Former AJC reporter recounts the horror of New York after the 9/11 attacks.

I’d been on MARTA, clueless, when the first plane hit. I watched horrified as the second one did.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

The newsroom, like the rest of the country, was in shock. Fear, disbelief, pain, and, yes, adrenaline coursed through 72 Marietta Street. We had jobs to do.

Mine, with the help of a slew of reporters in the field, was to write a “reaction” piece that ran Wednesday on A2.

“Bitterest day bounces from shock to rage,” the headline read. “Atlanta residents express disbelief.”

Meanwhile, we tried to get to New York as fast as possible. Our bosses beseeched Cox corporate to free up the jet. But the airports were closed and the planes couldn’t fly. A vanload of reporters and photographers headed to NYC that afternoon.

Bill Torpy and I rented a car and drove 16 hours the next morning. We breezed, surprisingly, into Manhattan, got Midtown hotel rooms, and headed downtown by cab.

The city was eerie, schizophrenic, off-key. Above 34th Street, the streets were crowded, the cafes busy, Central Park lively. The sun shined.

Below Canal Street, where rifle-toting Guardsmen established a perimeter, it was a hellscape. Only cops, firemen, search-and-rescue crews, ambulances, and heavy equipment passed through the barricades to the World Trade Center 10 blocks away.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

It was too quiet; the beep-beep of trucks in reverse rang loudest. Most residents had evacuated. Office paper was scattered everywhere, occasionally lofted skyward by a breeze. We couldn’t see the pancaked pile of concrete and steel, nor the fire roiling deep in the rubble of Ground Zero. But we could taste the acrid, malevolent smoke. The sun barely peeked through the toxic haze and dust.

I spent a morning at the National Guard Armory on Lexington Avenue where the city kept lists of hospitalized and deceased victims, and where loved ones described in great detail — height, weight, tattoos, dentures, birthmarks, circumcisions, tobacco-stained fingers— the bodies of the missing to sleepless detectives.

I met Paul Landstrom who was looking for his mother-in-law. All around us, on trees, mailboxes, phone booths, and TV trucks, were homemade flyers with pictures of the missing and descriptions of what clothes they wore on September 11, and which floor they worked on. Landstrom’s mother-in-law worked on the 96th floor of One World Trade Center.

“The saddest part,” he said, “is the porch light. We leave it on hoping she’ll come home.”

She never did.

Credit: AJC staff

Credit: AJC staff

Saturday, I drove to Long Island for the funeral of Fire Chief Peter Ganci Jr., the NYFD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer to die on September 11.

Ganci was a “five-star hero” who ordered his men to leave the area after the first tower collapsed. He then went to check on a command post. The fire department’s top chaplain watched as Ganci stared toward the upper reaches of the remaining tower.“He had a look of defiance that said, ‘I got you,’” the reverend said. “‘You aren’t going to get me.’”

Nearly 3,000 firefighters lined the street outside the red brick St. Kilian Roman Catholic Church. There would’ve been more, but many were searching for survivors in the rubble. I asked one of Ganci’s men for an interview. Red-eyed from fatigue, smoke, and booze, he threatened to beat the crap out of me. His buddies pulled him away.

I, too, cried. At night, once the stories were filed and the day’s adrenaline had faded. Alone in my hotel room, the reality of what I had witnessed overwhelmed me. The detachment of the reporter disappeared, replaced by the passion and pain of a son, brother, husband-to-be, father-to-be.

The photos of smiling faces plastered to Manhattan lampposts played on a reel in my head. The banal details of the lives lost — one wore a ruby ring on her left pinky finger, another was planning the annual trip to Fort Lauderdale, another ended his days with a cigar and Scotch — made the horror real and personal. These people died going to work, for Christ’s sake.

How sad. How unfair. How evil.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

I wasn’t naive. 9/11 wasn’t a loss-of-innocence moment for me. I’d traveled a lot, reported from places like Vietnam and the Philippines where America isn’t considered “a shining city on a hill.” But the degree of death and destruction, and the yearslong planning and hatred that went into it, rocked me. The world, obviously, would never be the same. This was the most-searing event in my still-young career and I needed to find out what came next. I’d soon get my chance.

My editors ordered me home. I was going to Israel, the West Bank, and Pakistan to cover the run-up to the so-called “war on terror.” I flew out Sunday evening from LaGuardia and passed right by where the Twin Towers once stood. The fire raged angrily below.

About the Author

Dan Chapman worked at the AJC from 1999 to 2016. He has since written about conservation and the environment across the South. He published “A Road Running Southward” (Island Press) in 2022. He lives in Decatur with wife Bita Honarvar (AJC photo editor), sons Sammy and Naveed, and a dog named Sunny.