25 Years After 9/11

Alexander Fernandez

Life News Today

Where were you on 9/11? Twenty-five years later, the question still pulls people back to classrooms, offices and living rooms where an ordinary Tuesday became a national emergency. For those born afterward, there is only footage, not memory, and the gap between the two is measurable. A poll Ipsos conducted Aug. 21–23 found that 47% of American adults name the Sept. 11 attacks among the most important historic events of their lifetime. Among adults under 35, just 33% do. Only about 1 in 10 Americans plan to mark the 25th anniversary in any way at all, and of that small group, just over half say they will display an American flag.

Alexander Mandl remembers the morning starting with paper. By his recollection, he was 20 floors above lower Manhattan, at Goldman Sachs’ headquarters on Broad Street, three weeks into a new job, newly married, with a baby on the way. Documents drifted past the window. “Oh, you know, ticker tape parade,” he recalled thinking. Then he looked down at the narrow street below and realized there was no parade. The papers were falling from somewhere else.

Screens on the trading floor showed news of the first attack. “Okay, there’s been an accident. It’s going to be all right,” he remembers telling himself. When training paused, he and a friend went for coffee. That is where they learned a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. “I really felt like everything inside, like, sink,” Mandl said.

Goldman Sachs evacuated. Warnings spread that more planes might be coming. Mandl’s friend lived at 88 Greenwich Street, blocks from the towers, and the two reasoned a place already struck might be safer than somewhere new. They watched from an observation deck around the 20th floor as people evacuated below, radio ads still playing in the background, an ordinary sound under an unraveling morning. “It’s close but it’s far enough,” Mandl remembers thinking, afraid for the people inside the towers, not yet afraid for himself. He was wrong about that too. He watched both towers collapse, a wall of gray dust rolling up the avenues and swallowing the buildings in its path, turning midmorning into something closer to dusk.

“I saw the towers collapse with my own eyes, but I haven’t seen any person hurt or dead,” he said. Inside the apartment, he and his friend pushed white T-shirts into the gaps around windows and doors, trying to keep the dust out. Then, strangely, they got hungry. They found eggs in the refrigerator and made an omelet, a small ordinary act in the middle of something neither of them had a frame of reference for. Around 4 p.m., he recalls, firefighters evacuated the building and told them the air outside was safe. Mandl believed them. He believed, that day, that he had walked away unhurt.

Earlier that morning, all over lower Manhattan, firefighters had moved toward the towers while others fled. Stephen Siller, 34, a firefighter with Brooklyn’s Squad 1, heard the call over his scanner on his way to play golf with his brothers. He phoned his wife Sally, returned to his firehouse for his gear, and found the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel closed to traffic. He left his truck and ran the length of it on foot, 60 pounds of gear on his back, toward the fire. He never came home to his wife and five children. His family later built a foundation in his name, Tunnel to Towers, out of that run. He was one of 343 New York City firefighters who died that day, firefighters who ran into buildings that thousands of others were running out of.

Meanwhile, aboard United Flight 93, passengers were fighting for their lives in a different way. Hijackers had seized the plane after it left Newark. Over the course of 37 phone calls in the final 35 minutes, passengers and crew members learned what had already happened in New York and Washington, and they decided to act. Jeremy Glick told his wife the passengers were organizing to rush the hijackers. Todd Beamer, on the phone with a telephone operator, was heard saying the words that would outlive him. “Let’s roll.” The plane went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, short of Washington, where the U.S. Capitol is believed to have been its intended target.

By nightfall, the country had started reaching for whatever it could offer. Blood banks saw lines around the block, even in cities nowhere near the attacks. Nationwide collections that September were 38% higher than the monthly average earlier in 2001, though later government testimony reported that fewer than 260 units of blood were used to treat victims of the attacks. That day, people just wanted to give something. By late October, the Red Cross’s Liberty Fund had received about $547 million in pledges. Strangers helped strangers in smaller ways too. Mandl’s friend, who had fled his apartment with almost nothing, was offered new clothes by a woman on the street who refused to let him pay. “We help out each other,” Mandl said, describing what he remembers most about that week.

American flags went up everywhere, from porches and car antennas to office windows and lapels. Television anchors started wearing small flag pins on air. Walmart sold 116,000 flags on Sept. 11 alone, compared with 6,400 on the same date the year before. Over the next two days, it sold more than 300,000 more. “By that time, stores were running out of them,” company spokesman Tom Williams said.

The response reached beyond the country’s borders. When U.S. airspace shut down, Canada rerouted incoming flights under what it called Operation Yellow Ribbon. Gander, Newfoundland, a town of roughly 10,000 people, took in 38 planes carrying about 6,600 passengers and crew. Residents of Gander and neighboring communities opened their homes, cooked meals for strangers and drove them around town for days as they waited to continue their journeys, turning fear and uncertainty into friendships that lasted for decades. At Queen Elizabeth II’s request, the Coldstream Guards played the American anthem outside Buckingham Palace on Sept. 13. NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history, treating an attack on one member as an attack on all of them.

For Mandl, the belief that he had escaped unhurt would not last. Years later, in Spain, where he now lives, a chronic cough and creeping exhaustion he had explained away as overwork turned out to be something else, something he says doctors eventually connected to his exposure to World Trade Center dust. By his account, the damage did not stop there. His lung function declined until he needed a double lung transplant, the clearest measure of how far he says the consequences of that morning reached. His individual medical records were not independently reviewed for this article, but his account describes a toll that took years to surface after he thought he had escaped untouched.

Twenty-five years later, “Where were you?” still reopens all of it. For Mandl, it begins with paper floating past a window, before he understood that anything was wrong, before he knew the day would follow him to another country and eventually cost him his own lungs. He remembers the destruction. He also remembers the omelet, the T-shirts pressed into the gaps, the woman who would not let a stranger pay for his clothes, and firefighters who ran the wrong way on purpose. That is what “Never Forget” actually asks of people. Not just the image of two towers falling, but everything that kept happening afterward to those who walked away from them.

It asks something of the generation that came after too, the one with no answer of its own to “Where were you?”—a generation born into a country already shaped by that morning without ever living through it. They cannot forget what they never knew firsthand. What they can do is take up the same charge anyway, refusing to let the day become someone else’s story, one they were simply handed and set aside. They inherited its weight without being asked. At the very least, this anniversary should honor those who died on 9/11 and those still suffering from its aftermath by reminding younger generations that the attack was directed at them and their future as much as at those who watched the towers fall.