Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11. MItchell Zuckoff

If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”

      Brian hung up. Then he punched in the numbers for another telephone call.

      AS LOUISE SWEENEY prepared to leave home to run errands, the phone rang. She picked up to hear her son’s voice: “Mom, It’s Brian. I’m on a hijacked plane and it doesn’t look good. I called to say I love you and I love my family.”

      Brian told his mother that he didn’t know who the hijackers were. Calling from the rear of the plane, he said he thought they might come back, so he might have to hang up quickly. He told her he believed that they might be flying somewhere over Ohio. Brian said he and other passengers might storm the cockpit.

      Louise knew her son, and she recognized how he sounded when he became “pissed off.” He had that tone.

      Before ending the call, Brian told her, “Remember Crossing Over. Don’t forget Crossing Over.”

      Louise remembered, and she wouldn’t forget. As Flight 175 streamed toward New York City, descending by the second, flying erratically, the original pilots apparently dead and a flight attendant wounded, Brian tried to comfort his mother. Crossing Over was a book and television program featuring a self-professed psychic named John Edward, who claimed to communicate with the dead. Brian wanted his mother to know that somehow, someday, he would see her again.

      Now Brian had to go.

      “They are coming back,” he said. Brian told his mother goodbye as he hung up.

      Louise Sweeney turned on the television.

      AT NINE O’CLOCK, Peter Hanson called his parents’ home a second time from Flight 175.

      “It’s getting bad, Dad,” Peter told his father, Lee. “A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace.”

      “They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up and getting sick.”

      “The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down.”

      “I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.”

      Peter’s description of the hijackers’ weapons, claims, and tactics echoed the calls only minutes earlier from Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney on Flight 11.

      Then, just as Brian Sweeney had tried to reassure his wife and mother, Peter Hanson sought to comfort his father: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”

      AT 9:01 A.M., as United Flight 175 rapidly descended, Peter Mulligan, a flight control manager at New York Center, told the FAA Command Center in Virginia: “We have several situations going on here. It’s escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us.”

      As it barreled toward the World Trade Center, already the scene of disaster from Flight 11’s crash, United Flight 175 looked as though it might hit the Statue of Liberty.

      Air traffic controllers stared rapt at their screens, even as they continued to warn other nearby planes. Everything in their long years of training and experience channeled their minds toward the hope and expectation that hijacked planes would land and passengers would be held hostage until demands were met, or until the military either forced the hijackers to surrender or killed them. To the very last moments, some controllers held tight to the notion that the pilots were racing toward the nearest airport, beset by a routine mechanical or electrical emergency.

      Reality overtook that fantasy.

      United Airlines Flight 175 flew low and fast, banking toward the southern twin of the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center. Flight controllers, airline officials, government and military experts, and everyone else would need to accept a new script for hijackings, one that featured a multipronged murder-suicide plot designed to maximize civilian casualties and terrorize survivors through the destruction of physical and symbolic pillars of America’s power.

      The evidence flashed on the air traffic controllers’ radar screens.

      “No!” a New York controller shouted. “He’s not going to land. He’s going in!”

      FROM THE BACK of the plane, with his wife and daughter pressed against him, Peter Hanson spoke his final words to his father: “Oh my God… . Oh my God, oh my God.”

      Lee Hanson heard a woman shriek.

      AT THAT MOMENT, a battalion of television and still cameras on the ground and in helicopters trained their lenses on Lower Manhattan. Every network joined CNN live on the air, yet still almost no one knew what was happening or what kind of planes were involved.

      On ABC’s Good Morning America, the smoke-obscured North Tower filled the screen while hosts Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson interviewed reporter Don Dahler on the scene. As Dahler described scores of fire crews and other first responders rushing toward the World Trade Center, a Boeing 767 zoomed into view on the right side of the screen.

      At 9:03:11 a.m., Lee and Eunice Hanson, Louise Sweeney, and millions of others became witnesses to murder. They watched live on television as United Flight 175, traveling between 540 and 587 miles per hour, slammed on an angle into the 77th through 85th floors of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. A bright orange fireball exploded. The building rocked and belched smoke, glass, steel, and debris. The plane and everyone inside it disappeared forever.

      In her kitchen, Eunice Hanson screamed.

      In her television studio in New York, Diane Sawyer gasped, “Oh my God.”

      “That looks like a second plane,” her colleague Charles Gibson said.

      “That just exploded!” said reporter Don Dahler, still on the phone to the studio, his location preventing him from seeing the crash.

      Gibson composed himself. On some level, every professional broadcaster feared becoming known for a histrionic narration of a terrible event, like the radio reporter who nearly fell apart while witnessing the crash of the German airship Hindenburg in 1937.

      “We just saw another plane coming in from the side,” Gibson said soberly. “So this looks like it is some sort of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is under way.”

      After replaying the video to be certain about what they’d seen, Gibson’s voice went slack.

      “Oh, this is terrifying… . Awful.”

      Sawyer spoke for Eunice and Lee Hanson, Louise Sweeney, and countless others who saw United Flight 175’s final seconds. “To watch powerless,” she said, “is a horror.”

      THE TOLL WAS incalculable, just as it had been less than seventeen minutes earlier from the crash of American Flight 11. The immediate victims of United Flight 175 were two pilots, seven crew members, and fifty-one passengers, including three small children. All of them slaughtered in public view, preserved on film, by five al-Qaeda terrorists.

      Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian.

      Delayed passengers wouldn’t hear recitals of Forrest Gump dialogue from Captain Victor Saracini. First Officer Michael Horrocks’s daughter wouldn’t rise from bed with the promise that her daddy loved her to the moon. Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis would never again share their gifts with young hockey players or with their own families.

      Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran