What they went through

Our countrymen died real deaths on Sept. 11, and we
need to listen to their last words.

By Garrison Keillor

Aug. 23, 2006 It was painful to hear the woman in
anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center,
crying, "I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm going to
die." Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing
eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of
her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke and
heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin
Cosgrove on the 105th floor, moments before it
collapsed, gasping for breath, saying, "We're young
men, we're not ready to die." And then he screamed,
"Oh my God" as the building started to collapse.
It's in their voices, what they went through.

Those were two of the 1,613 calls to 911 released by
New York City last week, on almost all of which the
caller's voice was beeped out. The city argued that
to hear persons in anguish in their last minutes
constitutes an invasion of privacy. The truth is
that the callers had no interest in privacy, they
were desperate to be heard, and censoring them now
is a last insult by a bureaucracy that failed to
protect them in the first place.

They were people like us; we might have sat near
them in a theater or restaurant, asked them for
directions on the street. They went to work that
fine Tuesday morning and suddenly found themselves
facing the abyss, and the first thing we thought,
seeing the burning buildings on TV, was "What is it
like for the people in there?" We wanted to know.

Then, inevitably, politicians began to seize the day
and turn it into a patriotic tableau starring
themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who does not appear
in a leadership capacity in the reliable accounts of
that morning, who was captured on videotape fleeing
uptown, soon stepped into the TV lights and put on
his public face, and a few days later the Current
Occupant mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand
and vowed vengeance, and the media was glad to focus
on the martial moment, the flag waving over the
wreckage, the theme of America united -- and the
anguished voices from the towers were unheard, the
people who fell from high floors and smashed into
the pavement were not seen on American TV. The media
averted its eyes from the reality of 9/11 and
started looking for the message.

The best book on the subject, by the way, is "102
Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive
Inside the Twin Towers," by Jim Dwyer and Kevin
Flynn, two New York Times reporters who fashioned a
plain narrative out of thousands of stories that
took place in the time between the first strike and
>the collapse of the second tower. You read it,
you're there.

Mr. Giuliani is still flying around giving speeches
on leadership, knocking down a hundred grand per
shot, getting standing ovations everywhere as a
stand-in for the police and firemen who died in the
towers. He has never faced up to his failure to
prepare for the attack, even after the 1993 bomb
explosion at the World Trade Center, when it was
shown clearly that police and fire couldn't
communicate with each other by radio. Eight years
passed, little was done, and then came the 19 men
with box cutters. The 911 operators took thousands
of calls and had no information to give. Police
helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of the
infernos and could see that the buildings were going
to collapse, couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the
ground, who, unable to see the fire, sent their men
up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those
men their lives.

In the end, what we crave is reality. The woman
crying on the 83rd floor was real. Our countrymen
died real deaths on a warm September morning, and
then, to avenge them, even more have died in Iraq
and Afghanistan. In our hearts, we know we're on the
wrong road, the road to unreality, but the man says
to stay the course. And now as November nears,
congressmen who have supported the war, no questions
asked, find it convenient to admit to having
"questions" about it. "We are facing a difficult
situation," they say. They are "troubled."

The woman who cried on the 83rd floor was more than
troubled. She saw death. It is indecent for New York
to stifle the voices of the people in the towers.
The congressmen who deal so casually with life and
death ought to sit down and listen to those phone
calls.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can
be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations
across the country.)