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 (20 page)

Network Plus folded late January 2002. I got the word directly from our CEO. The company was filing for bankruptcy— Chapter 11 and then Chapter 7. I had to let everybody go. It wasn’t exactly a Happy New Year.

Our office goes through 9/11, the trauma. We go on
Oprah
. I get them all, one by one, to come back to work to show this will not defeat us.
This will not defeat us. This is what America is about. This is what our company is about. We’re back. We’re selling.
It’s a different office. Bad location. So what? We can make it work. Then just like that,
boom
. Everybody has to leave. Find another job. No notice. Just a phone call.
You tell them, Mike.
I told them. What the hell? What can you say? What do you feel? What sense is there in the world? Two jet planes and two collapsing towers couldn’t break this office up, but corporate
mismanagement could. We beat the terrorists, but we couldn’t beat the accountants.

We were putting on a wedding in seven months. What did the end of Network Plus mean for me? I was asked to stay on to manage the assets of our office while the company was in receivership. I’d get a modest salary. I couldn’t afford not to have a salary. At best, this was a Band-Aid on my financial situation.

Starting in February, I sat by myself in an empty office and coordinated the deconstruction of Network Plus, a company that I helped build. I missed my guys. I remembered our Christmas party a few months prior. I got back from Germany and gave out posters of original Berlin Wall graffiti. The reps presented me with gifts and plaques of appreciation for what we did on 9/11. I felt loved by these people. I felt love for them. We rented out SPQR, a restaurant in Little Italy. We had the whole place. What a special night for us to pause and look at each other. We were more than mere co-workers. The next and last time we got together again as a group was the day I let everyone go. I felt so at a loss in that moment. To all those guys: I always felt that I never did thank you enough.

And that was it. I walked into that empty office every day from February to May. There was no selling. There were no more in days or out days. Instead, I inventoried pencils, paper clips, and tissue boxes. I filed reports.

The media requests and public appearances did not let up. I began, however, to see a change in their character. The first sign of this was when I attended a United States Senate Hearing before the Special Committee on Aging about Emergency Preparedness for the Elderly and Disabled.

Senator Larry Craig headed the committee. He wanted to examine what happened on 9/11 and see what we learned from it. (A few years later, Senator Craig’s actions in a public accommodation
would put him on the other side of the hearing table.) This was no media interview or black-tie dinner.

I walked in to it feeling that I should’ve written something down. I was nervous and unprepared.
Would I get in trouble for something? What trouble? Who needs this?
I was also embarrassed by Network Plus having folded and felt reluctant to do much in public.

It was a field hearing, held in a conference room in NYC. The impressive array of panelists included the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Aging, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s U.S. Fire Administrator, the Director of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, the Associate Director for Epidemiological Science, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and New York Congressman Benjamin A. Gilman. Really, what could I add? Who was I to comment?

I listened to all the experts go before me. I was the second-to-the-last speaker. I was asked to retell what happened once I met Tina on the 68th floor and how we got out. I told my story. After grilling some of the other panelists about the preparedness conditions and responses that day, Senator Craig asked me some short, perfunctory questions about whether or not Tina’s portable wheelchair was used and whether we’d ever had a fire drill before 9/11. Then we engaged in the following dialogue:

Senator Craig:
Well, Michael, your testimony is special. I am sure many people have praised you, as they should, for your help and persistence under those most difficult circumstances. I think all of us, when we hear people like you and testimonies given, question ourselves whether we could’ve performed as well under those circumstances. My congratulations to you.

Mr. Benfante:
Thank you, Senator. Just one more thing.

Senator Craig:
Please go ahead.

Mr. Benfante:
All things considered, I agree with Congressman Gilman that it was a tremendous emergency response. I know there were many lives lost, but I think just in the way that our Fire Department and Police Department and rescue workers responded, there were more lives saved. It just should be acknowledged.

I guess I may have sounded out of line. The senator was quick to assure me: “Certainly, I am not critical, and I don’t know many who are.” But they were being critical.

During that hearing, I got the creeping feeling that it was designed more to focus on what we did wrong or what we could have done better that day. They were looking to find fault. They were looking to point a finger at one thing or another that was the reason for the scale of loss, rather than to look at all the right things we did. They should have been listing the ways our fire department, port authority, police, and citizens acted in order to save people. How can we replicate
that?
should’ve been the question, or at least
a
question, asked. The selfless acts, the nameless sacrifices: What can we take away from those actions?

Let’s face it. Most people who died in the Towers were above where the planes crashed. I don’t know how any other community could’ve reacted any better or gotten better results.

Maybe I was too close to it. But I saw those firemen—maybe seventy-five to a hundred of them—marching up the stairs, knowing they were walking into potentially unconquerable danger, hoping to save one life and understanding that their selfless bravery could cost them their own. I saw heroic acts minute
by minute, floor by floor, hundreds of such acts. There was so much
right
done. I saw it.

This was February 2002. 9/11 was only six months earlier, but our nation had gotten past its Kumbayah moment. Now, little by little, everybody was grabbing pieces of 9/11 for other reasons, their own reasons. The “story” of 9/11 was slowly getting picked apart, co-opted, externalized. People were hijacking 9/11 to support their own agendas. I wanted my story to represent an awakening in us. I wanted my story to show how amazing, kind, and self-sacrificing we all could be in the face of unimaginable horror. And the only reason I was speaking publicly about it was because I felt that society’s collective consciousness had come to agree that now was the time for all of us to check ourselves and realize what is truly important: How precious life is and how we should not take it for granted. How noble we could be to and for each other.

It was only six months earlier that everybody seemed united in the spirit of being good to one another. Volunteers were digging in the ground to find what remained, and other volunteers were bringing them food. So many were grieving, and so many were trying to comfort. “
WE ARE ALL AMERICANS
,” France’s
Le Monde
newspaper declared on 9/12. “This is the end of irony,” pronounced the editor of
Vanity Fair
. There was unity—unity of grief, unity of aid, unity of recognition of the sacrifices made in the Towers by the firemen, by the hostages in the hijacked planes, at the Pentagon, and in the days of loss and gratitude that followed.

My point, my whole point, was that I was not the only one. I wanted to point to the untold and uncountable acts of heroism on 9/11 and in the days following and say, “Look at who we really are. Look at who we were on 9/11. Look how we acted
when the fire came. This is the best of us, the best in us. Now let us
be
our best selves, the best nation, the best community every day forward.”

But sitting in that hearing, I could sense a current of thought moving in a very different direction. That room sowed seeds of blame and division, not credit and unity. Sadly, it wasn’t just that room. It was only six months later, and it was as though the world wanted to forget those good feelings. Being our best selves, the best community demanded too much of us. The window started to close. And thus, I saw the world begin to go back to business as usual.

The “awakening” was only in my head. Corporate America apparently had no ethical epiphanies in the wake of 9/11. Just one month after 9/11, the Enron scandal came to light. The pensions and personal savings of so many good people had been wiped out, and lives were destroyed. Tyco, WorldCom, Adelphia Communications, Arthur Anderson, Qwest Communications, and others led a mind-boggling and seemingly endless parade of titanic corporate criminality.

And you want to talk about irony? One of America’s favorite TV shows was a “reality” show called
Survivor
. That’s right. It was called
Survivor
. But the way you “survived” was not by helping others and everyone making it out together. Just the opposite. You win in
Survivor
by carefully and strategically deceiving others, by lying and tricking until one person, and only one person, is left. Then you “win.” There were three separate versions of this hot reality show in the twelve months following 9/11. Each production rated in the top 10 of America’s most watched shows, notching over 20 million viewers each time. These were the “survivors” our country had become interested in. The ongoing but still very fresh story of 9/11 survival had exceeded the national
attention span. The reality lessons of 9/11 survival was no match for the lessons of reality television’s
Survivor
.

Of course, of course, we had to get back to daily living. But how could we go on living the same way? I looked back on some of my media appearances in the previous six months, and I was flooded with doubt and embarrassment, which slowly fermented into anger. Here I’d been, thinking that the nation really had come together and really did understand and really was sharing in grief and in sacrifice and buying this idea that in the face of the worst of human behavior we saw the best of what we could be. This gave me my license to talk about it. It wasn’t easy for me to talk, but I thought this was the moment when we’d all grow together. But it wasn’t a national soul-growth moment, or even fifteen minutes of fame. It was fifteen minutes of the pretense of growth and togetherness followed by a mindless resumption of the way it used to be. There was no growth. I can’t tell you how alone that made me feel.

And I’d look over at Joy, sitting next to me on the couch, and I knew she felt alone too.

Prior to 9/11, the outside world could never come between me and Joy. That’s what made us strong. It was us first, and then other things. Our careers, our friends, our families—all that could be managed, but we came first. Now I was putting whatever I could between us. It was all me. I put up an impenetrable wall. I couldn’t face my real feelings, which meant I couldn’t sit still and talk honestly with her. It was easier to deal with the outside, not the inside. Inside was anger, guilt, a shattered equilibrium. Inside I was feeling vulnerable and unsure of myself. I was feeling wrong about being here—wrong about surviving from a logical standpoint (
how did I make it?
) and a fairness standpoint (
why me?
). The photographs, the stories were everywhere. So much pain and loss. I wanted bin Laden caught. But
would his capture make these feelings go away?
*
I don’t know. Of all these feelings, anger was the easiest to express. Anger was my external self. It separated me from Joy.

Six months before our wedding, the distance between us was growing.

Every day she tried to let me know about what was happening with the wedding. I’d add only the shortest possible answers to create the briefest possible discussion: “Great, sweets,” I’d say. “Do whatever you need to. Sounds great. Flowers? Sure. Your uncle can’t make it? All right.” She’s talking about a wedding on September 13, and all I can see is the first anniversary of 9/11.
I just need to get through it
. “Get through it” is not exactly a recipe for a romantic start to a life of marital bliss.

I really can’t go on like this.

The phone continues to ring, every day. More offers, more appearances, more media. ABC Family wants to do something? It’s got
family
in its name. I’ll do it.

I was still talking to kids at schools, but the nature of the interviews had almost completely changed. There’s a lot less talking about 9/11 and a lot more B-roll. The appearances I was making were also changing in nature. People were focusing on the wrong things. I didn’t feel that I was being effective. I just didn’t want to go fill a spot at a memorial or say a few words at somebody’s banquet. It was getting confusing. Should I be always talking about 9/11 because it was so important never to
forget?
I will never forget.
It was impossible to move on, but I knew that I needed to, somehow. The only way to do it was to stop associating myself with things having to do with 9/11. That way I’d be forced to deal with my career, my wedding, Joy. Maybe it was time to get back to that.

In May, another telecom company, which I will call Telco Networks, bought the assets of Network Plus. That meant they bought me too. They offered me a job with them as a regional manager, which meant I’d be managing offices in Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, and Charlestown, Massachusetts. I was a New York City guy. That’s what I knew. Now I had to learn a new territory, new guys in new offices. I had to fly out from my new office in Newark four times a month. The job was different than my old job, but I was different too.

I artlessly navigated new corporate politics—cattiness, gossip, complaining, turf wars. Maybe pre-9/11 this would have been amusing to me. Maybe pre-9/11 I would have played this game and played it well. Now I saw through it—the posturing, the fiefdom crap.
Don’t these guys know what’s happening in the world right now?
Here I am, watching guys scheming to fuck each other over. Some rep is telling me in a car ride how he told So-and-So in accounting to go screw himself, and all I can remember are people carrying each other through the shambles of hell. I’m still getting calls about 9/11—to talk to groups, media—but these guys at Telco Networks, they don’t know about that.