Free Reluctant Hero: A 9/11 Survivor Speaks Out About That Unthinkable Day, What He's Learned, How He's Struggled, and What No One Should Ever Forget by Michael Benfante Page B

the west side of the North Tower’s lobby. We could see outside the building and out all the way to the West Side Highway. We made it. We were finally free from those damn stairs, from the confinement, from the lack of control. But our immediate sense of relief was quickly overcome by confusion resulting from a flood of new information as we surveyed the scene. To our right, toward the north end of the building, we saw devastation. It was a war zone. What happened here? This is more than a transformer fire or a gas explosion. Shattered glass littered the inside of the lobby and the outside of the building. Twisted metal poked out from all sides of the lobby walls, with chunks of broken cement and loose paper all over the ground. The bright sun now had a dusty film over it—like snow, but dirty, with a grayish white hue. People moved around aimlessly, bandaged and bloodied—seemingly looking for help, for a friend, for something they lost, for I don’t know what.
    Three of us held the woman—the firemen on the back, me on one side, and John on the other. For John and me, fatigue was no longer a factor. Whatever strain we felt gave way to the new world of sights and sounds we had now entered. In fact, after sixty-eight floors, we no longer thought of ourselves as two men carrying a woman in a wheelchair. The chair had become an unconscious extension of our own bodies—the three of us moving as one body. When we turned, she turned. If we bent low, she went low. When we froze—startled or shocked—she froze with us. The three of us—me, John, and the woman—had become incapable of moving anywhere except together.
    We stood there gripping the chair, dazed, trying to make sense of what we were seeing. My eyes wandered to a firemen helping a woman walk through a window space in the lobby where there was no longer a window—totally surreal. Then I looked left and saw another firemen help a woman without shoes get over some debris and under the giant metal strip that once divided a massive pane of glass.
    We were on our own. No one was telling us where to go. I’m sure we had that lost look on our faces. For a moment I was struck motionless. I stared out at the madness, semi - bewildered. One firemen approached us. It was as if he had read my thoughts. “Take her out past the corner over there. It’s fully blown out,” he barked. In the northwest corner of the lobby, even the metal strip was gone. The space was gutted. It looked as though the mammoth structures of glass and steel that girded the area had been completely and violently vacuumed out. My god. That morning—just about an hour and a half earlier—I’d clocked in for work in that exact same lobby.
    The firemen, John, and I carried the woman through the broken window space and across to the West Side Highway area. Now where? The three of us scanned the area for any direction that looked more like safety than danger. The firemen helping us got a call on his radio. They wanted his location. “I’m helping a situation here,” he told them. The situation was us.
    Finally someone pointed us to an ambulance. We saw it facing south on the southbound side of the West Side Highway, right in front of the North Tower. We walked across the northbound side, across the divider, and presented the woman to the EMT guys at the ambulance. Amazingly, with all the destruction around us, the ambulance was empty.
    They undid the Velcro straps, removed her from the evacuation wheelchair, and placed her in the back of the ambulance.She started to cry. She hadn’t cried at all the whole time we’d been together. In fact, throughout our entire journey, she’d shown little emotion at all. As soon as she was in the ambulance, she began to let it out. “Hey, what are you crying for?” I said to her. “Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.” I thought maybe she was still worried about her motorized wheelchair. She motioned to me with her hands—tiny hands—to give her