Reluctant Hero Read online

  I left the men’s room, climbed back over the debris, returned to the office, and saw that people were filing down the stairs in an orderly fashion. I ran all the way into my office, grabbed my cell phone and my trusty bag. I strapped it across my chest, and as I turned to leave, I spotted the copy of Black Hawk Down on my desk. I hesitated. I had meant to return it to Mike Wright that morning. I’ll give it to him when we come back up later. Dashing out, I was startled to notice that the windows on the east side of the whole office were badly shattered; shards of broken glass were scattered all over the desks a few feet away. Joe Longorino and Phil Ipsan, the reps who sat there, were already out on appointments. I used to sit there when I first came to the office.

  I checked the perimeter offices to make sure they were really all clear. Adam Andrews, the assistant manager, waited with me and helped make sure everyone was gone. There were no fire alarms or sprinklers going off. What else was there to do? Adam and I headed to the stairwell. I was the last man out. Only three or four minutes had passed since impact.

  Heading Down the Stairs

  There were not a lot of people in the stairwell, at first. There were mostly those from my floor and some injured people scrambling. The injuries varied—some bleeding, some burned, some applying makeshift bandages to their wounds. Some of the uninjured walked cautiously, like old people walking on an icy sidewalk. Others gave aid to the injured. All were moving. Some quicker than others, but moving. The prevailing attitude was generally calm.

  Off the stairwell, on the 79th floor, we heard two guys yelling for help behind elevator doors. We managed to open them enough to see that the elevator car was stuck in between the 80th and 79th floors. I ran into a nearby office and grabbed one of those bathroom keys that have a stick attached so no one walks off with it. Another guy used the leg of a metal chair. Prying the doors open, it looked like we would kink them, doing more damage than good. We realized our effort was futile. We opened up the doors just enough to shove the stick attached to the key and left it with them. We said good luck and kept moving. This all happened very fast. It took less than a minute.

  I got back into the stairwell and regained my spot behind Adam Andrews again. I was moving. On the 79th floor, my phone rang. According to my cell phone records, I got the call at 8:52 a.m. It was Joy. She was frantic. “Oh my god, where are you? Michael, what’s going on?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m in the stairwell. I’m heading down, and I’m OK.”

  I thought I was having this conversation with her. I thought I was allaying her fears. But the line was breaking up on her end, so I finally assured her, “Look, I’m fine, really. I’ll call you when I get to the bottom.” I hung up. I came to find out later that she never heard a word I said. I could hear her, but all she could hear was static. In my mind, I thought I had talked to my fancée and she knew I was OK. She was having another experience entirely. What she went through as events unfolded was an emotional hell ride that so many loved ones endured that day. For so many, that tortured experience of waiting and not knowing had a very different conclusion. That I made it out and others didn’t still haunts me terribly.

  We proceeded to the 78th floor, where the express elevator stopped. People moved quickly and efficiently down the stairs. It wasn’t crowded. I began to wonder what the hell was really happening. I heard people screaming. I kept getting different versions of what was going on. One person said definitely, “There’s a fire!” I saw a fire extinguisher out of the safety glass sitting on the stairwell landing on the 76th floor, so I grabbed it and began to head back up the stairs.

  It was simple to me: People were yelling “There’s a fire!” I was standing next to a fire extinguisher, and nobody was using it. I figured, Why don’t we do something?

  I started to go back up, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. Too many people were on the stairwell heading in the opposite direction. I got up maybe a flight and a half. This is crazy. I put the fire extinguisher down and resumed my descent.

  Not even two steps back down the stairwell, I ran into John Cerqueira. I had hired John three months earlier right out of college. Here was a guy who was classic sales material—six feet tall, all-American good looks, well-spoken. He looked nervous. I wondered what he was doing by himself. I didn’t remember seeing him in the office when all hell had broken loose. He was stuck in the bathroom when the explosion hit. Then he moved to a mechanical room, where he and some other people were stuck for a while. Now both of us were well behind the others in our office.

  “Let’s stick together on the way down,” I said. That made good sense to both of us.

  We hurried down the stairs. Things moved well at this point. Some people had minor cuts and scrapes, but nobody was hurt badly enough to stop the flow of human traffic. There was no panic. It felt like we were moving, so I felt OK. I didn’t feel I was in danger.

  There was some talk in the stairwell that it was a plane that hit the building. I imagined a small commuter plane went off course. No big deal.

  But the stories and theories kept on flying. Some sounded plausible, and some sounded outrageous. I didn’t say much. I took it all in. The wheels in my mind were turning in multiple directions. Sure, I wanted to know what the actual problem was, but mostly I thought, Let’s get out of here first. I actually could’ve moved even faster down the stairs. I wasn’t impaired physically in any way like some were. But I wanted to stay with John, and I didn’t want to be rude and just blow by everyone in an every-man-for-himself kind of way. We here heading down the stairs at a good pace. That was fine with me.

  The 68th Floor

  The network of stairwells and landings were well lit, one indistinguishable from the next. The small victories were seeing the floor numbers go down floor by floor. At each landing we could see the floor entrances. Sometimes the entrance doors were open, and sometimes they weren’t. On the 68th floor, they were wide open. I observed someone there calmly walk into the stairwell, then back into the office floor. That was odd.

  I walked out of the stairwell and onto the 68th floor. I thought I should tell the others, “Hey, the stairwell is pretty clear. C’mon, let’s go.” I also wanted to see if I could find out what was going on. Maybe I could see something from there.

  John followed me. We said we would stick together.

  There was a badly damaged Snapple vending machine in the office lobby. The glass casing showed what looked like a man-made smash in the middle of it. You could just grab a Snapple.

  I told whomever I passed that the stairway was all clear. Some of them began to head toward it. I turned right down one hallway, which opened up into another long hallway on the right. At the end of the hallway, there were large see-through glass doors that were the threshold to more office space. Three women stood huddled on the other side of the doors. They were just standing there, together, still. Maybe they didn’t know?

  I ran down the hallway leading toward the glass doors. I banged on the glass. They hit the Open button, and before I could open my mouth to tell them anything, one of them stepped aside, revealing a fourth woman sitting in a motorized wheelchair.

  She wasn’t a very big person. She was quite small, in fact. “Is she OK?” I asked. They didn’t answer but instead solemnly looked down at their friend in the wheelchair.

  The woman in the wheelchair stared straight ahead at no one in particular. I looked at her straight in the face.

  “Do you need help?”

  “Yes,” she said. No hesitation.

  It was strange to me. Here were these women standing together. There were no men. It appeared as though everyone had already cleared out of the office. And when I asked her “Do you need help?” I sincerely meant it. It was as if maybe she was waiting for somebody, some formal procedure or the firemen. So when I asked her this question, I didn’t have a specific plan of action in mind about how I would help her or what help I could offer. It was more of a general question that could’ve elicited a number of respo
nses.

  But she said one word: “Yes.”

  The woman was calm. Her face showed noticeable concern, but she was in control. Her diminutive frame belied a definite strength she communicated through her clear and serious blue eyes. This was not a person who perceived herself as helpless in the world. Though I would later learn that her hands were clenched from rheumatoid arthritis since the age of three and her build was ever so slight, she projected a presence that indicated more ability than disability.

  I wondered how long she might have been waiting there. The three women held her personal belongings. I sensed they were her friends.

  An evacuation chair lay flat on the floor next to her. It looked like a folded beach chair attached to a lightweight hand truck with wheels and sliders on the bottom. It was all folded up with Velcro straps.

  Keep moving, my inner voice told me. A thousand thoughts flooded my brain. My mind was racing. She needed help. What was the next move? Whatever it was, the voice in my head was unequivocal: Move!

  I tried to open the evac chair. I fiddled with the straps, but the straps weren’t what kept the chair from opening. In my head I was screaming: How do you open this fucking thing! Finally, I saw this little lever on the bottom. I hit the lever. The chair opened. The Velcro straps were there for the purpose of strapping the person in the wheelchair, not strapping the wheelchair together. Now I know.

  We placed the woman in the evac chair. She repeatedly expressed concern about leaving her motorized wheelchair behind. They’re very costly. John went to get it.

  “Leave it, John,” I said. “It’s too cumbersome. It’s way too heavy. We’ll come back up later and get it for her.”

  I could see the woman didn’t like my plan. I bent down, looked her in the eye, and assured her, “Look, we can’t get you out of here and carry that wheelchair too. I promise you, I will personally come back up here and get that wheelchair for you.”

  She nodded in agreement. She was a decisive person. That was good. John still insisted. “We can take it, Mike. Really, we can.”

  I looked at him, perhaps unconsciously prevailing upon our boss-employee relationship. “Leave it and grab a side of this evac chair.”

  Carrying her, not wheeling her, made the most sense. It was faster, plain and simple. Plus, it let us move at the pace our feet would carry us. Was she heavy? Well, she wasn’t light, but the real challenge was balance. Keeping her level while moving down the stairs was our main concern. If we didn’t distribute the weight evenly, she could tip over. John took one side of the evac chair, and I took the other, which made us a three-person load coming down the right side of the stairs. As long as we concentrated, I felt that we could make it.

  “Here we go,” I said to the woman.

  “One second,” she said, putting on a surgical mask. “OK. Let’s go.”

  We carried her. Her friends carried her belongings. And we headed into the stairwell, hoping to get out as quickly as possible.

  Floors 68–55

  John and I carried her from the 68th to the 55th floor. My prime directive was still Keep moving. Anytime there was a little stoppage or the stairwell got crowded, I tried to figure out our next move. I was always looking ahead, thinking ahead. With each step my role as navigator became more and more defined. What little talking we did, John did most of it with the woman in the wheelchair. I was figuring out how to get around people and making sure there wasn’t anyone or anything in our way. I simply wanted to keep us moving forward.

  This wasn’t a chitchat atmosphere. We were tense. Our limited dialogue consisted of the frequent “You OK? You all right?” from me and nods of assent from her. Keep moving.

  We rapidly made our way to the 55th floor, where somehow someone had created an impromptu water station. Many were leaving the stairwell to rehydrate. It made sense to us to stop there too. John and I set the woman down on the office’s foyer floor. Then John went to grab himself some water in one of the adjacent offices. I asked the woman if she wanted some water. She moved her surgical mask to the side to answer: No. “Are you sure?”

  “No,” she said.

  Why wouldn’t she want water? “Well, I’m setting you down here for a moment, and I’m getting some water.” I looked at her through the mask. “I’ll be right back.” But she didn’t look right to me. Did she say she didn’t want water because she didn’t want me to leave her? Did she think I was leaving her? I sensed she wasn’t telling me all she really felt. I turned back around. “Don’t go anywhere.” I wasn’t being facetious. I meant to assure her I was coming back. Her changeless mixed expression of calm and concern remained as earnest as it was when I first saw her. I didn’t know what to make of it. I took one last look at her and walked toward an office.

  The truth is I didn’t want water. I wanted to see what was going on. I thought maybe people on this floor might know something. And I knew I had to be quick.

  I ran toward a window in an office space and looked out eastward over the courtyard. I saw all forms of detritus strewn about on the ground far below, but it was hard to make out exactly what it was. For a split second, I thought that some of the things I saw on the ground were bodies. As quickly as that thought entered my mind, another part of my brain immediately shut it down. How could I be sure? We were so high up. But at that point, it mentally and emotionally registered to me that something was very, very wrong. Danger was near, maybe closer than I realized.

  I ran from the window to a desk with a phone. I called my parents’ house. I dialed but couldn’t get through. I dialed again and still couldn’t get through. I dialed a third time and got my father.

  “Dad!”

  “Jesus Christ, Michael! What’s going on? Where are you? Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine. I’m helping a woman in a wheelchair.”

  “You have to get out of there, now.”

  “I’m getting out. I might try to look for an elevator to go down.”

  He thought I said I was in an elevator. He was so excited that he didn’t hear a lot of what I was saying.

  “Dad, I’m all right. I’ll call you as soon as I get out.”

  My father had already seen it all on TV. He saw the plane hit my building, just twelve floors above my office. He saw the second plane hit the South Tower. He knew the gravity of the situation, but I didn’t give him enough time to tell me. I wanted to keep moving.

  I hung up on my father. I hustled back to the woman in the wheelchair. I brought her water. She drank it.

  I got the vague sense from my father’s voice that something more serious than I thought was taking place. But as serious as I imagined it might be, I thought that at worst he was telling me to get out of a building that had a fire in it, somewhere. I thought the fire was high above me, and that I was out of danger. But my father knew how bad my situation was. Worse, in his mind, he was thinking I was in an elevator, which is a very bad place to be in a building fire. On top of that, I’d told him I was helping a woman in a wheelchair, so he knew I wasn’t moving as fast as I could.

  It was, in fact, at 9:02 a.m., sometime between when we began carrying the woman in the wheelchair and the 55th floor, that the second plane hit the South Tower. The stairwells were very well insulated. You couldn’t hear a lot. We heard none of it. In a matter of minutes, within those thirteen floors, our grave danger had doubled in scope, and we knew nothing of it.

  John and I picked the woman back up and resumed our descent. Though it had only been thirteen floors, we had effectively established our carrying positions: me on the left navigating, John on the right.

  From floor to floor, men jumped in intermittently to help us. There were handles on the front of the wheelchair. That made it easier. When offers to help came forth, John and I took the front handles, and various men took turns holding the back. Some stayed longer than others. But eventually each left to move faster. We were moving. That was all I cared about. But what if we stopped moving? Then what?

  Floors 55–33: We
See Firemen

  Two things became more evident the lower we descended down the stairs: We moved slower, and we saw firemen.

  Things got really backed up. The firemen told us to stay to the right so they could make their way up the left side of the stairwell. That slowed the flow of traffic considerably. It also made two men carrying a woman in a wheelchair a very inconvenient way to travel down the stairs. Turning a corner was always a negotiation for us. Because we were three across, the firemen had to make an exception for us. They let us pass on the left or go to our right, whichever worked better.

  You could hear broken-voiced dispatches coming through the firemen’s radio devices, which made people in the stairwell think they had information we didn’t. People hectored them with questions, trying to find out what was going on. For our own protection, they never gave a complete or straight answer. That kept me calm. It didn’t allow me to dwell too much on what could really be going on, or if and to what degree our lives were in danger. What good would it do for us to know what happened? Would it move us down the stairs faster? It might set off panic. Could they have even described the entire situation if they tried? Lack of information kept me concentrated on moving forward.

  To this day, I can’t get those firemen out of my mind. I see their faces. With each one I passed, I saw in their eyes extreme exhaustion and extreme determination. Those looks shot right through me then, and they still do now. I must have seen fifty, maybe a hundred—sweating, lugging heavy gear, knowing what we didn’t know, knowing they were headed toward incredible personal danger, risking their lives to help others. But despite their load, their fatigue, and their rush into danger, they calmed all of us. They told us in reassuring tones, “Just keep going.” They were professional. Through their manner and movement, they spoke to us without speaking: You’ll make it. Never once did they let us know how dire the situation was. “Keep moving. It’s gonna be OK,” they’d say. They were very positive, very steady. They gave us what we needed. And we kept moving.