Luck, Trauma, and Remembering 24 Years Later

The three stories I think about on 9/11

Author

Garrett Graff
September 11, 2025 • Reading Time: 10 minutes

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Whenever I talk about my work (as I did this summer with Traci Thomas on her The Stacks podcast), I talk about how the power to me of oral history is how it puts you back amid world-changing events before the participants themselves knew the outcome. Some forty percent of America is today too young to remember the Tuesday morning attacks of September 11th, 2001. They will never know what it was like to experience that morning not knowing what came next. Instead, they read it about in history books.

The version of 9/11 they learn goes something like this: The attacks began at 8:46 a.m. and the whole thing was over 102 minutes late at 10:28 a.m. with the collapse of the second tower; there were four hijacked planes, four attacks, and about 3,000 people died. That is an entirely factually true statement, but it’s not the day that any of us lived through that day remember.

We didn’t know when the attacks began (remember how everyone’s first thought was that first crash into the North Tower was likely a small plane, a terrible pilot error or mechanical malfunction?), we didn’t know when the attacks were over (there were false reports and rumors all day long — remember the car bomb at the State Department?), we didn’t know how many hijacked planes there were (as late as 1 p.m., the US government believed there were still a dozen hijacked planes in the skies over North America), there was no sense these attacks were confined just to New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania (skyscrapers were evacuated coast-to-cast, Disney World in Florida closed down and evacuated, and even the Toronto subway was evacuated), and — most importantly — none of us knew what came next.

Understanding the fear, trauma, chaos, and confusion of 9/11 — experiencing it not as we teach it in history books but through the eyes of the of those who lived it — is key to understanding why our country reacted the way we did.

I’ve spent much of the last decade reporting and writing on September 11th, including of course in my book The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, which is probably the most important writing I will do in my life.

As we all remember that day today and think back across the profound changes it delivered to our lives and our world, I wanted to share today three pieces I’ve written about the day.

President Bush at Emma Booker Elementary School in the initial minutes after the attacks.

First, the article that inspired my book — an oral history of eight hours aboard Air Force One with George W. Bush:

Master Sgt. Dana Lark, superintendent of communications, Air Force One: From all indications, it was going to be a simple trip. I had breakfast with one of the navigators, and we were talking about how we were having breakfast in Florida and we’re going to be back in time for lunch.

Col. Mark Tillman, presidential pilot, Air Force One: We were all getting ready, based on the estimated departure time. All of us had already shown up at the plane.

Master Sgt. Dana Lark: There were two TV tuners, worldwide television tuners [at my workspace on Air Force One]. They were like old-school rabbit ears—UHF and VHF frequencies. We didn’t have the ability to tune into CNN, Fox, or anything else. It was the Today Show, the strongest signal that day, and they’re showing pictures [of the Towers], smoke billowing out. I saw the second airplane strike. I said, “Oh shit.” I just dropped everything and ran downstairs to get Colonel Tillman: “You’ve got to come see this.”

Col. Mark Tillman: It didn’t make any sense. It’s a clear-and-a-million day.

In researching my book, [I spent] three years reading and listening to thousands of personal stories from that Tuesday—stories from Americans all across the country and people far beyond our shores. In all those published accounts and audio clips, and in the interviews I conducted, one theme never ceases to amaze me: the sheer randomness of how the day unfolded, who lived, who died, who was touched, and who escaped. One thousand times a day, we all make arbitrary decisions—which flight to book, which elevator to board, whether to run an errand or stop for coffee before work—never realizing the possibilities that an alternate choice might have meant. In the 18 years since 9/11, each of us must have made literally 1 million such decisions, creating a multitude of alternate outcomes we’ll never know.

Over millennia, we’ve called “luck” and “fate” by many names, often intertwining the concepts with the unseen hand of Providence. In mythology, the three Fates were goddesses who handed out destiny at birth, weaving a future that each mortal would be forced to live out inexorably—the concept of fate serving for many as a necessary explanation for the random cruelties, vicissitudes, and lucky breaks that determine so much of how life plays out. That individuals might just blunder into these events for no reason at all was, for the ancient Greeks, just too bleak a thought.

Yet it’s hard to come away from the stories of 9/11 with a sense of anything other than an appreciation for the role randomness plays in our daily existence—There but for the grace of God go I, as the 16th-century clergyman John Bradford is said to have phrased it—and how it can change the course of history.

Will was one of just 18 people who survived in the rubble of the towers — a story that was told in a Nicolas Cage movie, but it’s the story of what came after, a story most people don’t know, that to me is the reason to think about Will today: 

The oddest thing about being trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center was that Will Jimeno didn’t break any bones. The Port Authority police officer had 220 stories of the World Trade Center fall on top of him — all of both towers, first the south, then the north — a violence of unimaginable scale, velocity and intensity, one that killed three of the other officers he’d been standing with moments earlier, and entombing him and his surviving sergeant amid concrete and rock for hours on Sept. 11, 2001.

…

Jimeno was medically retired from his dream job at the PAPD in 2004 — after really only working as a cop for the nine months before 9/11 — and has dedicated himself in the years since to speaking to groups living through their own struggles.

He makes the rounds of rehab facilities, substance abuse programs, churches and jails, as well as speaking to military groups and police academy classes. He speaks to a lot of elementary, middle and high schools, and the occasional college. At each, he brings a small piece of the steel from the World Trade Center that fell 20 years ago Saturday. In all his presentations, he talks about what it’s like when the World Trade Center falls on top of you — and how you stand back up. Ultimately, Jimeno came to understand that he wasn’t defined by the building that fell on him. Instead, he would be defined by what he did despite it.

Trauma, Jimeno says, isn’t comparative or competitive. Whatever your own personal trauma is can be just as devastating to you as his was to him. At some point, Jimeno says, in all our lives, we’re going to feel like the World Trade Center fell on top of us — whether it’s the death of a family member, a bad breakup, a divorce, the loss of a job, an accident, addiction, abuse, a sexual assault, depression or something else. It might even be, he says, the final exam next week that you don’t think you can make it through.


It’s what we do in that moment — and who we are after — that matters most.

However you mark this day, whatever memories or stories it brings you, I hope you’ll take a few moments to pause and think about that clear blue sky on a September Tuesday twenty-fours ago today. Thanks, as always, for reading — and for remembering.

GMG

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