Original subtitles

You see the plane, he gonna make a maneuver.

The next thing I know, bam.

We stood right in front of the elevator.

Delise and I and 18 other people from my office.

These were all big shots.

The head of human resources, the General Manager.

All these big shots just standing up right there.

Not a word is said.

The elevator doors open, we got in.

As I'm getting out of the door,

the security guard looks at me and says,

"Where are you going?"

I said, "I'm going home.

I saw fireballs falling from the other building."

He said, "Your building is safe."

It's secure. Go back to your office.

You can hear the whoop-whoop signals.

Your building is safe.

It's secure. Go back to your office.

"Nobody else is coming out."

Delise stepped out, and she said,

"Stan, I'm scared. I wanna go home."

I said, "Well, go, go, go. Take the rest of the day off."

I had that choice to go back into that elevator

at that point or go home.

So, I don't know what to do.

The doors are about to close and Jack Andriaccio is holding on to one end.

And Manny Gomez is holding on to the other end.

"Come on, Stan the Man."

You're not scared to go back up.

"Come on, Stan, we don't have all day here."

And I walked back in that elevator.

And all I was doing was being faithful to authority.

They said go back.

All right, so we go back.

The door closes and I can still remember the look on

the faces of everybody in that elevator.

Because I was the last one who stepped in,

and everybody is looking at me, like,

"Why did you take so long? We were waiting on you."

Not realizing I would never see them again.

We saw a lot of things that day that no one should see.

To this day,

I still have my times when I can't take it anymore,

you know, when I still think about it.

There were times when I would go over the Brooklyn Bridge

going into work,

and it just got me so bad that I, I couldn't take it anymore and there was,

as I was driving over the bridge,

I actually felt myself almost trying to jerk

the wheel off the side to just drive off the edge of the bridge,

just so I didn't have to deal with it anymore.

You know, and every time I did that, I was, like,

you can't do this, you know,

just keep going.

Just keep going; You can do this.

I've worked as an emergency medical technician.

I was young.

21-year-old kid.

And we were driving down to the Trade Center to help people.

As we pull up, we see hundreds of people just running out to us.

And you're just looking through and you don't know where to go,

because there's just so much chaos going on.

Oh, man, man!

Oh my god!

Oh, boy.

And I remember as I was grabbing my equipment to go see what we were gonna do,

some people kept on running up to me and, like,

"You gotta help my friend! You gotta help my friend!"

I'm, like, "Okay." I'm, like, "Calm down."

I'm like, "Where is your friend? What happened?"

"They jumped."

I'm, like, "From where?"

"From the 30th floor. From up there."

I'm, like, "They're dead. The bridge is that way.

Just run."

And I remember we just grabbed the first four or five people that we saw

that had blood on them,

and we ran into the back of our ambulance.

The rules almost went out the window that day.

You did what you could for who you could.

Deploy North. Gotta go people let's go, let's go.

Get to the end of the street.

I'm on the 81st floor in the South Tower,

in a huge glass-enclosed office.

The phone is ringing.

I pick up the phone,

it's a young lady from Chicago on the other end.

"Stan, get out."

"Why do I have to get out?"

With the phone in my hand, I'm standing up,

not looking in any particular direction.

But something caught my attention looking towards

the direction of the Statue of Liberty, south.

What I saw was a tiny little spec first of a plane.

And within the split second, it's getting larger and larger and larger.

Oh my god, it's coming towards me.

It's coming for me!

Eye-level eye contact.

And as I'm watching, within split seconds,

I can see this plane start tilting.

Very gradually.

And I'm watching this plane like being hypnotized.

Can't move my eyes away.

And I can hear this revving sound this engine is making.

Like when the plane takes off,

that sound it's making,

well, multiply that by 1,000.

And this plane is coming towards me.

And my mind is reacting so fast and I don't know what to do.

And the next thing I remember saying and I don't know why I said it.

I said, "Lord, I can't do this. You take over."

Dropped the phone, screamed, dove under the desk.

Come on, get up, get up, get up, get up.

Get up, now. Get up!

Oh my god. Oh my god!

Jesus Christ.

A second airplane, a 727, just rammed into the building.

Where do I go? Do I go home?

It's a US Airway jet slammed into it.

I saw it.

Hello, Gerald?

Yo, I'm gonna get outta the city, yo.

I ain't staying here.

Look! Look at the second building!

When the plane hit, I got blown out of my shoes,

and I hit the marble wall in front of me

with my upper body.

And then my strong will or my obstinance kicked in.

I'm, like, "Oh, no way.

I am not orphaning my kids in this building.

I am getting out of here."

We got into the stairwells and we stumbled across

this odd gentleman who had artificial legs.

And he sat down and said, "I can't go anymore."

The two men just said, "No way. Not on our watch."

And they picked him up and they just started carrying him down.

I encountered a woman on the stairwell who was having an asthma attack.

And in my pocketbook I had an inhaler.

And I handed it to her.

I said, "Here. Just use it."

And she was using it, and she said,

"Oh my god, I can breathe,"

and she started down.

So, you just did,

everybody was just doing what they needed to do to help.

It was a constant very quick flow,

but people were kind to each other.

We were, like, right in the path of all

the debris from the second plane and from the building,

and it was just shot right towards our ambulance.

All the patients, they were all huddled on the floor,

all crunched together with their hands over their heads.

And we were just kinda on top of them.

We were scared in there.

I mean, at least I know I can't speak for anybody else,

but I can speak for myself.

I was terrified.

I looked at my partner and I said, you know,

"We need to get outta here."

When we pulled outta there,

I hear him scream through the front,

"I'm getting flagged. I'm being flagged."

So, I open up the back door, I said,

I'm, like, "What's going on?"

He's, like, "This guy jumped in front of the ambulance.

He said we need to help this lady."

So, I'm, like, "All right."

So, we jump out and we see this one lady.

She was lying half on the street,

half on the sidewalk.

Orlando and I were able to just move her over to the side a little bit,

and we saw that her whole back side looked like it was just torn off.

From her shoulder blades all the way down to, like,

the top of her thigh.

Looked like everything was just ripped right off.

We didn't know it at the time,

but we found out later on that she was hit by the

landing gear of the second plane.

And it went right down and ripped off half her back.

As we're driving, she was screaming out in agony.

I remember seeing the three or four other patients in the ambulance.

You know, and you can see them,

that they're scared.

They were all crying, they were all looking round.

Like, and, they're looking at me.

And here I am, 21-year-old kid.

What do I know?

And I remember the woman on the stretcher,

I go down and she's awake and she's looking at me

and she's screaming.

She's, like, "It hurts.

I'm hurt. Help me! Somebody please help me."

And I remember just getting down on my knee and

just holding her hand and getting close to her.

I'm, like, "It's all right. It's okay. We got you."

I'm, like, "I'm here now.

I'm gonna get you to the hospital."

You know, "We're gonna, we're gonna take care of you."

There was a bunch of doctors just waiting for us at the door.

And they start grabbing some of the other patients that we

brought in and other people.

And we're, like, "No, no, no, forget those.

I'm, like, this one.

You gotta take this one in, right here."

You know, you just handing the patient over

it's, like, okay, I've done my part.

I did my part, I did the best that I could for her.

And I brought her to people that can help her a lot more than I can.

I really thought I'd died.

Here I am alive.

This is not possible.

Upon impact, a large chunk of that plane was stuck

in the office doorway.

The air pressure was so great, it was sucking everything out.

It looks like a demolition crew came in and just ripped the entire floor apart.

Every wall is flattened.

Every piece of furniture is mangled.

I'm hiding under the desk.

It looks like somebody took a giant bag of cement and threw it in the air.

The jet fuel is smelling so profusely.

The sound was so deafening that my ears pop.

I got temporarily deaf.

All the cables that were hanging in the ceiling dropped.

And they're short-circuiting.

The sprinkler system came on.

And part of the floor collapsed.

And it's hovering like this, right over the desk.

If I don't get burned, well, then, I'll get electrocuted.

If I don't get electrocuted and burned, well, then,

the floor is gonna collapse.

I'm gonna die. I'm gonna get crushed.

And if the three of them miss me, well,

then I'm gonna get sucked out by the air pressure.

One way or the other, I'm gone.

And I started to scream.

When the second tower got hit, that was a terrifying moment.

Of course, now you realize, this is no accident.

This is intentional.

And that changes your whole perception of what you're dealing with now.

One of my thoughts was going through my head, is stay calm.

You know.

You have to make,

I knew I was gonna be having to make some very serious decisions

involving people's lives.

Which is my job,

which I'm trained for,

and I'm trained very well for on the Fire Department.

And I wanted to make it as clear ahead as I could.

So, I had to avoid that little panicky thing that you go through at first.

I was climbing the stairs in the North Tower.

And our orders were to report to the 23rd floor.

So, I'm walking around the floor,

I'm looking for this chief I'm supposed to report to.

And I hear chatter.

I hear people talking.

And, of course, I'm curious. Nobody's supposed to be there.

And I open the door and there's two people inside the stairway.

It was an injured secretary,

a woman and her boss stayed with her.

This is an incredibly heroic guy.

I wish I can remember his name.

But he stayed and took his in,

trying to get his injured secretary out of the building.

And they were in stairway C.

Now, they were alone;

There was nobody else in stairway C, and I was worried about them.

So, I told them, "Go to stairway B.

The Fire Department's in stairway B; They will help you."

And they were frozen; They couldn't move.

They just froze.

And then I yelled at them.

I felt bad, but I yelled at them.

I just, "Get!"

You know, "Stairway B!"

I'm not gonna tell you again," you know, like that.

But I had to do it, you know, 'cause I had to

startle them to get 'em out of that.

They were in, like, a funk, you know what I mean?

And finally they listened to me and went over to stairway B.

And they survived.

They got out. That was good.

Calm down, we're the fire department she's gonna be fine.

To help anybody, you've gotta start triaging.

You try to determine the injury at a second in the moment.

So that the unit coming behind you can immediately treat that person.

Green tag for minor injuries, you understand everything.

Then you have the, uh, red tag for immediate.

And then when we get to the deceased,

that means no care needed.

At this time, this person is presumed dead.

I was underneath the towers, going from area to area.

I did not see any living person on the ground.

Everybody was deceased.

So, going past, you just rip the tags off and left deceased, deceased.

Until I ran into that one person.

I put deceased, which is the black tag.

And then she says,

"I'm not dead. Call my daughter."

But she didn't know what I knew, and she didn't see what I'd seen.

Her head did not hit the ground, or I couldn't see that the head,

'cause the hair was still intact.

She looked like an office personnel.

She looked like maybe a woman that was on the plane.

And the makeup.

But what I saw below the torso was

complete crushed disfigurement.

This lady must have came down feet first.

You can't take, "Stop! Stop! I'm not dead!"

I could have done something immediately to help her.

But I was panicking myself.

I was dealing with death myself.

Even though I did not fear death, or I wasn't thinking about death.

But I saw death, and I saw death, and I saw death, and I saw death.

She would not survive another couple of minutes.

So I lied.

And said, "You're okay."

This is preliminary.

This is just, I meant to make, I tore the wrong thing off.

Relax.

They're coming, they're coming, they're coming.

"Don't worry about what I just did."

I had a guilty conscience about what I was saying,

and that I was lying.

But I wasn't lying in the fact of her condition.

I was lying in the fact that I did think she was dead.

And that black tag stayed with me.

It took me three years to push it back or from this cortex part of my

brain to the frontal part of my brain, the memory.

Or put it somewhere with the psychiatrist and the clinician

to help me move her around so that she's not

in the mind's eye in the daytime or in the night-time.

Or at any time.

The human body or the human mind is not positioned,

or the brain can never be positioned to

deal with tragedy of another human being.

It just reminds you that this could be your mother.

This is your father, this is your family.

This is a human being.

You don't lie to the dying.

I came out on the 44th floor, 'cause that's where our stairwell ends.

And there was panic and bedlam, and it was pitch black.

And then all of a sudden in this darkness is this voice.

He was singing,

and I think the singing distracted everybody that they were,

they stopped in their tracks to see why he was singing,

or where he was singing from.

And it calmed everybody down.

And then he said these words.

He said, "Today is a proud day to be an American."

It was Rick Rescorla, our head of security.

Rick was so concerned for many years about

the security and safety of everybody

in the World Trade Center.

It had been attacked before,

and he was certain it would happen again.

He did predict that they would come.

If they came again, that they would come from the air.

And it's very hard to protect people when they come from the air.

So, the only protection would be to teach them how to get out

in case a catastrophe happened.

Rick had them redo the stairwells, repaint them,

make sure there was lighting

so everybody could see where we were going.

And four times a year,

we walked from 70 all the way down to the sky lobby

to get out of the building.

You know, at first people would just assume this is over the top,

it was exaggerated.

Do we really need to do this?

I mean, in my mind,

my favorite line was,

"Lightning never strikes the same place twice."

So, after '93, I didn't even think about it because I was, like,

no one's ever gonna attack the same building again.

That day, things were on fire.

You know, things were blowing up,

and he really was able to refocus everybody pretty

quickly and disperse the crowds to their proper stairwells to get

them out of there.

So, seeing Rick was probably like seeing your guardian angel when I saw him on 44.

I wasn't nervous at that point.

I really wasn't.

Hey, Kim.

Look at his big camera. Look at his big camera.

He'll tell your grandchildren you were there.

We were there.

I wasn't emotional on that day.

I was not frozen in fear,

I wasn't thinking horrible thoughts.

My mind, thankfully, protected me from absorbing any carnage.

You know, my mind blocked anything that might have been really ugly out there,

I don't remember.

Other than this grayness.

Others died and I didn't.

I wasn't having any of that in my mind yet.

Again, I cannot explain why.

Um, and I keep wondering.

You know, well, am I, you know, am I cold-hearted?

I don't...

I don't think so.

I think I'm tender and compassionate when I need to be.

Odd.

I was stuck in the 81st floor.

I crawled the entire length of the loans department to the

lounge and the computer room and the communication room.

And that's the farthest I could have gone.

Because one lousy sheet rock wall stood firm.

Just one wall.

That period of waiting was the most painful thing you would ever imagine.

That period of just waiting, hoping that somebody is gonna come to get you.

And I'm crying out to this invisible God that I've hurt so much.

From the 84th floor, I led a group of people down the stairs.

And we arrived on the 81st floor, me in the lead.

As I arrive there, a heavyset woman came up and stopped me.

"We've just come off a floor in flames and smoke, and we've gotta go higher."

And, of course, I'm stopped now and I can't get past her,

and bumping behind me comes the rest of my team, if you like.

So, now there's this group of us.

Nine, ten people, on the 81st floor landing,

who are now beginning to debate listening

to her and starting to discuss, well, do we go up, do we go down?

What do we do now?

I'm behind of a wall and I'm crying out,

"Wait for me. Don't leave me to die."

What I heard was something like,

"Help! Help! I'm buried. Is anyone there? I can't breathe."

Kind of again sobered up and said,

"Okay, I've got a job to do here."

And my flashlight back on again.

And as I squeezed onto that floor sideways, I have this very,

very clear memory of everybody on that landing turning around

and starting to go up the stairs.

So, I started toward the stranger's voice.

I can only hear that voice faintly.

I had my hand through that hole,

and I'm trying, "Please, please, my hand is here!

Turn to your left!"

As I hear a little bit, his voice is walking away.

His voice is moving away from me.

"No, no, no!

Come back, come back towards your right.

Come back, come back towards your left.

Come straight, straight-straight now."

As I can hear this voice closer, closer.

Sharper.

"Look down! Look down, look down."

There I am, with my hand waving towards him.

When that light flashed on my hand, all hope was there.

Somebody, this person with this flashlight, whoever it is,

somebody is gonna rescue me.

I'm gonna live.

It was that hope.

That feeling of knowing that, you know what?

I'm gonna live.

That feeling of knowing that you're gonna live,

that somebody is here to take you home.

I'm gonna get to see my children again.

I'm gonna be reconciled with my wife again.

I'm gonna live.

They left me here to die, but I'm gonna go home.

And this man really did that.

Rescued me so I could go home.

"Hallelujah, I've been saved!" he said.

"Do you know Jesus Christ?"

That was a very strange thing to hear at that time,

and I wasn't ready for a philosophical discussion,

so I stammered out a rather pathetic reply.

"I go to church every Sunday."

That was the best I could do to that question.

And, "Come on, we got work to do here."

So, there was a lot of debris to the right and debris

to the left of me, and this immovable wall between us.

And I told him the only way out of there is for you to come up this wall.

So, he tried once, and I missed him.

I said, "You must do this."

And over the wall he came and then his weight on me pushed

the desk over.

We fell back onto a pile of debris, and he gave me a big kiss.

And he got up and he says, "Well, what are you doing?"

Fixed his jacket and his tie.

And he stretched his hand.

He says, "Brian Clark." I said, "Stanley Praimnath."

And he said, "I'm Stanley."

He said, "We'll be brothers for life."

And I said, "Well, I have no siblings."

I said, "We can be brothers."

And then I noticed I had a puncture wound on my right palm.

And Stanley also had a puncture wound on his palm.

And I'm the one who did it.

I put our hands together and said,

"We'll be blood brothers for life."

And we made our way off the floor back to the

81st floor landing.

I shone the light down and I took that.

I didn't see flames.

I saw some smoke coming up.

And I took that gratefully, took that fateful first step down.

And we continued on down.

Based on the woman telling us that we

needed to go up because down below was on fire,

we started to climb.

I guess we got to about the 91st floor and realized

there was no exiting.

The smoke was getting thicker,

and people were starting to drift off.

It was like going into a peaceful sleep.

I wanted to see my wife and my four beautiful kids again.

As we were fading in and out of consciousness,

I had heard a voice.

Some who are religious may believe it's God or an angel.

Others, maybe it was my adrenaline-fueled synapses.

I'm not sure, but it was a very cool,

calm voice telling me to get up and come this way.

And I followed the voice right into the thickest of the smoke

and the fire.

And I pushed back on the wall

and I revealed the staircase below.

And then I ran through three flights of stairs

that were on fire.

I had burns on 60% of my body.

My contact lenses were melted to my eyes.

But I was alive.

When we got down to about the 22nd floor,

the integrity of the building was really

starting to deteriorate.

And then there was cracks starting in the walls.

And, you know, we were, like,

"Holy crap, we have to get out of here."

And we really started to pick up the pace,

like, almost running.

And all I kept thinking is,

"This building is not taking me.

I'm going home to my kids."

So, I kept going and going.

And when we got to the bottom floor we were yelling,

"We're here, we're here!"

And some people were clapping.

And they're, like, "All right, we're right behind you."

When we emerged out of the building

there was a sense of relief that we were safe.

MAN Keep it moving, folks The danger is not over!

They ushered us across the street.

My little group, we sat down on the curb.

And they were triaging right behind us.

They were carrying very wounded people behind us, laying them down,

trying to triage what they could do.

When we looked up and saw the burning on our building,

my first thought was,

"This is coming down."

I'm not gonna die here on the street.

I just got out of that building; I have to get out of here.

You gotta keep going.

Sir, are you gonna stay behind?

Come on.

Please keep moving. Please keep moving.

Some of the people we work with encountered Rick

on one of the lower floors

as they were leaving the building.

Rick was heading up the stairs.

And they said, "Rick, come with us."

And he's, like, "No, no.

I have to do one more sweep to make sure all our people are safe."

He could have gotten out.

But he chose to go back up.

All I knew that Rick was doing what Rick was destined to do,

and that was get everybody out of that building.

And knowing Rick, you knew he wasn't leaving until that last person was out.

Got the helicopter out. Yeah.

Oh, (bleep)!

It's coming down, it's coming down!

The ash filled the air and blocked the sun.

And, very strangely, as we went down Broadway,

and it wasn't densely populated.

All of a sudden, Stanley was gone.

I'm, I'm, I'm looking around wondering where he is.

And this feeling washed over me, like, oh!

Did I just imagine this?

Was Stanley some sort of a guardian angel?

Like, I had real confused doubts about what had just transpired.

I learned later from Stanley that he had commandeered

a guy in a pickup truck and told him,

"You drive me to Brooklyn."

Apparently, the guy did.

Brian said to me later on, had he made the choice to go back up like

the others, he would have died.

But there was something in that scream that held him to help me.

So, every time I tell this man,

"Brian, thank you for saving my life."

He says, "No, no, Stan. Thank you.

Had you not screamed, I would have gone back up.

I would have died."

Being as young as I was at the time,

that day, um, definitely changed me.

You know, there are things that I live with to this day that still

haunt my dreams from it.

You know, when I start thinking about how bad it could be,

I keep thinking of that patient that we picked up.

The woman on the stretcher.

We didn't think that she was gonna make it through at all.

But we found out a couple of weeks later that she was still alive.

This is Mag for Magnificent.

I got him last night from a friend of my fiancé's.

He is so much fun.

I, normally there's little white blankets here.

And then I got Mag last night, too.

It made me realize that color's been absent in my environment.

And it showed up when it really needed to be there.

And I found out later on her name was Debbie.

And I remember going to the hospital to go see her.

And they brought us over to her room and she was still intubated at the time,

but she was sitting up and conscious, and she's looking at us.

And she, see her moving her hand and she's, like, it's them.

It's them.

And she was pointing to us.

And all the people that we walked by in the waiting room was her parents,

her fiancé and the rest of her family.

They came over to us and they were just hugging us.

You know, it became, it was very emotional for Orlando and I.

And Frank Puma was the one,

the guy who drove the EMT truck that allowed

me to get on it.

The few times that I was able to see her in the hospital,

she was always upbeat.

She's, like, "Don't worry, I'm gonna get better."

And throughout my time,

she has been an inspiration for me to get me out of my dark places.

Knowing the fact that I gave someone back their family.

I helped bring that person back home.

Our orders were to go upstairs in the North Tower

for search and rescue.

And, uh, we heard a loud noise outside.

And I see Billy Burke walking towards me.

He's got a funny look on his face.

And I look at him and I said,

"Is that what I thought it was?"

Looking at a piece of our building fell off.

And he just looks at me and he says,

"The South Tower has just collapsed."

Knowing what that meant,

that right next door to us,

thousands of people were just killed.

Some of our friends, too.

And I did the quick calculation in my mind and I says,

"All right. If that one can go, this one can go.

It's time for us to get outta here."

And my guys didn't react. They balked.

They didn't wanna leave.

And I said, "Let's go. It's time to go."

So, we start our retreat down the B stairway of the North Tower.

And I'd just be whispering it to Billy Butler's ears.

"Billy, can you move a little faster?"

And the, uh, collapse of the North Tower starts with us still inside.

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.