Published on Thursday, August 24, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun (Maryland)
Hear the Voices of 9/11

by Garrison Keillor
It was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the
World Trade Center, crying, "I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm going to
die." Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair.
She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by
smoke and heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin Cosgrove on
the 105th floor, moments before it collapsed, gasping for breath,
saying, "We're young men, we're not ready to die." And then he screamed,
"Oh my God" as the building started to collapse. It's in their voices,
what they went through. Those were two of the 1,613 calls to 911
released by New York City last week, on almost all of which the caller's
voice was beeped out. The city argued that to hear people in anguish in
their last minutes constitutes invasion of privacy. The truth is that
the callers had no interest in privacy - they were desperate to be
heard, and censoring them now is a last insult by a bureaucracy that
failed to protect them in the first place.
They were people like us; we might have sat near them in a theater or
restaurant, asked them for directions on the street. They went to work
that fine Tuesday morning and suddenly found themselves facing the
abyss, and the first thing we thought, seeing the burning buildings on
TV, was, "What is it like for the people in there?" We wanted to know.
Then, inevitably, politicians began to seize the day and turn it into a
patriotic tableau starring Themselves. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who
does not appear in a leadership capacity in the reliable accounts of
that morning - who was captured on videotape fleeing uptown - soon
stepped into the TV lights and put on his public face, and a few days
later the Current Occupant mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand
and vowed vengeance. The media were glad to focus on the martial moment,
the flag waving over the wreckage, the theme of America United, and the
anguished voices from the towers were unheard; the people who fell from
high floors and smashed into the pavement were not seen on American TV.
The media averted their eyes from the reality of Sept. 11 and started
looking for the Message.
The best book on the subject, by the way, is 102 Minutes: The Untold
Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, by Jim Dwyer and
Kevin Flynn, two New York Times reporters who fashioned a plain
narrative out of thousands of stories that took place in the time
between the first strike and the collapse of the second tower. You read
it, you're there.
Mr. Giuliani is still flying around giving speeches on leadership,
knocking down a hundred grand per shot, getting standing ovations
everywhere as a stand-in for the police and firemen who died in the
towers. He has never faced up to his failure to prepare for the attack,
even after the 1993 bomb explosion at the center, when it was shown
clearly that police and fire couldn't communicate with each other by
radio.
Eight years passed, little was done, and then came the 19 men with box
cutters. The 911 operators took thousands of calls and had no
information to give. Police helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of
the infernos and could see that the buildings were going to collapse,
couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the ground who, unable to see the
fire, sent their men up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those
men their lives.
In the end, what we crave is reality. The woman crying on the 83rd floor
was real. Our countrymen died real deaths on a warm September morning,
and then, to avenge them, even more have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In our hearts, we know we're on the wrong road, the road to unreality,
but the man says to stay the course. And now, as November nears,
congressmen who have supported the war, no questions asked, find it
convenient to admit to having "questions" about it. "We are facing a
difficult situation," they say. They are "troubled."
The woman who cried on the 83rd floor was more than troubled. She saw
death. It is indecent for New York to stifle the voices of the people in
the towers. The congressmen who deal so casually with life and death
ought to sit down and listen to those phone calls. Garrison Keillor's "A
Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio
stations across the country.
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