Phyrfight Intel

I Saw It All. Then I Saw Nothing.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Tuesday, April 9, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

(This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2001. It was among 10 articles that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.)

I saw the airliner at the instant it hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. A little later I saw the flames burst out of the south tower when the second airliner hit it. I saw people fall from the top of the World Trade Center. I saw the south tower fall down. A little later, I saw the north tower fall down. I have, in the past several hours, looked into lower Manhattan, and each time, where the World Trade Center stood, there is absolutely nothing.

I think that in the next few days I am going to wish that I had not seen any of this. There is no benefit in being able to watch two 108-story office buildings fall to the ground after two airliners have been forced to fly into them. It all seems very compelling now, and when you are in this business and you are on the scene, it is your job to provide an account. So this is just such an account, because there is something about us that demands that we provide this detail for the record.

For some of us who commute into New York City from New Jersey there is the delight each morning of traveling by ferry boat from Hoboken train terminal to lower Manhattan. The delight is in the fact that from the ferry’s top deck one is able, each morning, to see the Statue of Liberty, that great green statue. Morning after morning, for many of us, it remains a fresh sight and especially so yesterday morning, against a sky of the purest blue and a faint fall breeze.

I had come into town about 15 minutes earlier than usual, because I was going to buy a new cummerbund at Brooks Brothers for my tuxedo, to wear at my son’s weekend wedding in Madera, Calif. Brooks Brothers is just across the street from the World Trade Center.

There is a small coffee shop, with very good cinnamon-raisin croissants, across from American Express in the northern tower of the World Financial Center. Dow Jones is in the WFC’s southern tower, and the whole complex sits in the shadow of the World Trade Center. In fact, you have no idea, unless you had ever seen it, just how extraordinarily beautiful this complex of buildings was on a dark, clear night looked at from the Hoboken ferry in the middle of the Hudson River; all the buildings would be lit up, and the fat, domed World Financial Center’s buildings, designed by Cesar Pelli, stood in perfect proportion to the two magnificent, high silver towers. I cannot believe I will not see it again.

As I walked toward the coffee shop, at about 8:45, I glanced upward, and then downward. Quicker than these words can convey, my mind said: I think I just saw the wing of an airliner below the top of the Trade Center. Then the loud sound. I thought, my God, it hit it. But when I looked up, there was no plane. There was a wide gash across the north face of the tower, very high up, and gray smoke was billowing out of the gash, and there was a large fire inside the building. There were little, shining particles floating down from the building. I never saw the plane, or a fuselage or a wing. The plane seemed to have vaporized.

Way up there, the building just burned. There was a lot of smoke, but for a time, despite the horrifying tragedy, it somehow seemed like a containable event. The smoke was billowing upward and about three-fourths of the building looked fine. It seemed that the people below the gash would be able to descend. For awhile, the gathered crowd on the ground mainly watched amazed as the Trade Center tower burned from this one awful, open wound. Then the back of the other tower blew out. Then hell was in Manhattan.

A guy came running toward us who said another plane had crashed into the other tower, and now the sky was filling with a massive wall of black smoke and orange flames. Staring upward at the two majestic buildings, one had helpless thoughts about a helpless situation. It was so high up, there was no way to put water on these flames; it was just going to keep burning. Maybe it would just burn out the top of the building.

For awhile, aside from the flames and smoke, it was oddly uneventful. Sometimes windows would fall off the building and float down; sometimes a piece of smoking debris would arc downward. Then people started jumping off.

They were all so far away, but you always knew when a person was coming off the building because they all came down the same way–spread-eagled, turning, falling fast, and disappearing behind the Woolworth Building. It was awful, and one’s head filled, irresistably, with awful thoughts. Did they jump rather than be burned? Did the fire force them off the building? Just an hour before, they were probably on the ground, like the rest of us. I was stooping down near a trimmed green hedge near Stuyvesant High School, and I kept hearing a cricket chirp in the hedge, and occasionally small birds would fly up toward the blue.

Then the first building fell down. You have probably seen this over and over on television. I heard on TV later that a lot of people got out of the towers in an orderly evacuation because someone told them the buildings couldn’t fall down. I never thought those towers would fall down. But when it fell, it fell not merely with thunder, but all the way down, as rubble. It was so quickly nothing.

Now we were all running away, hard, because the smoke, about 40 stories high, was racing outward, toward us and all of lower Manhattan. My editorial-page colleague Jason Riley told me later that he got caught in the first collapse’s fallout. He couldn’t run faster than the smoke and crawled under a van to avoid the debris. But he started choking and his eyes were burning and the air had turned black. He said he thought the van would move and kill him. He banged on the van’s window and they let him in. Then they opened the door to let two other guys in, and the van started filling with floating debris and smoke. He got out and cops were telling people to “make for the water.” Jason headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge, and made it across.

I went north on the West Side Highway, with thousands of scared people. There is something called the Children’s Playground along there, and I went in and sat down at a picnic table to watch the towers again. The northern tower was still burning from its original wound; in fact, for awhile the burning seemed to stop in the first tower, but started again after the other building fell down. I decided that if the other tower had collapsed, then this one would too, and I was going to watch it fall.

I was going to bear witness. Let’s be a little more precise about this statement. I loved the World Trade Center towers. I have worked in their shadow for almost 25 years. I came to see them the way I saw the Statue of Liberty. At night, in the fall, as I noted earlier, when they and all the rest of Manhattan’s buildings were alight against a dark sky, the World Trade Center’s towers were just joyous. They shouted out on behalf of everyone in this city, where everyone seems to take pride in working long, hard hours. No matter what, those long, hard silver towers were always there. Way up there.

Of course it fell. It was the most awful, humbling, disgusting sight. All of a sudden, it was just a 100-floor shaft of smoke. As it fell, as it was hitting the ground, the smoke and crap flew upward, I guess along the sides still standing, and the smoke arced away from the building in a series of neat, repulsively identical plumes. I looked at the center of the building and all I could see were a few scraggly black twisted girders pointing upward. Then they fell and it was all gone.

We all had to start running again because the smoke was so huge and terrifying, and it was moving very fast. It was covering all of lower Manhattan. Along the way, a fellow told me that an airliner had crashed into the Pentagon.

It was impossible to think. It was perfectly obvious that identifiable Middle East terrorists had done all this and the United States and its new president would be obliged to respond on some very large scale. For all that, the depth of the evil and nihilism was numbing to behold, though in truth the beholding was over. The people in the airliners, the people coming off the top floors of the buildings, the bodies at the bottom beneath the rubble, all these souls evaporated in one clear morning in September.

As I walked north along the West Side Highway, empty now but for a torrent of police cars and fire engines from distant New York suburbs, racing southward to help, I kept turning around and turning around to look, and look again. I kept looking up at the sky, above the famous old Woolworth Building, where the World Trade Center stood, its two side-by-side towers, so high against the sky. I always saw the same thing, which was nothing.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.