Heroes, Victims
A time to honor the dead--and to embrace the living
F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous dictum--"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy"--may never have been more apt than last week. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers alike aired their unbearable anguish and anger, prompting even jaded news anchors to tear up. Thirteen-year-old Cameron Buchanan, whose brother, Brandon Buchanan, age 24, worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, was among the legion of people overpowered by a sense of loss. Two days after the attack, Cameron called his brother's cellphone, which was still taking messages. "He just wanted to talk to him one last time," says Ronald Buchanan, father of Brandon, Cameron, and their two sisters. "He left a message saying he was his hero, and he wanted to grow up just like him."
The terrorists wanted their thousands of victims to be anonymous statistics. But family members refused to let that happen. Stories tumbled out last week. Playful David Retik, 33, a partner in a Boston-based venture-capital firm, dragged out his inflatable trampoline in Needham, Mass., for block parties. Bookish Rodney Dickens, an 11-year-old honors student raised by a single mom in Washington, D.C., was on his first plane ride--having earned the chance to take a marine biology field trip to the Channel Islands off California sponsored by the National Geographic Society. And then there was bighearted Rev. Mychal Judge, who rushed down to the World Trade Center after the attack, only to die when debris fell on him while he was giving a firefighter last rites. Steven Morello Jr., whose father worked on the 93rd floor for Marsh & McLennan, says his dad "wasn't a symbol of destructive capitalism--this was a loving, caring human being who was taking care of his family."
Fleeing a fireball. The survivors and the fatalities of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks weren't separated by much more than a few floors and sheer luck. Floyd Rasmussen worked at the Pentagon, too, just two floors and one corridor away from his wife. Army Lt. Col. Robert Grunewald of Alexandria, Va., who crawled out of the Pentagon after a fireball blasted through the wall of his office, says, "The good Lord was on my side. . . . When I got out I was happy to be alive. . . . Now, I just feel disgusted. I am so saddened by the loss of life of my friends."
Those who literally survived the blasts will relive the awful assaults for years, perhaps wondering why they got a second chance. But in the broadest sense, America is now a nation of survivors, even if with a small s. The signs of a collective struggle to understand last week's attacks, to do something to help, popped up everywhere. Thousands of people lined up to donate blood and money in cities around the country. Countless New Yorkers showed up to hand out water and food to rescue workers. Others staffed volunteer bucket brigades to remove debris from the demolished buildings. When officials at Washington Hospital Center started to run low on human tissue for burn victims from the Pentagon attack after air traffic was halted, a group of men from a Dallas hospital piled into a car with an ice chest containing human skin and drove overnight to Washington.
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