FALL & RISE STORY OF 911 EB

Mitchell Zuckoff

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780008342111
• eBook ISBN: 9780008342128
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Biographien

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.

CHAPTER 1

“QUIET’S A GOOD THING”

September 10, 2001

CAPTAIN JOHN OGONOWSKI

American Airlines Flight 11

“Dad, I need help with my math!”

John Ogonowski’s eldest daughter, Laura, called out to her father the second he stepped inside his family’s farmhouse in rural Dracut, Massachusetts.

“Laura!” yelled her mother, Margaret “Peg” Ogonowski, in response. “Let him walk in the door!”

Fifty years old, six feet tall and country-boy handsome, John gazed at his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter. His smile etched deep crinkles in the ruddy skin around his blue eyes. Dinner hour was near, and Peg suspected that John felt equal parts tired and happy to be home. As darkness fell on September 10, 2001, he’d just driven from Boston’s Logan International Airport after piloting an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles. A day earlier, he’d flown west on American Flight 11, a daily nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.

After twenty-three years as a commercial pilot, John’s normal routine upon returning home was to go directly to the master bedroom and strip out of his navy-blue captain’s uniform with the silver stripes on the sleeves. He’d pull on grease-stained jeans and a work shirt, then head to the enormous barn on the family’s 130-acre farm, located thirty miles north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border. Quiet by nature, content working with his calloused hands, John inhaled the perfume of fresh hay bales and unwound by tackling one of the endless jobs that came with being a farmer who also flew jets.

But on this day, to Peg’s surprise, John broke his routine. Changing clothes and doing chores would wait. Still in uniform, he sat at the kitchen counter with Laura and her geometry problems. “Let’s remember,” he often told his girls, “math is fun.” They’d roll their eyes, but they liked to hear him say it.

Homework finished, the family enjoyed a dinner of chicken cutlets, capped by John’s favorite dessert, ice cream. Also at dinner that night were Peg’s parents, visiting from New York; his father’s brother Al, who lived nearby; and their younger daughters Caroline, fourteen, and Mary, eleven.

At one point, Peg noticed something missing from John’s uniform shirt. “Did you go to work without your epaulets?” she asked. “I had to stop for gas,” John said. He’d removed the shoulder decorations so he wouldn’t look showy, like one of those pilots who seemed to expect the world to salute them.

John’s modesty and quiet confidence had attracted Peg nineteen years earlier, when she was a junior flight attendant for American. John had joined the airline as a flight engineer after serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, when he flew C-141 transport planes back and forth across the Pacific. Some of his return flights bore flag-draped coffins. In his early years at American, John was a rare bird: an unmarried pilot, easy on the eyes, respectful to all. On a flight out of Phoenix, a savvy senior flight attendant urged Peg to speak with him. When they landed in Boston he got her number.

They were married in less than a year. By the end of the decade John had been promoted to captain, Peg had risen in seniority, and they had three daughters. All that, plus their White Gate Farm, growing hay and picking fruit from three hundred blueberry bushes and an orchard of a hundred fifty peach trees John planted himself. Every spring, they put in pumpkins and corn to sell at John’s parents’ farm a couple of miles down the road, where he’d learned to drive a tractor at the age of eight. Peg often joked that the classic John Deere in their barn was her pilot husband’s other jet.

John and Peg continued to work for American Airlines throughout their marriage, with John flying a dozen days a month and Peg working about the same. They alternated flight schedules so one or the other could be with the girls. When that failed, their families pitched in. John had spent a chunk of his career flying international routes, but the overnight flights wore him down, and he’d recently been recertified on the Boeing 767, the wide-bodied pride of American’s domestic fleet. Lately he’d been flying regularly on the Boston–Los Angeles route, often on Flight 11, which Peg had flown hundreds of times as well.

John was scheduled to fly again the next morning, another six-hour trip to California, but he decided he didn’t want to leave home so soon after returning from the West Coast. Also, federal agriculture officials and a team from Tufts University were coming to the farm in the morning to discuss a program John felt passionate about. He and Peg had set aside a dozen acres to allow Cambodian immigrant farmers to grow bok choy, water spinach, pigweed, and other traditional Asian vegetables, to sell at markets and to feed their families. John plowed for the immigrants and rarely collected the two-hundred-dollar monthly rent. He built greenhouses for early spring planting, provided water from the farm’s pond, and taught the new Americans about New England’s unforgiving soil, crop-killing pests, and short planting season. Soon the Ogonowskis’ White Gate Farm was designated the first “mentor farm” for immigrants. When a reporter stopped by, John heaped credit on the Cambodians: “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire hundred acres.”

After dinner, John went to the desktop computer in the TV room. He logged in to the American Airlines scheduling system, hoping that another pilot wanted to pick up an extra trip. A match would turn John’s onscreen schedule green, allowing him to stay on the farm on September 11. He tried several times, with the same result each time.

“I’m just getting red lights,” he told Peg.

The farm tour would go on without him, while once again John would serve as captain of American Airlines Flight 11, nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles.

PETER, SUE KIM, AND CHRISTINE HANSON

United Airlines Flight 175

In 1989, a vibrant young woman slalomed through a house party, weaving through the crowd to avoid a determined young man with red dreadlocks, freckles, and a closet stuffed with tie-dyed T-shirts. Peter Hanson was cute, but Sue Kim wasn’t interested in a latter-day hippie desperate to convince her that the music of the Grateful Dead was comparable to the work of Mozart.

This sort of thing happened often to Sue, a first-generation Korean American. It made sense that a curious, intense man like Peter would meet her at a party and be smitten by her intelligence and effervescence. Sue’s easy laugh made people imagine that she’d lived a charmed life. But she hadn’t.

When Sue was two, her overworked parents sent her from their Los Angeles home to live with her grandmother in Korea. She returned to the United States four years later and learned that she had two younger brothers, who hadn’t been sent away from their parents. Her mother died when Sue was fifteen, and she helped to raise her brothers. Later her father committed suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. Beneath her placid surface, Sue craved the bonds of a secure family.

After the house party, Peter engineered ways to see Sue again while he pursued a master’s degree in business administration. When Peter thought that he’d gained romantic traction, he cut off his dreadlocks, stuffed them in a bag, and gave them to his mother, Eunice. She understood: Peter wanted to show Sue he’d be good marriage material. It marked a sharp turn toward responsibility for the free-spirited twenty-three-year-old. His parents worried that perhaps he wasn’t quite ready for marriage, but he couldn’t wait.

“If I don’t nab her now, she won’t be there,” Peter told his mother. Eunice accompanied him on a shopping trip for an engagement ring. Sue said yes, accepting not only Peter but also his devotion to the Grateful Dead. Their wedding bands were antiques, handed down from the parents of Peter’s father, Lee.

Peter earned an MBA from Boston University and became vice president of sales for a Massachusetts computer software company. He stayed close with his parents, with whom he’d traveled the world as a boy and occasionally enjoyed his favorite band’s contact-high concerts. Even as he accepted adult responsibilities, Peter remained a prankster. One day while answering phones at the local Conservation Commission office where she worked, Eunice heard a stern male voice demanding permission to build a structure next to a pond on his property. Eunice calmly explained the review process and the permits needed, but the caller raged about his rights as a landowner. As the rant wore on, Eunice realized it was Peter.

Meanwhile, Sue developed into an impressive academic scientist. She’d worked her way through a biology degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then moved to Boston for a master’s degree in medical sciences. With Peter’s encouragement, Sue pursued a PhD in immunology, working with specially bred mice to explore the role of certain molecules in asthma and AIDS. Sue was scheduled to defend her dissertation that fall, but approval was a foregone conclusion. Her doctoral adviser envisioned Sue joining the faculty at Boston University.

Peter and Sue juggled their professional lives with taking care of their daughter, Christine, who was born in February 1999. She looked like Sue in miniature, a hug magnet with Peter’s love of music. Christine’s middle name was Lee, for her paternal grandfather. Quietly, Sue stocked up on pregnancy tests, hoping to give Christine a little brother and Peter’s parents a grandson.

Lee and Eunice visited often from their Connecticut home. When Eunice arrived one day with a broken foot, Christine yelled, “I help you, Namma! Wait here!” She ran upstairs and returned with a colorful Band-Aid she applied to Eunice’s cast. Lee found joy in watching Christine work with Peter in the yard. The little girl promised the young trees that she and her daddy would help them grow big and strong. When they said grace before meals, Christine insisted on a song from a television show about Barney the purple dinosaur: “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family. With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?” If her grandparents missed a word, Christine made them start over.

Early in September, Peter needed to fly to California on business, so they decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and a visit with Sue’s grandmother and brothers. The weekend before the September 11 flight, Christine told Eunice of her excitement about the upcoming trip, which included plans for an outing to Disneyland. During one phone call, Christine reported to her grandmother that she was going to California to see Mickey Mouse and Pluto. Then Christine expressed an even stronger desire: “I want to go to your house, Namma!”

On the night of September 10, Christine slept in her new big-girl bed with her favorite stuffed animal, Peter Rabbit holding a carrot. Before she left home the next morning, she’d tuck Peter under the covers, to keep him safe until she returned.

BARBARA OLSON

American Airlines Flight 77

Under the hot lights of the C-SPAN television show Washington Journal, host Peter Slen flipped open a copy of Washingtonian magazine for September 2001. The camera zoomed in to a headline, THE 100 MOST POWERFUL WOMEN IN WASHINGTON. Then it swung across the set to find conservative firebrand Barbara Olson, her telegenic smile dialed to full blast, her gleaming blond hair draped down the back of her red blazer. Slen asked Barbara: “Why are you listed as an influential political insider?”

Barbara knew perfectly well, but she answered modestly: “I don’t know. That’s where they put me.” She changed the subject to a recent lunch where the magazine’s honorees discussed who might be the first female president. Overwhelmingly, the capital’s most powerful women named Hillary Clinton. Virtually alone in dissent was Barbara, who had just completed her second book lacerating the U.S. senator from New York and former First Lady.

“What does it mean to have influence in this town?” Slen asked. “How do you get it? Is it power, is it position, is it money, is it marriage?”

The question carried a sexist dagger, missed by audience members who didn’t know that Barbara’s husband was among the most powerful lawyers in the country: U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, the top legal strategist for the White House. President George W. Bush had given him the job after Olson had argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court to end the recount of votes in Florida from the 2000 election, a decision that led to Bush becoming president.

Barbara ignored the jab, replying with a laugh that long work paved the road to influence. She’d grown used to questions about whether a glamorous woman who drove a Jaguar and had a weakness for stiletto heels deserved her place at the center of the political world. But at forty-five, having earned a partnership in a prominent law firm, Barbara drew confidence from the knowledge that before marrying Ted, she’d been a professional ballet dancer, worked her way through law school, and prosecuted drug cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. She’d also served as chief investigative counsel for the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

During her five...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Maps
• Introduction: “The Darkness of Ignorance”
• Prologue: “A Clear Declaration of War”
• Part I: Fall from the Sky
• Part II: Fall to the Ground
• Part III: Rise from the Ashes
• Appendix 1: The Fallen
• Appendix 2: Timeline of Key Events on September 11, 2001
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• List of Searchable Terms
• About the Author
• Also by Mitchell Zuckoff
• About the Publisher