The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (8 page)

“Yes,” the trooper insisted. Through an odd twist of fate, Patty was shopping in one of the stores under the World Trade Center when the first plane hit, and she immediately left the area. Vitale was relieved. He also felt a bit silly for all the plans he was mentally making to raise his nephew under the assumption that Patty might be dead.

As time passed, Vitale continued to receive only snippets of information. Officials at the airport weren’t providing any updates, nor were the air-traffic controllers. The pilot even told Vitale the plane’s radio was useless. They needed to be in the air for the captain to call back to Continental’s home base in Houston to find out what was happening. And he assumed that any attempts to pick up a commercial radio station while they were sitting on the tarmac would be futile.

Most of the information passengers had gathered came from the brief telephone calls they were making to family members. Rumors began circulating that both towers had collapsed. Vitale didn’t think this was possible. Then he finally discovered it was true. Worse still, there were scores of firefighters and police officers in the buildings at the time.

Vitale had a new worry. His best friend through high school, Anthony DeRubbio, was a New York City firefighter. For that matter, virtually the entire DeRubbio family was made up of firefighters. Three of Anthony’s brothers—Dominick, Robert, and David—were in the FDNY. Vitale’s thoughts were with Anthony. They were the same age and had gone to the same schools—St. Agatha’s Elementary in Brooklyn and Aviation High School in Queens. The reason Vitale went to Aviation was that it was where Anthony wanted to go. Their birthdays were just six days apart. Vitale was born on September 19. Anthony’s birthday was September 25. When they were kids, Vitale would never let Anthony forget that he was older. Could Anthony really be gone?

During the flight, Tom McKeon was sitting in the row just ahead of Vitale, and the two men started talking soon after landing. When Vitale told McKeon he was positive the towers had collapsed, McKeon was just as certain Vitale must be mistaken.

Vitale lent McKeon his phone so he could call his father. McKeon’s father was a firefighter for thirty-five years in West New York, a town just across the Hudson River in New Jersey. There wasn’t a place in town from which you couldn’t see the towers.

“Are the towers really gone?” McKeon asked his father.

“They’re all gone,” he said.

“And the firefighters?”

“Yeah,” his father said mournfully.

Hearing it from his father was the first time McKeon believed the unimaginable had happened.

M
oving around the plane, Vitale had an idea. He was a talk-radio junkie who loved listening to the stations in the city. The pilot was probably right; parked on the ground, they couldn’t pick up most commercial radio stations, but Vitale knew 770 AM, WABC, had a particularly strong signal and at night could be heard as far away as Maine.

Maybe tonight they’d be able to pick it up in Newfoundland.

The pilot, Tom Carroll, was willing to try and gingerly played with the dials on the receiver. The copilot was seated next to him and several flight attendants were also in the cockpit, as was Vitale. Carroll could feel their eyes staring at him as he tried to locate the right frequency. At first all he could find was static, but when he struck upon the New York station, a small cheer erupted in the cockpit. Before the celebration went too far, they were floored by the words spilling out of the speakers. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, were thought to be dead. For hours they remained glued to the radio.

At 10
P.M.
in Gander, Vitale, the pilot, and the crew huddled in the dimly lit cockpit and listened to the president’s address to the nation.

Listening to the president’s speech, Vitale was in a state of shock. How could this be happening? he thought to himself. How could somebody do this? Staring out the pilot’s window, he looked across a darkened airfield, which only added to his sense of isolation. He felt overwhelmed. Tears welled up in his eyes.

Standing in the doorway of the cockpit was McKeon. As the president spoke, he couldn’t help but imagine that this must have been what it was like for his parents and grandparents during World War II. Gathered around a radio, learning about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and then listening to the president, searching for hope and strength in his words.

The cockpit fell silent when the president concluded. Vitale’s face was flushed and he could feel the tears on his cheeks. He was embarrassed by his reaction and quickly composed himself before anyone could notice. As a police officer, he worried that people would be looking to him to show strength and he didn’t want to show any sign of weakness. Wiping away the tears, he was filled with another emotion. Pride. At that moment he had never been more proud to be an American.

T
en hours after landing, the 372 passengers and crew members of Lufthansa Flight 400 were allowed to leave the aircraft. While everyone else boarded buses that would take them to the terminal for processing, Captain Reinhard Knoth stayed behind. The RCMP and Canadian military were running the names of all passengers from each of the planes through various intelligence databases and Knoth was told the name of one of his passengers matched up with the name of a suspected terrorist.

Inside the terminal, the man would be quietly pulled aside and detained for questioning by the police. In the meantime, RCMP officials were concerned that the passenger might have hidden something, possibly a bomb, on board the jumbo jet. Knoth believed the police were being a bit overzealous. If a passenger had taken a bomb onto the plane, he would have blown it up by now. Why wait?

The strain of the day’s events was evident on the faces of the police surrounding the plane. None of them knew what to expect from one minute to the next. Knoth realized that the moment the first plane hit the first tower, the old rules on combating global terrorism had ceased to apply, but nobody was sure what the new rules would be.

Walking through the empty aircraft, Knoth accompanied a small squad of officers looking for anything suspicious. After going through the area where the man was sitting, they spread throughout the rest of the plane. Excitedly, one of the officers called out that he’d found something in one of the overhead compartments. It was an oddly shaped cylindrical metal container. Knoth walked over and stared at it for a moment.

Moving quickly to call in the bomb squad, the officers backed away from the shiny metal object and told Knoth to do the same. Instead, he stepped forward. Reaching into the overhead bin, Knoth heard the officers yelling at him to stop, but he picked up the item anyway. He knew he’d recognized it from somewhere.

It was a container of Danzka vodka. A premium vodka made in Denmark and packaged in an aluminum bottle. They sell it at the duty-free shop in Frankfurt. The company’s slogan: “Danzka, the Unexpected Vodka.”

T
he passengers of Lufthansa Flight 400 were taken to the local high school, Gander Collegiate. Although they arrived at midnight, Frankfurt mayor Petra Roth and Hugo Boss chairman Werner Baldessarini couldn’t believe how many people were waiting to greet the passengers. The volunteers handed out toiletries and bedding and made sure everyone knew there was food and water available.

Although her English is only fair, Mayor Roth introduced herself to various people at the school and thanked them for everything they were doing.

The school was still waiting for a supply of cots to arrive. Baldessarini was so tired he decided to make do with what they already had. He took a blanket and a pillow and staked out a small corner of the school’s gym floor. He curled up in his cashmere suit and quickly fell asleep.

G
eorge Vitale would have loved to be able to sleep. As long as he was on the plane, however, he found sleeping impossible. Vitale was relieved when the pilot, at about 2,
A.M.
, announced it was now their turn to go through Canadian customs.

The combination of sleep deprivation, stress, and the abundance of security made the passengers a bit skittish as they walked through the terminal.

“Welcome to Gander,” a woman said to Vitale’s fellow passenger Tom McKeon. “Right this way.”

McKeon realized his nerves were more than a little frayed when he asked the woman for permission to use the airport’s bathroom and she responded by laughing and telling him, “Of course.”

Rather than housing the passengers from Continental Flight 23 in Gander, they were sent by bus fifteen miles down the road to Appleton, a beautiful town of seven hundred people on the eastern banks of the Gander River. The first thing McKeon noticed when he walked into the Appleton Community Center was the smell of coffee. He had served six years in the navy, mostly aboard submarines, and there was always something about the smell of a fresh pot of coffee that was reassuring to him. The second thing he noticed was the television. Vitale saw it as well. Even though he knew by now that the towers had been destroyed, he was still paralyzed by the pictures. At first he thought it must have been some sort of computer simulation. As people gathered around, all of them horrified, many crying, he realized it was real footage of the attack. The television remained on all night, flickering like a candle at the far end of the room.

T
hanks to a steady stream of U.S. servicemen and their families, who were stationed in the area, the Baptist church in Gander used to be one of the largest congregations in town. Since the American military presence evaporated in the nineties, however, the church has shriveled into one of the town’s smallest. There are six families, about thirty people, who regularly attend services, and they share the guidance of a full-time pastor with a town that is more than an hour away. While the number of Baptists in Gander may have declined, it hasn’t diminished their sense of community.

As soon as the first plane landed, Gary House, a church deacon, was on the phone to the town’s command center, offering shelter and care for as many of the stranded passengers as could fit inside the church. A retired schoolteacher, House estimated they could comfortably accommodate between thirty and forty people. Since the Baptists weren’t in a position to handle a large number of passengers, Red Cross officials delivered them a small but challenging group.

Among the 135 passengers on Delta Flight 141 from Brussels to New York were thirty-eight refugees from Moldova, a part of the former Soviet Union located just east of Romania. The refugees constituted five different families who were being relocated to the United States to start new lives. Three of the women in the group were pregnant. And among the five families there were more than a dozen children—from infants to teenagers.