroes in a year's time,
stood for the duration representing law enforcement and firefighters.
And at Martin Luther King Park, people gathered for a prayer vigil and words of encouragement.
These were just a few of the ceremonies around our area today.
Tonight, we have team coverage on the evening ceremonies and candlelight vigils around Grand Rapids.
WZZM 13's Tatum Wan and Chris Tye are live in Grand Rapids.
But first, we begin with President Bush's address to the nation tonight.
With the Statue of Liberty in the background, the president spoke about the difficult year behind us
and the challenges facing our nation in the years ahead.
It has been a year of adjustment, of coming to terms with the difficult knowledge
that our nation has determined enemies and that we are not invulnerable to their attacks.
Yet in the events that have challenged us, we've also seen the character that will deliver us.
The attack on our nation was also attack on the ideals that make us a nation.
We value every life. Our enemies value none.
Not even the innocent. Not even their own.
And we will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder.
Now and in the future, Americans will live as free people, not in fear,
and never at the mercy of any foreign plot or power.
We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics
trying to murder their way to power.
Tomorrow, September the 12th, a milestone is passed and a mission goes on.
Be confident. Our country is strong.
The president ended tonight's speech by talking about hope, which he says lights the way for America,
and he said darkness will not overcome it.
Tomorrow, the president will give perhaps an even more important speech.
He'll address the UN, and it's expected that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein will be his target.
That's something a local terrorism expert says may be a mistake.
He says we need to continue to fight small terrorism cells.
We're collecting all types of intelligence, but we need to do a better job in the analysis.
And we'll have more on my interview with Jonathan White later on in this newscast. Juliette?
It has been an emotionally exhausting day for millions of Americans.
Tonight, many turned to their churches for comfort.
WZZM 13's Tatum Wan attended a special candlelight vigil at Grand Rapids First Assembly of God Church,
and she joins us now live. Tatum?
Lee and Juliette, right after the September 11th attacks,
many people questioned how such a tragedy could happen.
Well, many of those same people turned to their faith for answers.
Tonight, here at the First Assembly of God parking lot, hundreds of people...