A Decade of Hope (43 page)

 

For the first forty minutes or so of that day I, like everybody else, was reacting to 9/11. I didn't know that I was about to become personally involved. All I knew was that the video of that plane hitting, United 175, made me feel so awful for the families, and for those crew members and passengers. I thought it would be an incredibly horrible thing for those families to have to live with for the rest of their lives. It's bad enough to know someone had died in a horrific thing like this, but to have to see it and to live with it? It's an image that you wish you could erase but can't.

I then got the call from Brad, and at first I didn't understand what he was saying, as he was just screaming. And I said, “Brad, I don't know what you're saying, I can't understand you. Please, please calm down.” And it still didn't hit me; I still didn't know. And what he was screaming was “It's Chic! It's Chic! It's Chic!” Over and over and over again.

I said, “What do you mean? What do you mean?”

And here's the horrible thing: Someone we know in aviation told us that the second plane to hit the towers was Chic's plane. In the confusion, no one knew where the planes were. Chic's plane was scheduled to depart at 8:10 A.M., rolled out at 8:20 A.M., and turned around sometime after 8:50 A.M., after which they lost it. They had no idea that it had turned around and actually sent out a search-and-rescue team in the vicinity of where it went off radar. They still thought that the second plane hitting was Chic's plane.

The Secret Service called Chic's wife, Sheri. Then Chic's best friend, Tom, who had gone to Sheri, called my brother Brad and told him Chic's flight was involved. I immediately got on the phone and called Sheri's house to talk to Tom, who was also a pilot with American Airlines. I said, “Are you sure? How do you know?” Tom just said, “They know, Debra.”

I just didn't want to accept the fact that it was Chic's flight that hit Tower 2. Here I was, thinking about those poor pilots and their poor families, and now I'm realizing that I was talking about my brother and me.

I'll never forget that it was Jim Miklaszewski at NBC who reported that a bomb had just gone off at the Pentagon.
Oh, my God
, I thought.
All hell's breaking loose
. And then that switched to a small plane, and then that switched to a larger plane, and it wasn't until the afternoon that we found out that it was American 77, Chic's plane, that had hit the Pentagon.

There was only one cockpit voice recorder that was recovered—the one from United 93. The recorder on Chic's plane was analog tape, so it was destroyed. We pressed really hard to get confirmation of that, and finally saw a picture of it, and it was rubbish in the fire. The data recorder from United 93, however, told us a great deal: when the cockpit was breached, and how long the fight would have lasted inside the cockpit for my brother. As a former flight attendant, I can tell you that it would have been very easy for them to get in. We also know that they had done a lot of rehearsals and research on test flights: which airplanes would have the lightest loads; which day of the week would be most advantageous. The cockpit door was open when they went in, and I think it must have happened when the flight attendant got up to get the pilots their coffee. Remember, they positioned people in the first row of first class, so that when they saw the flight attendant open the door, they would be right behind her. On United 93 one of the flight attendants got pushed into the cockpit, and you can hear her on the cockpit voice recorder begging for her life. The pilots knew they were going to kill her. I believe that all of the flights were taken over in the same way.

Unlike so many 9/11 families, we knew what had happened that day. Although the focus of the reporting was mostly the Trade Center, it all felt very much a part of the attack that had killed Chic. All of it was connected. And I felt very certain that the people who did this had all conspired together, so every revelation of reportage in New York felt very much a part of the attack that killed my brother.

Then, when I heard how many firefighters had been killed, I literally collapsed in my living room in LA. I remember taking my daughter to the firehouse on Eighty-fifth Street in New York, when I was pushing her in a stroller. The guys would all
ooh
and
ahh
at our little curly-blond-haired girl. So we felt a connection to the Fire Department: They weren't off somewhere in some remote location but were right in our neighborhood.... So that was a horrible thing.

There was a point when I remember feeling very grateful, if you can believe it, and lucky that Chic's plane had hit the Pentagon and not the World Trade Center. At least we knew where he was that day, somewhere in that mess at the Pentagon. We didn't know what we would get back in terms of remains, if anything, but we knew where he was. To this day, when I see people holding up flyers with descriptions of missing family members, with their wedding pictures, smiling faces, and vital statistics, I understand how harrowing it was for them, not knowing. I understand the denial and the hope in their hearts on 9/11. When the husband didn't come home that night, and the next night, and the next night, and the next day, they had to hope that he was still alive somewhere—maybe unconscious, maybe not knowing who he was. You hold out hope until there is confirmation.

What is ironic is that we had such special connections to the Pentagon. Chic had spent seventeen years as a reservist there. He had volunteered for the Persian Gulf War, had reactivated during [it], and had worked at the Pentagon. We all lived on Bolling Air Force Base there in Anacostia in Washington, D.C., and my dad was at the Pentagon all the time. So for his plane to crash there, where we had all this history, was bizarre—like having it crash in your backyard. It was a building that was extremely familiar to us, and on top of that, his plane went right over Arlington, where my parents had just been buried. It was all very bizarre.

I never would have understood how important remains are until we got them for Chic. We got them at the end of November, and he was identified through DNA. It was a gift, because we couldn't have buried him at Arlington without those remains. We could have chosen a columbarium, and he could have had a marker someplace, but he couldn't have a grave. That too made me appreciate the true nightmare and anguish that World Trade Center families have gone through with respect to the remains issue. My parents were both buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and Chic was the one who arranged for their burials. My father was a chief master sergeant—the first person, I believe, to get that rank—and was buried with honors, the full military funeral that Chic always wanted to have. Chic wanted to be buried properly at Arlington, and the very idea that that wouldn't be possible because there was nothing to bury would have added to the trauma of having yet something else taken away from him—first his life, and then his proper burial.

 

Chic's wife, Sheri, had a rough time. She is a very private person and wanted to be out of the limelight and stay in her house. I begged her to talk to the
Washington Post
—begged her, please, because we were trying to get him buried at Arlington, and they wouldn't let us. Chic was a retired naval reservist captain, and because the space there was filling up with World War II veterans, Arlington had created an arbitrary rule that retired reservists had to be sixty years old to be buried there. Chic died the day before his fifty-second birthday, so a media campaign to get them to relax the requirement was important. Sheri finally agreed to talk to the
Post,
and we got Chic buried there. But she was never really the same. Sheri was an American Airlines flight attendant but never flew again, and became reserved, and stayed mostly in her home.

When strangers ask me what I do for a living, I really don't like to answer that question. But really, what I am now is a political activist. I never thought I would be one, for I'd always considered a political activist to be a troublemaker. Most Americans were touched by 9/11; they know that their world changed. Of course, people went back to their lives, their jobs, and their mortgages, but I never went back to my normal life. I want to help get the message of 9/11 out, so through the next years I'll be trying to figure out how to do that.

I started getting politically active when, in March 2004, I wrote an op-ed, my very first one, for the
Wall Street Journal,
titled OUR 9/11. It was me basically saying to a small group of 9/11 family members, Hold on: 9/11 happened to everybody, not just you. The piece was a response to the controversial Bush campaign ads that appeared in February of that year, the ones that were cast in Hallmarkish golden tones, reminding people that we'd been through all these terrible things and asking where the country was going. They featured something like three seconds or less of Bush at Ground Zero, and some family members came out against them really hard, basically saying that was a slap in the face of families with victims. One family member was quoted as saying, “I'd rather vote for Saddam Hussein than for Bush.”

And I became enraged by that.

I knew that so many of our members of the armed services had signed up because of 9/11, and were already dying in Iraq, and here was a 9/11 family member saying, I'd rather vote for the leader who is killing our guys. I thought it was incredibly ungracious and insensitive to our military families, of which I had been part for much of my life. And I thought of many of Chic's classmates, because when he died his peers who had stayed in the military were at the height of their careers: one was in charge of the Fifth Fleet; one was in charge of the Sixth Fleet; and one was in charge of the Seventh Fleet. Later, another led the battle of Fallujah.

I was also outraged because I saw how magnificent the American people had been on 9/11. I don't think I could have gotten through it all were it not for them. I felt it was very small of these 9/11 family members to belittle our country this way, so I wrote the op-ed piece, basically saying, We've all had this collective loss, but when you go out and do this, you do not speak for me. And you have to have respect for the military and their families. And when you consider that 9/11 images are now appearing on coffee mugs and postage stamps and place mats, I think your outrage is selective. Let the public decide the president, not you.

After that piece appeared, the press saw that someone was speaking out and then started coming to me for comment, and very, very slowly I ended up involved. I believe I was asked to join the World Trade Center Memorial board because I was viewed as someone who would push back against 9/11 families who were already very focused on Ground Zero and what would be built there. I think the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is responsible for rebuilding the site and for the memorial, wanted to marginalize the families, to push them aside. They thought,
Here, this woman's great. Her brother died at the Pentagon, but she's a New Yorker. We'll bring her on the board and she'll help us. She'll be someone who'll be a buff
er
, push back
. Of course, it didn't work out that way. One of the things they planned was an International Freedom Center, and I became one of the people who wanted to tear that idea to shreds, because it would have been, with its histories of events with no relevance at all to 9/11, a horrible thing to put there.

That was a real education. Ultimately, all of this comes down to their successful PR campaign versus your successful PR campaign and fighting for control of the narrative. I also learned how things are run in the city by the political and cultural elites. I also butted heads with other 9/11 family members with respect to the 9/11 Commission and the war in Iraq, for I was viewed as a “Bush defender” and a “Bush girl.” The truth of the matter is that I was, and have always been, a Democrat, and quite liberal. But for me and many Americans, 9/11 was just a game changer. It redefined the world; now all bets were off. No longer could I rely on the
New York Times
to tell me what was happening. I don't trust the
New York Times
, because much of what they reported was inaccurate. I am now reading primary source material, and when I want to know what is happening, say, in Iraq, I read the bloggers in Iraq on the ground. Their information was better than anything from the networks or CNN. And I started writing.

I was on everyone's list of family members who got information. When the Bush ad was aired, I received an e-mail that was a protest of those ads. It was funneled to everyone through a 9/11 families listserv, but it was signed by a woman who I noticed was from Fenton Communications. I thought,
Fenton Communications, that sounds like a PR firm
.
If this is such a grassroots family thing, what's a PR firm doing here sending information through the 9/11 families
group?
I investigated, and it turns out that Fenton Communications is a liberal PR firm, with clients like
MoveOn.org
and 9/11 Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow. I thought,
Oh, my God, the woman who signed this e-mail organizing family members is not even one herself.
I called her up and said, “Who's the client on this Bush ad protest?” “Oh, it's
MoveOn.org
.” And I thought,
Holy crap. This isn't being organized by legitimate 9/11 families but by the anti-Bush opposition.
I later found out that the woman who worked at Fenton was a former Al Gore staffer. So much of this is political, and the families were just being used. I was outraged enough to do another
Wall Street Journal
op-ed.

And between the writing, being on the board of the memorial, and all my other activities, I was really sort of stuffed into this kind of odd job, unpaid, where I was involved in all things 9/11.

I got involved in issues involving homeland security matters regarding immigration. I got involved with our national security policies, and with the terror project, trying to get corporations to divest their pension investments, mainly pensions with companies that were investing or doing business in Iran. I campaigned for George Bush in the 2004 election, and though I'd never been involved in a political campaign in my life, I felt that he had to get elected for a second term or that Kerry was going to dismantle everything, not just the war in Iraq, but the Patriot Act and all of the vital, necessary antiterrorism tools that had been put in place. I did tons of radio for the Bush campaign, and then I spoke at the Republican convention, an incredible experience. Remember, I'm still a Democrat, and I sort of still self-identify as a liberal Democrat, but everything to me was national security and 9/11 and stopping these bastards from doing it, or worse, again. And that's still what I'm all about. Stopping them, and educating the public about their threat. We've now gone beyond the dangers of aviation to considering the dangers of all the terrorist acts that they can do. They must be stopped. There must be a new awareness about the lifeand-death dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sharia law. Americans need to be educated about these threats to their future. They need to wake up to these truths. And I hope we actually are ready to stop them, because they're vastly embedded. You know, it was emotional to hear of bin Laden's death, and it was a great moral victory for America. But I also think of my brother. He was a military man, and he would still be angry at what was done to all his passengers and crew. We still have a long way to go.