Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘The farewell calls from the planes… the mounting terror of air traffic control… the mothers who knew they were witnessing their loved ones perish… From an author who’s spent 5 years reconstructing its horror, never has the story been told with such devastating, human force’ Daily Mail This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerising, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day. In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then a reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote about the attacks, the victims, and their families. After further years of meticulous reporting, Zuckoff has filled Fall and Rise with voices of the lost and the saved. The result is an utterly gripping book, filled with intimate stories of people most affected by the events of that sunny Tuesday in September: an out-of-work actor stuck in an elevator in the North Tower of the World Trade Center; the heroes aboard Flight 93 deciding to take action; a veteran trapped in the inferno in the Pentagon; the fire chief among the first on the scene in sleepy Shanksville; a team of firefighters racing to save an injured woman and themselves; and the men, women, and children flying across country to see loved ones or for work who suddenly faced terrorists bent on murder. Fall and Rise will open new avenues of understanding for everyone who thinks they know the story of 9/11, bringing to life – and in some cases, bringing back to life – the extraordinary ordinary people who experienced the worst day in modern American history. Destined to be a classic, Fall and Rise will move, shock, inspire, and fill hearts with love and admiration for the human spirit as it triumphs in the face of horrifying events.
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© Mitchell Zuckoff 2019
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Cover photograph © Catherine Ursillo/Getty Images
The Impossible Dream (The Quest)
From Man of La Mancha
Lyric by Joe Darion
Music by Mitch Leigh
Copyright © 1965 Andrew Scott Music and Helena Music Corp.
Copyright Renewed
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Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
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Map by Nick Springer, copyright © 2018 Springer Cartographics LLC
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Mitchell Zuckoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008342098
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008342128
Version 2019-04-15
CONTENTS
Introduction “The Darkness of Ignorance”
Prologue “A Clear Declaration of War”
Chapter 1 “Quiet’s a Good Thing”
Chapter 3 “A Beautiful Day to Fly”
Chapter 4 “I Think We’re Being Hijacked”
Chapter 6 “The Start of World War III”
Chapter 7 “Beware Any Cockpit Intrusion”
Chapter 8 “America Is Under Attack”
Chapter 14 “We’ll Be Brothers for Life”
Chapter 15 “They’re Trying to Kill Us, Boys”
Chapter 16 “They Done Blowed Up the Pentagon”
Chapter 17 “I Think Those Buildings Are Going Down”
Chapter 18 “To Run, Where the Brave Dare Not Go”
Chapter 19 “Remember This Name”
Chapter 20 “This Is Your Plane Crash”
Chapter 21 “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”
Chapter 22 “Your Sister and Niece Will Never Be Lonely”
The ravages of many a forest fire of a bygone age may be read today in the scars left in the tree itself. The exact year that the fire occurred and some idea of its intensity are recorded in the wood, oftentimes grown over with living tissue and hid from the casual observer.
—FOREST PATHOLOGIST J. S. BOYCE, 1921
ON OCTOBER 28, 1886, PRESIDENT GROVER CLEVELAND SAILED TO A teardrop-shaped island in New York Harbor to formally accept France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty. Under leaden skies and a veil of mist, the president ended his speech with a tribute to the copper-clad lady’s torch and her symbolic power: “A stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and men’s oppression until Liberty shall enlighten the world.”
Dignitaries pounded ceremonial last rivets as warship cannons boomed. Across the water in Lower Manhattan, revelers erupted in celebration. Cobblestone streets pulsed with braying horses, throbbing drums, and blooming flower carts. Brass bands marched like front-bound soldiers, and children scrambled up lampposts to avoid being trampled.
Out-of-towners drawn to the spectacle tilted their heads to gawk at the impossibly tall buildings that loomed over them. Amused by these sky-eyed rubes, an office boy in a high tower felt seized by a raffish idea. He opened a window and tossed out long ribbons of the narrow paper tape that normally recorded the drunkard’s walk of stock prices. His pals followed suit.
“In a moment, the air was white with curling streamers,” a reporter for the New York Times observed. “Hundreds caught in the meshes of electric wires and made a snowy canopy, and others floated downward and were caught by the crowd.”
The fun was contagious. Serious men of finance became boys again, pressing against office windows to unspool paper onto the crowd. “There was seemingly no end to it,” the Times reporter wrote. “Every window appeared to be a paper mill spouting out squirming lines of tape. Such was Wall Street’s novel celebration.”
With that, the ticker-tape parade was born.
During the next one hundred fifteen years, countless tons of celebratory confetti sailed from high-rise windows onto a stretch of Lower Broadway that became known as the Canyon of Heroes. Paper blizzards honored more than two hundred explorers and presidents, war heroes and athletes, astronauts and religious figures, luminaries from Einstein to Earhart, Churchill to Kennedy, Mandela to the Mets.
