Heroes, Victims
A time to honor the dead--and to embrace the living
Hour upon hour, words simply failed. How could kamikaze jetliners attack both the towering World Trade Center and the mighty Pentagon? Inside the structures, an indescribable nightmare ensued. One minute, men and women were sipping coffee, reading their E-mails. The next, they were engulfed in a cataclysm of fire and falling walls. And the horror kept right on coming, in wave after nauseating wave. No one watching television could see or hear the police officers and firefighters trapped in the labyrinthine stairwells of the Trade Center as they stared up in disbelief when the tower above them began to crumble. Then there were the spouses, parents, and children waiting in dread by the phone, uncertain if loved ones were dead or alive. Mere words and pictures fail utterly to capture the grief of relatives wandering the streets near the crumpled towers with homemade fliers bearing images of their lost ones, begging for help in finding them. And how to describe the emotions of rescue workers plucking fingers, toes, ears from the rubble? None had ever seen anything like it. No one had. Ever.
Despite the inadequacy of language at such a shattering moment, Americans talked and talked, struggling to make sense of the carnage. They jammed phone lines, spoke to neighbors over backyard fences, sent E-mails, gathered around televisions in bars. They organized prayer vigils, grabbed coworkers to commiserate over lunch. In part, they used words to try to make sense of the senseless. Yet people also talked because of an unquenchable impulse to remember, to honor the dead.
Heroic tales. This national wake has been a time for storytelling, for recounting tales of victims that a friend of a friend knew, of lucky survivors, and plucky heroes. The pages that follow tell some of those stories. Many, of course, remain unknown yet. Some, certainly, will never be known. The stories that can be told now range from the heartbreaking to the harrowing--such as the sad saga of Floyd Rasmussen, who stumbled around the Pentagon for hours after the attack, calling to his missing wife, "Here I am--come find me."
When a nation is prosperous and at peace, as America has been for nearly a decade, its heroes are few. Citizens then tend to study the clay feet of leaders, be they Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich. But a country in duress, as Attorney General John Ashcroft said last week, "calls on us . . . to be at our best." Thankfully, many Americans responded to the terrorist attacks with quiet courage, showing, once more, that ordinary citizens can be heroes. The firefighters and cops who died helping people exit the World Trade Center towers made no such claims for themselves--they were just doing their jobs, one after another had said, just doing their duty. Other heroes, meanwhile, stepped forth to show that how a life is lived can be more important than life itself. Lyzbeth Glick's husband, Jeremy, called on his cellphone to tell her that he and several other passengers were ready to fight the knife-wielding hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93 shortly before it crashed near Shanksville, Pa. "He was a hero for what he did," she told the New York Times. "But he was a hero for me because he told me not to be sad and to take care of our [12-week-old] daughter, and he said whatever happened he would be OK with any choices I make."
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