Reluctant Hero Read online

  Reluctant

  Hero

  Reluctant

  Hero

  A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable

  Day, What He’s Learned, How He’s Struggled,

  and What No One Should Ever Forget

  Michael Benfante

  and Dave Hollander

  Skyhorse Publishing

  Copyright © 2011 by Michael Benfante and David Hollander

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

  in any manner without the express written consent of the

  publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical

  reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to

  Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street,

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  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks

  of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  www.skyhorsepublishing.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61608-285-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  TO MY FATHER,

  a perfect father to a child, a loving man to a son

  TO MY MOTHER,

  who loves me like a rock

  CONTENTS

  Preface: Why This Book, and Why Now?

  Introduction: How Did I Get Here?

  PART I A Jersey Guy

  Friday–Monday, September 7–10, 2001

  PART II The Day

  Tuesday, September 11, 2001

  PART III Now What?

  Wednesday–Friday, September 12–14, 2001

  PART IV A Hero’s Welcome?

  September 2001–September 2002

  PART V When nobody’s Looking

  2003–2006

  PART VI Depth

  2006–2008

  PART VII We’re in This Together

  2008–2011

  Epilogue: To Be Continued

  Offcial Proposal: 9/11 National Day of Service

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Index

  And we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice. Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end and at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a fire-fighter. Two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down 68 floors to safety. A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burn victims.

  In these acts and many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one another and an abiding love for our country. Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called, “the warm courage of national unity.”

  —President George W. Bush

  Remarks at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance,

  September 14, 2001

  And our hearts are full of gratitude for those who saved others. These men and women remind us that heroism is found not only on the fields of battle. They remind us that heroism does not require special training or physical strength. Heroism is here, all around us, in the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens, just waiting to be summoned—as it was on Saturday morning.

  Their actions, their selflessness, also pose a challenge to each of us. It raises the question of what, beyond the prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?

  —President Barack Obama

  Speech at the memorial service for the victims of the shooting in

  Tucson, Arizona, January 12, 2011

  When I go home people’ll ask me, “Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?” You know what I’ll say? I won’t say a goddamn word. Why? They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand that it’s about the men next to you, and that’s it. That’s all it is.

  —Black Hawk Down

  From the screenplay by Mike Nolan, based on

  the book by Mark Bowden

  PREFACE:

  WHY THIS BOOK, AND WHY NOW?

  THE WHOLE TOPIC of 9/11 is never a matter of small talk to me. It’s no academic discussion. If someone casually says to me, “Hey, tell me your story,” I tell them, “Nah, it’s not going to work that way.” But if somebody asks me, sincerely, “You were that guy? Can you talk about it?” Then I say, “Why don’t you ask me questions, tell me what you want to know, and I’ll tell you what I can.” That’s so much easier. I can handle that. Any other way is exhausting for me, and I don’t want to do it.

  To this day, it’s impossible for me to give a summary explanation of how I really felt and what I really went through without telling everything—every single thing that I went through. I don’t know how, psychologically, to tell someone an abbreviated version of what happened to me. People ask, and I say, “Yeah, I was there.”

  “Really?” they say.

  Then they ask for more.

  “Yes, I carried this woman down sixty-eight floors.”

  Then what? Then what?

  It’s a very intense and personal place to go. It takes a lot out of me. I don’t like bringing it up. I don’t go around telling people I carried a woman down sixty-eight flights in Tower 1 on 9/11.

  “There I was, World Trade Center, September 11 … ” This isn’t the goddamn World of Commander McBragg.

  Will I tell the story if asked? It depends on who’s asking and what kind of emotional space they’re coming from. But my story is not a cocktail party trick or somebody’s cheap entertainment option.

  Obviously, and for many reasons, it’s an experience I now feel compelled to share with all seriousness, honesty, and emotion. But I can only tell it one way. That’s from beginning to end, with nothing left out. And frankly, rarely are there times and places where that’s an easy or appropriate thing to do.

  Suffice it to say that I don’t like telling this story. I don’t even like thinking about it. For almost ten years I’ve stopped telling it altogether. And I’ve never really told the whole thing to anyone. That’s hurt a lot of people. It’s hurt me too. I want to tell it now. I need to tell it.

  And I want to get it right. I will try hard—very hard—to tell it exactly like I remember it.

  I’m still not sure I understand it—what it’s meant, how it’s changed me. Some call me a hero for it—for what I did on 9/11. I’m not very comfortable with that. What I do know is I need to tell everything to everybody (and I need to hear some things as well).

  I know that if I retrace my steps, I can tell you how I came to be on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center, Tower 1, on 9/11, sitting at my desk at 8:46 a.m. when the first plane hit just twelve floors above me.

  And then I spent the next ninety-six minutes inside Tower 1. I made it out, barely.

  I was one of the lucky ones.

  Sometimes I feel so awful about it I can’t hear myself think a single thought. Other times I draw such hope and clarity from it. Either way, it’s time to talk about it. So let me try here to tell you, and myself, what happened. Like I said, I will try hard to get it right.

  INTRODUCTION:

  HOW DID I GET HERE?
r />   I SAT HALF-DAZED, DOWNING beers and inhaling burgers at O’Reilly’s Pub on 31st and Broadway. It was an unusual lunch at O’Reilly’s for obvious reasons, but also because I was sitting in the back dining room. I’d eaten there a hundred times before, but I’d never sat in the back. That’s usually where the “business people” had lunch, at the round tables with the white linen tablecloths. That’s not where I usually sat. But this day it was sit there or sit nowhere. That’s how crowded it was.

  Boozer went to the bar to get more beers. I sat, fidgety, at a table with John. John wasn’t saying much. Boozer yelled to me, “Raj!” (That’s how they know me at O’Reilly’s, after Roger Staubach.) He motioned for me to come to the front. “You gotta see this.”

  I came and I saw. It was me. On television. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I really couldn’t believe the camera guy made it out of there. But there I was: Lost and off-balance amid rubble, dust, and debris; rumpled light blue dress shirt, loosened navy blue tie; my black bag over my shoulder, a bottle of water in my left hand. I looked like hell.

  The camera moved closer, and the questions started.

  Cameraman: Who are you with?

  Me: I was on the 81st floor.

  My voice trembled slightly. Maybe only I noticed.

  Cameraman: Tell me what you saw and heard.

  Me: There were forty people in there. Just an explosion. I saw this light flash out my window. The whole doorway entrance to my office blew open. My office was freaking out. I just told them to calm down and get to the center of the office. Everybody was fine on my floor.

  My voice was definitely shaky.

  I’m shaky.

  Me: We just started heading down the stairs. I heard people were trapped in the bathroom. I ran to the bathroom. It was just [pause] blown out. I asked if anybody was in there. People weren’t in there. So I started going down the steps. I heard people shouting. I stopped at, like, sixty-eight; and there was a woman in a wheelchair, and I got her in the straps—the wheelchair—and I carried her down the steps. Carried her down sixty-eight floors, man. [Coughs.] Then we got lost on the 5th floor. It was chaos.

  Cameraman: Who do you work for?

  Me: Network Plus, a communications company out of Randolph, Massachusetts.

  Cameraman: How do you spell your name?

  Me: Mike Benfante. B–E–N–F–A–N–T–E.

  I couldn’t reconcile it—the reality of where I’d just been and the comparative normalcy of O’Reilly’s. For a moment I felt the fear from before, from down there. Dryness crept up the back of my throat. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Boozer staring at me. I felt more eyes on me from all around the bar. Somebody patted me on the back. I looked up. I was still on television.

  On the TV the camera stayed with me as I walked toward John. I grabbed his arm, and we circled for a moment, disoriented, trying to get our bearings. I muttered to no one in particular, “It’s chaos, man. It’s chaos.”

  As we walked out of the frame, the camera surveyed the devastation behind us, slowly focusing its lens toward the top of the North Tower, where smoke streamed from the upper floors. Abruptly, the segment cut to the tower imploding, capturing full audio of the deliberate deep, rumbling sound. Next they cut to a hand wiping dirt from the camera lens, revealing a clear ground-level shot of me running—running for my life—full-speed toward the camera, John running behind me, and a ferocious cloud of white dust coming up fast behind us, enveloping everything in its path. Debris flying, voices crying out. People swept off their feet into the air. You could hear the sounds of large objects and particles scraping against the cement ground, against metal signs, and against vehicles. The white dust consumed the entire television screen. Then blackness. Blackness and silence. I’ll never forget that blackness.

  You can’t really plan where you’re going to be on the worst day of your life. And it’s hard to imagine that the worst day of your life might also be one of the worst days in modern history. Long before that day, I had plans. I had goals. But none of them included being in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

  PART I

  A JERSEY GUY

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2001

  I didn’t love my Jersey City studio apartment on 234½ 7th Street. It was small and dumpy, but I got a great deal on it. Joy lived right across Hamilton Square Park. I called her before heading out the door for the train. I’d pick her up after work. We’d get dinner, or maybe see a movie. We had a lot to talk about. Two weeks earlier, after an entire summer of searching, we’d finally found a place to have our wedding. The big event was a year away, but there was plenty to do right away. Life wasn’t simple. Still, I was looking forward to the weekend. Forecasts called for sun, blue skies, highs in the low eighties. Maybe we could go down to the Shore? There were so many plans.

  My plan—my big plan—always included living in northern New Jersey. That’s where I’m from. That’s where my family is. That’s where I’ve always wanted to end up. As a kid, I skinned my knees in the parks and playgrounds of Montclair, Verona, and Bloomfield. I earned all-conference football and track honors at Immaculate Conception High School. Except for four years spent at Brown University, and cup of coffee here and there, I’ve lived in New Jersey all my life.

  In fact, that’s what I told Network Plus. I wanted to be in New Jersey. “Someday you’ll be able to open your own New Jersey office.” That was their big speech to me at my interview. They painted a pretty picture. But when I woke up on Friday, September 7, 2001, I was headed into Network Plus offices in New York City, on the 81st floor of the Word Trade Center’s North Tower. I sold telecommunications there. To be precise, I managed others who sold telecommunications. That’s what I did.

  I’d been working for Network Plus since May 1994. I didn’t plan on that, either. I graduated from Brown in 1987; months later, the market crashed, and any prospects I had of becoming an investment banker crashed with it. I settled for commercial banking, but that didn’t do it for me. I wanted out of banking. Sales, in most any field, sounded like the right direction. It just happened to be telecom sales.

  My rise through Network Plus wasn’t a straight line. While living in Princeton, New Jersey, I cut my teeth for two years at their office in nearby Bluebell, Pennsylvania. It was a new office, and Network Plus was a fairly new company, founded only three years earlier, in 1991. In 1996, they sent me down to Springfield, Virginia, to resuscitate a floundering sales office. The move was a disaster. The office was poorly positioned geographically, making recruitment nearly impossible. I tried hard for ten months, but the office never took off. When a sales manager position became available in Norwalk, Connecticut, I jumped all over it. Connecticut wasn’t the biggest sales region, but it was a helluva lot bigger than Springfield; and I got to manage a sizable sales staff. The Network Plus home office was based relatively nearby in Randolph, Massachusetts. Most importantly, it was a step closer to being back in New Jersey. The company was expanding. Network Plus was building a network, becoming a competitive local exchange carrier, a CLEC as it’s called in the trade. They opened up additional offices, and finally, they asked me to find office space in New Jersey. Things were looking up.

  I quickly found suitable space and negotiated a favorable lease. All we needed to do was sign. But Network Plus put the brakes on the transaction. They were already setting up an office in New York City. “It makes no sense to open up a New Jersey office too,” they explained. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.

  Adding insult to injury, the New York office already had a sales manager. And they had already filled my old position as sales manager at the Norwalk office. This meant I’d go from being the manager of my own office to an assistant manager in New York City. This was not my plan. I had already reached my personal goal of becoming the sales manager of an office. That was big for me. “Assistant manager” meant I was back out there selling. That was difficult for me. The thing is, I’m a better sales manager
than I am a salesman. I don’t get jazzed about all the little details that make a top salesman—bringing in doughnuts, remembering birthdays, sending out Christmas cards. I respect those professional traits in others. It’s just not my cup of tea. For me, going back to selling was like being a detective being told to walk a beat again. It felt like I was taking a step back.

  September 3, 1998, on my first day at the New York City offices, I looked around and saw we had only six salespeople. It would be an uphill battle. Still, I was in downtown Manhattan, in a spectacular office space on the 81st floor of one of the world’s most famous buildings, the World Trade Center. How bad could life be? Within a year, the manager of the New York City office was promoted to regional manager, and I took over his job. And things took off for me.

  New York City turned out to be a perfect fit. I performed better in all aspects of my job. I liked the city. I liked riding the subway. I loved recruiting talent. Most of the salespeople I hired were from the New York area, but I also recruited young salespeople from all over the country who were either new to New York or fresh out of college. That kind of recruiting was a first for Network Plus. At the height of our operation, we had forty salespeople in the New York office.

  I was having a great time. I was active. I personally took every hire under my wing and out on their first sales calls. I gained a lot of respect from my salespeople for being in the trenches with them. People knew what they had to do. My guys and I were in sync. Business was booming.

  My office quickly emerged as one of the company’s top two sales offices. Network Plus eventually opened an office in New Jersey and offered it to me. But I didn’t want it. I had New York City.