The 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks passed with little of the intensity the 10th anniversary produced. This is partially because the media loves nice, round anniversaries, and because time is doing what time does — taking the edge off the pain.

It is incumbent on those who understand the impact of that day — through the loss of a loved one, the loss of security, the loss of freedom — to keep some of the memory alive. Not as a historical artifact but as an active reminder of the evil men can do when ideology trumps humanity (as the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya fatally demonstrated).

During the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, I corresponded with a man who was helping secure the Ground Zero site. That column is reprinted here, as a reminder that no matter how many anniversaries fade into history, we have a responsibility to honor the lost.

Monroe Mann at Ground Zero

Three hours after two planes struck the World Trade Center towers, Monroe Mann journeyed into Manhattan to find his sister, who had been stranded on a subway train. Mann, a lieutenant in the National Guard, wore his uniform, knowing it would give him broader access in the search. He found her, and after arranging to get her home, he walked to the site of the fallen towers and volunteered for the “bucket brigade,” the line of rescuers removing rubble, one pail at a time.

At breaks during his three-day ordeal, Monroe used armory equipment to email to me firsthand accounts of what he saw. The following excerpts are his unedited diary of events.

Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001

I got a ride to the site with NYPD this morning. We stopped at the NFL headquarters. They were donating boxes of NFL caps, sweatshirts, windbreakers, pants, etc. for the relief effort. We went to the precinct and unloaded all the boxes of NFL gear.

I can’t believe it, but building 7 is still on fire, still smoldering. It was such an incredible sight to see the three fire hoses sticking out from the windows spraying the rubble from the adjacent building … yet their efforts yielded no positive results as smoke continues to pour up into the sky.

PLEASE, don’t read any more if you are awaiting news from your loved ones.

There aren’t likely any more people alive, though of course, we are hoping for miracles. We expect only bodies to be coming out in the coming weeks. Most of the buildings’ rubble has been pummeled many stories underground. We are still doing bucket brigades standing on TOP of the rubble, which in some cases, lies more than three stories up. The rubble goes six stories down.

Spray painted in red paint right on the side of the building right across from the epicenter: “Morgue full, new morgue two blocks south.”

It is so sickening. The new morgue is in the Brooks Brothers store. The new downtown police headquarters is in a Burger King.

Walking through the streets, I looked into a building that had a window crashed out, and found the feet of someone sticking out on a couch. I went in only to find it was NYPD, sleeping, collapsed from exhaustion. I am so glad he wasn’t dead.

In speaking with a cop, he told me that he had to leave and stop helping when he pulled a body out that was frozen rigor mortus with a mouth in fear, eyes wide open, and her hands covering her face. “This is too much for me,” he told me.

We were helping in trying to pull another of the bodies out. It was stuck. In order to get it out, the doctor regrettably had to cut the body in half with a pocket knife. They pulled the torso off, and put his wallet in the body bag with it.

We’re standing at the end of the world.

Papers from the buildings are strewn everywhere on the ground … papers that must have seemed so important to everyone just days ago. I picked one up and read part of it, “This then marks the close of the deal. We look forward to doing business with you.” How sad. How terrible.

One restaurant is totally intact except for one window that was blown out. I went in to look around and on one table, found a bag of Skittles, open, with two left. Someone had been eating them. Someone had been eating them.

My friend, who worked at the WTC, didn’t have to go in on Tuesday. He was a tour guide there. He told me that if there’s a problem on the upper floors, they go to the roof and wait for a helicopter. He fears that the tour guide who took his place that day probably did just that, and went to the roof with those on the tour.

The church that is in the middle of lower Manhattan, in the epicenter of carnage, remains wholly unscathed.

God is indeed with us.

Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001

I’ve been down at the Family Support Center, which is at the 69th Infantry Armory. I’m still on standby, and am waiting to soon be activated.

So many are walking around with poster board on their chest and back with pictures of their loved ones. Walking aimlessly around inside, aimlessly, aimlessly, aimlessly, aimlessly, aimlessly, aimlessly: WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO DO? It is so sad:

“He’s my dad.”

“She’s my mother.”

“Those are my brothers.” “My aunt.”

And it is so sad to still hear everyone talking in the present: IS IS IS IS IS IS. My mom is … my dad is … my sister is …

Even on the missing person signs that are EVERYWHERE, “She IS wearing black shoes. She IS an employee of …”

I called my mom last night and she told me to come home.

She didn’t want me there. I told her I was fine, and I stayed the night until this morning. I didn’t think it was really affecting me. But I’ll be honest. I really don’t want to go back there. But the fact that I have access to the closed off areas tells me I should, because I know there are so many others who WOULD go if they could. But part of me wants to just stay home, for fear that I am going to soon be more knee deep into this than I could ever imagine.

Friday, Sept. 14 , 2001

I woke up this morning … I was so happy. I jumped out of my own bed, saw the sun shining through the window, and the first thing on my mind was to see what auditions were on for me today …

Then reality hit me like a brick: It wasn’t a dream. I am so sad. I wish this were a dream. I WANT to wake up and go back to my silly pursuit of acting, and shoot for that silly Oscar. I would like nothing more than to go back in time to the way things were. But I can’t.

I WAS THERE. How many of you have seen the rubble, destruction, body bags, the crying families, the wandering weak? YOU STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED! YOU STILL HAVE NO TRUE IDEA WHAT HAPPENED IN LOWER MANHATTAN! Yeah, maybe I’m in shock, but it’s a shock to the reality of this situation.

Postscript: Mann has continued his writing and acting career. Follow his work at www.monroemann.blogspot.com.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Email him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: Lighting The Fuse, Michael S. Miller, Monroe Mann, Sept. 11 2001

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2012 at 12:00 am and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

When the terrorists used hijacked airplanes to strike their targets Sept. 11, 2001, I lived just a few miles from the Fort Lauderdale International Airport. My apartment was in an oceanfront building, and it was my habit to come home from work and waste as little time as possible between walking in the door in work clothes and walking back out the door ready to swim in the warm and usually gentle Atlantic. It used to entertain me for hours, watching the scores of women on the beach and the scores of planes flying in and out of the airport. The miracles and mechanics of both the female body and jetliners are equally mysterious and awe-inspiring, and, coincidentally, both are routinely for sale in South Florida.

On the first few days following the Sept. 11 attacks, I would drift along the coast and stare into the blue skies for hours at a time, fascinated by the lack of airplanes overhead. The emotions and impressions of that horrific week are preserved in increasingly clinical passages of my memory, but those hours spent looking at an empty sky remain as clear and bright to me as anything that is happening right now.

On the second day after the attacks, as I floated in the surf and watched the silent skies, three military jets cracked through the clouds and flew toward Miami, gone as fast as I could register what they were. Then, silence and empty sky. I remember wishing I had a talent for poetry, so I could encapsulate the fear, grief and unease that surrounded that September week, all manifested in the empty skies and undisturbed clouds.

During that era, Shannon, my wife-to-be, lived in Ann Arbor. One of us would fly to see the other just about every month. Single-seat flying in coach was not too expensive, and it was sadly romantic to walk each other through the terminal, to the gate, and wave goodbye as the loved one walked with the line of people to board the plane.

We did not know it in those mid-September days, but the sons of bitches who hijacked four airplanes and destroyed millions of dollars in property and thousands of priceless lives forever changed everything we knew about flying.

Shannon was supposed to fly to Fort Lauderdale on Sept. 12, 2001, but it was more than a month before we could re-arrange the visit. When I arrived to pick her up, I was stunned and saddened by what I saw. Military vehicles lined the entrance to the airport. Broward County police joined state troopers, their cars barricading the arrival and departure lanes. Inside the airport, National Guardsmen with automatic rifles lined the walkways to the gate, a gate that was closed. Never again would parting travelers walk with their loved ones to the gate and watch them walk to the plane.

And the lines! Lines at curbside, lines at check-in, lines to present boarding passes, lines for the metal detectors and scanners. What was once a fairly simple routine was now a gantlet of fear and suspicion.

At the time, I, like most people, accepted the changes as a necessary but temporary evil. Who knew what nefarious follow-up plans were already set in motion, and since it would undoubtedly take our military a month or so to track down and capture Osama bin Laden and his gang of bastards, it was better to be safe than to be incinerated when one’s plane was flown into the side of a steel building.

If anyone had told me then that nearly 10 years later, not only would bin Laden still be free, but that airport security would be 100 times more imposing and extreme, I might have shredded my frequent-flyer cards.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” — Benjamin Franklin

Yeah, well, jolly old Ben never had to navigate Fort Lauderdale International Airport with two toddlers.

Every Thanksgiving, my wife, two little boys and I fly back to South Florida to see my brother and celebrate an early Christmas. Flying with two big suitcases, two carry-ons, two car seats, a double stroller and the odds and ends that collect around a 2-and 4-year-old is close to reality show survival conditions. Only so much liquid can be packed, all electronics must be scanned, everyone’s shoes must come off — thanks to failed “shoe bomber” and successful a-hole Richard Reid — and the stroller has to be disassembled to its wheels.

At what point does liberty removed compensate for safety gained? The current focus on the Transportation and Safety Administration’s (TSA) latest efforts to keep us safe is apparently the breaking point. Here are your choices: Submit to full-body scanners that allow TSA workers to see your naked body, a manual hands-on search married men do not experience from strange hands, a possible $11,000 fine and arrest for refusal or … start walking.

Things are so bad and tense, a man warning a TSA worker, “Don’t touch my junk” has become as Internet famous as the “Hide yo kids hide yo wife hide yo husband cuz they be rapin’ everybody” guy.

On Thanksgiving morning, my family will board a plane and head to South Florida. I feel bad for the TSA crew that has to see my naked image just hours before their turkey dinners, but we all have to sacrifice for security, right?

What I am not happy about is thinking of my wife and toddlers being subjected to any kind of manhandling or invasion of privates.

By the time you read this, we will be in South Florida enjoying the holiday, the first half of our TSA hurdle behind us. And I really, really hope that when we return, the TSA will not have given me anything to write about.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Call him at (419) 241-1700 EXT. 223 or e-mail him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: Lighting The Fuse, Micheal S. Miller, Sept. 11 2001, TSA

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.