At 9/11, a journalist makes a tough life choice

I was one of the lucky ones. After the first plane hit that Tuesday morning, I was out of the World Trade Center within a few minutes.

Covering a breakfast meeting at a conference of business economists, I was in the ballroom of the Marriott World Trade Center hotel. The morning’s keynote speaker was well into his remarks when the impact of the jetliner sent an explosive shock wave through the building.

With no idea what was happening, we stayed inside as debris rained down onto lower Manhattan. Then security guards herded us out toward the south, and we got our first view of the giant, flaming gash in the north tower, 100 stories above.

I remained in the area long enough to see both towers blazing against the crystal-blue sky, and then I watched in horror and disbelief as victims trapped by heat and smoke made the terrible choice of jumping to their deaths.

Then I began walking away, and I basically kept moving until I was home with my family in Seattle a week later.

Five years later, I am still processing that day and my reaction to it, learning new details and trying to understand how it affected me and those around me.

And all the while I have wrestled with my decision to leave New York on Sept. 12 rather than return to the Trade Center site or remain in the city to report on the aftermath. I have always come to the conclusion that I made the only possible decision for myself at that time.

Yet even to this day when I tell my story to other journalists, I feel at least a hint of disbelief that I turned my back on the story of a lifetime.

True, I filed what was probably the first eyewitness account of a survivor to be published on the Internet, posting it less than three hours after the initial attack. But then, unlike other reporters who elected to go toward the burning structures or made their way downtown after the towers collapsed, I essentially wandered through Greenwich Village for much of that day. I halfheartedly interviewed doctors at St. Vincent's hospital, waiting for injured victims who never arrived, but I really did not know what I could contribute to the coverage.

Thoughts of quitting a career
In fact there were times in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when I seriously wondered why I should continue even to pursue my career. What was the point of being a reporter, I thought to myself, when I just experienced an event of such historic proportions and was unable to comprehend what I had witnessed?

By the time an editor finally contacted me the following morning with a plan of action, I had made my mind up decisively: I was leaving Manhattan that day to head home to my wife, Liz, and our two young boys.

One friend of mine, a veteran correspondent, asked me later why my editors didn’t demand that I stay in New York to help out. I think they knew that by then, 24 hours later, no amount of arguing was going to persuade me to change my mind. I had set my priorities as a husband and father.

Sept. 11 was a test that forced me to choose what was important to me in my life. In a strange way, even though I was 41 at the time, I felt like I became an adult on that day, with new responsibilities and a newfound awe for how quickly life can be taken away.

When I accepted the assignment to reflect on those events five years later, I found myself thinking about a couple of people who had helped me get through that day. So I decided to retrace my steps by tracking down and interviewing some of the people who had played important roles, trying to find out how their thinking had evolved in five years, and how they felt 9/11 had changed them.

In the process of returning to New York and doing so I learned more about what had happened to  me — there really is no end to the stories of that day — and I had inspiring reunions with a couple of men who had helped restore my faith in humanity in the face of inhuman evil.

The first person I looked up was John Roccosalva, a Greenwich Village resident who invited me and dozens of others of World Trade Center refugees to use the telephone in his apartment on a day when people were desperate to communicate with their loved ones.

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