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Empty Sky Junior Scholastic's editor recalls how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed her family—and the nation

By Suzanne McCabe | May 9, 2011 On the evening of September 11, 2001, six dads from my hometown of Rumson, New Jersey, didn’t come home from work. Their cars sat empty in the parking lot of the commuter ferry they’d taken into Manhattan that morning. Their seats at the dinner table have been empty ever since. My brother Mike was one of those dads. He and more than 2,700 other people were killed at the World Trade Center in New York City when 10 members of Al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group, crashed two hijacked planes into the Twin Towers. The 9/11 attacks were the deadliest on U.S. soil since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and they would change the nation profoundly. I was on a commuter ferry headed to downtown Manhattan when the first plane struck the North Tower. It was 8:46 a.m. I knew that my brother, who had started a job as an equities trader at Cantor Fitzgerald a week earlier, would already be at his desk. I would soon learn that he was on the 104th floor of that 110-‐story building. “As you can see,” the ferry captain said over his bullhorn, “a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

BALLY Wednesday, September 11, 2013 9:40:13 AM Eastern Daylight Time

We could see the Trade Center and the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan—still 40 minutes away—with aching clarity. As Mike, an avid bodysurfer, surely would have noted, it was a perfect beach day, crisp and cloudless. I tried him on his cell phone several times but couldn’t get through. Service had already become sporadic so I couldn’t reach his wife, Lynn, or any other family members either. As the ferry continued across the Hudson River to New York, we watched smoke spewing from the upper floors of the North Tower. At first, it seemed as if the crash had been some terrible accident. Then, just 17 minutes later, a second plane sliced through the top of the South Tower. Everyone gasped. America, we realized, was under attack. Still, we sailed on. We passed the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, all eyes glued to the two towers. While smoke billowed from one, orange fireballs ringed the other. Paper and shards of glass began to rain down on the streets, and thick black soot coated much of the sky. I tried to picture Mike and his best friend, Michael Tucker, or “Tuck,” who also worked at Cantor, racing down the stairs to safety. When our ferry docked in Lower Manhattan, we were instructed not to get off. Instead, we would take on people who had fled the Trade Center and nearby office buildings, and head back to New Jersey. Other Attacks I looked for my brother and Tuck in the crowd on the pier. If anyone could escape that building, I thought, it was those two guys. Mike had lifted weights since high school and was a great basketball player. And Tuck was as big and strong as the guys on the Syracuse University football team he once roomed with. As we sailed back to New Jersey, the smell of death and burning plastic began to fill the air. But nothing prepared us for what happened next. We watched in stunned silence as the South Tower collapsed in a massive swirl of ash. It was 10:05. Less than a half-‐hour later, the North Tower fell, leaving us, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, with nothing but an empty sky. We soon learned that there had been other attacks. Shortly after 9:30 a.m., hijackers had crashed a plane into the Pentagon, the U.S. military headquarters outside Washington, D.C., killing 189 people. And in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, passengers on a fourth plane, known as Flight 93, brought down their hijacked jet in a field when they realized it was headed for either the White House or the Capitol. All 44 people onboard died. That morning, my brother’s three children and thousands of others were called from their classrooms. My niece Regan, then 8, remembers an unfamiliar teacher arriving at the door during art class. “Come with me, please,” he said, “and bring your belongings.” When Regan and her brother and sister got home, their mom was in the driveway, her face ashen.


They went inside and turned on the TV. “I’d never seen those two buildings before,” Regan says. “Flames and chunks were tumbling down. ‘Your father is in there,’ my mom managed to say. Then she burst into tears.” A decade later, those memories are still raw for everyone who lived through that day. “Any time I hear ‘9/11,’ it just brings everything back,” says John Pollinger, who was the police chief of Middletown, New Jersey, in 2001. His town of 68,000 lost 37 people that day. Pollinger was at the ferry landing when my boat got back. “People were shell-‐shocked, stunned, covered with dust,” he says. “I told my detectives, ‘Get on the ferry. Go over there. See what you can do.’ In the end, there was little anyone could do besides tend to grieving families and try to recover the bodies of those who had died. Life Without Dad My brother’s children have had to grow up without their dad. He has missed their field hockey games, skateboarding competitions, proms, and graduations. He didn’t live to see their funny texts or Facebook posts. Most important, he’s missed seeing the extraordinary young adults they’ve become. Thousands of other families have faced the same heartbreaking loss. More than 400 firefighters and other rescue workers who went into the burning buildings to try to save people like Mike and Tuck also died on 9/11. Countless others spent months at the site, which came to be known as Ground Zero, searching through the rubble for bodies, trying to give families some measure of peace. Often, all they found were bone fragments. Many Ground Zero workers have since developed severe lung ailments from the pollutants they inhaled. Some have died. Those remaining live with the trauma of what they saw. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that our friends and people we didn’t even know were there to look out for us. They stuck by us when we needed them most. My family and so many others lost a lot on 9/11. We also incurred a debt that we can never repay. This article originally appeared in the September 5, 2011, issue of Junior Scholastic.


“I Was 11 on 9/11” A student from New York City tells what it was like to live through a tragic day 10 years ago By Laura Modigliani September 11, 2001, was Emily Sussell’s fourth day of sixth grade. She attended Intermediate School 89 in New York City, four blocks away from the World Trade Center. The school stood in the shadows of two 110-‐story skyscrapers known as the Twin Towers. As she sat in social studies class at about 8:45 a.m., Emily heard a loud crash. “We felt the building shake a little bit and heard a shattering boom,” she says. An airplane had flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Emily and her classmates quickly evacuated their school. A family friend came to pick up Emily. As they went outside, Emily looked up at the towers. “It looked like a giant hole through the top of the tower, filled with flames,” she says. “I could feel the heat of the fire on my face, even four city blocks away.”


Running for Her Life The family friend took Emily a few blocks to Public School 234, where Emily’s mother worked. As they waited for instructions on what to do next, a second plane hit the south tower. Emily and her mom soon left the school—just as the south tower collapsed. They ran to escape the huge cloud of smoke and debris. “I remember thinking that these kinds of things happen only in movies, not to me,” Emily says. At 10:28 a.m., the north tower crashed to the ground. By then, Emily and her mom were safely in another school about two miles from the World Trade Center. A National Tragedy Like many people, Emily first thought the crashes were an accident. That changed when she learned what had happened near Washington, D.C. A third plane had slammed into the side of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The five-‐sided building is the headquarters of the U.S. military. As news reports soon revealed, terrorists had hijacked, or taken over, the planes and flown them into the buildings on purpose. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Many people believe it was headed for the White House or the U.S. Capitol. The events of September 11, often called 9/11, stunned the nation and the world. In just a few hours, close to 3,000 people had been killed. More than 400 of them were firefighters and police officers who were trying to rescue people in the Twin Towers. The Aftermath Following 9/11, the U.S. government took many steps to try to make the country safer. It tightened security at airports and in public buildings. Within a month of the attacks, the U.S. would go to war to hunt down the people who had planned the attacks. Like many Americans, Emily recovered from the tragedy slowly. Clouds of toxic dust from the disaster hung in the air in her neighborhood. Her family couldn’t return home for nearly two weeks. She and her classmates had to attend another school for almost six months. Today, Emily, 21, is in her final year of college at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She says 9/11 is still a big part of her life. “It was the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me, and I survived it, so I think that I’m braver now,” she says. “It’s definitely made me more grateful for all of the things in my life.” This article originally appeared in the September 5, 2011, issue of Scholastic News Edition.


Growing Up in a Hurry Austin Vukosa, one of some 3,000 children under 18 who lost a parent in the attacks, became a hyperambitious, self-‐reliant teenager. By DAVID GONZALEZ Published: September 8, 2011 It took a few weeks for Annette Vukosa to finally break it to her elder son, Austin, that his father would not be coming home, and for a long time after that, the two spoke only sparingly about him. Finally, a few months after Sept. 11, Austin, all of 7, went up to his mother in their apartment in Kensington, Brooklyn, and announced: “I have a plan.” “We can be together with Daddy when we die,” he said. “If we cut our wrists, we’ll die and we’ll all be with Daddy again.” How Austin grew from being a bereft little boy to a hyperambitious beanpole of a 16-‐year-‐old is a story of stand-‐ins and mentors, therapy and special camps, and a universal desire by everyone close to him to ensure that Sept. 11 would neither destroy nor define his life. Most of all, it is a story of a child who grew up fast and focused, picking himself up, realizing early on that the boy truly is the father to the man. He is among some 3,000 children under 18 who lost not only a parent in the attacks, but also their very sense of security. Some, like Austin, were old enough to know — but not fully comprehend — the depth of their loss. Those sobering insights came later, as they became prematurely independent or even prematurely serious, sometimes taking it upon themselves to shoulder more responsibilities. Austin speaks of his life with a keenly felt sense of duty that goes beyond honoring a memory. He talks matter-‐of-‐factly about having to rely on his own wits and work to get ahead, unlike some children who think school is a joke, since, he said, their fathers will set them up in their family business. “I push myself to do what I do, from running to taking all these ridiculous Advanced Placement classes,” he said. “I don’t have anything to fall back on. I have to do this by my own hands.” His 12-‐year-‐old brother, Adam, does not remember their father, and constantly asks relatives for information about him: how he spoke or what sports he liked. Austin, by contrast, has memories, but keeps them close and quiet. Sometimes, it is impossible. In a city like New York, where the broken skyline attests to the staggering losses of that day, there are a decade’s worth of reminders. Even the park where he used to play catch with his father has been renamed in honor of another 9/11 victim. “Would this have been easier for me had his death not been so public?” Austin asked, then answered, as if observing himself through a window: “Most people lose a parent, and it’s private. Everybody knows it happened and people talk about it all the time. It’s so much more difficult because it was so public.” A Dreaded Sit-‐Down Alfred and Annette Vukosa’s paths crossed — and parted — in Lower Manhattan.


Annette Lalman had grown up in Guyana and moved to Ozone Park, Queens, during high school. Alfred Vukosa was born in Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia. In November 1967, his family dashed across the border into Italy, spending a year in a refugee camp before settling in Brooklyn. Alfred and Annette met in the late 1980s on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where both worked in trading operations. They married in 1992 and moved into the third floor of the modest building in Kensington that Alfred’s parents had bought. Austin was born in 1994, and Adam five years later. Alfred loved his job — information technology specialist at Cantor Fitzgerald — and they began looking to buy their own home. They fell in love with a two-‐family brick house in Dyker Heights, and were about to go to contract. That was about a week before Sept. 11. Annette heard the noise from the first plane’s impact; her job, evaluating corporate bonds, was a couple of blocks away. She called her husband, only to get an agitated co-‐worker who answered the phone and begged her to hang up and call 911. When she and several friends decided to walk over, they found themselves dashing inside a building to seek shelter when the towers collapsed. She walked the six miles home, where Austin and Adam were with their grandparents. “My grandmother was watching the television, crying,” Austin recalled. “My grandfather was standing there, trying to be strong, I guess.” For a few weeks, the family searched hospitals and pored over lists. Seldom-‐seen relatives came from far away, and there were whispered conversations and emotional arguments — like the time Annette’s sister said no one could survive five days in rubble. A few weeks later, Annette had the sit-‐down with Austin she had been dreading. “I explained to him, the building came down,” she recalled. “Daddy was in the building. We went to look for him and we can’t find him. I don’t remember if I even said the words ‘He’s dead.’ ” Even during the memorial service at a Queens church, Austin was puzzled by the tears and tributes for his father. “It’s like one of those jokes people are talking about and you don’t understand it,” he said. “You feel left out. About a year later I came around to the fact he’s probably not going to come home. For some reason, I didn’t think it had happened to anyone else besides me.” Pushing Himself Tall and slender, with close-‐cropped hair, Austin looks like anyone else on the track team at Xavier High School in Manhattan. He has an easy smile, softening his edge of quiet intensity. A classmate and good friend, Anthony Pucik, said it was not until a year after they met that he learned what had happened to Austin’s father. Austin had been like that since grammar school, keeping his


father’s memory to himself, as much for privacy as for not wanting to be framed solely by the tragedy that befell him. “If you knew, you knew,” he said. “But if you didn’t, I wasn’t going to explain it.” His little brother has been the exact opposite. Without a single memory of his father, he has ceaselessly grilled his mother and relatives on every aspect of Alfred’s life. For a while, Annette said, he would tell even strangers that his father had died in the World Trade Center. Their paternal grandfather, Sam, tried to be a father to the boys. He took them to basketball games and the movies. But at home, he often broke down in tears thinking how he — a man who had survived the Nazis and escaped Communism — lost his son in the land that gave him refuge. He died six years later. About the same time, Brian Malone, a young banker who had lost family friends on Sept. 11, became Austin’s mentor through Tuesday’s Children, an organization for children of 9/11. Mr. Malone goes bowling and sailing with him, teaching him how to tie a tie and shave, and even giving him a book that he described as “a thousand things every guy should know.” He was the latest member of a circle that helped nurture the shy boy, from his mother’s extended family and their yearly vacations to the teachers at the local Roman Catholic school where his mother enrolled him to provide a smaller and more supportive community. One thing that he needed little help with was school, never having to be cajoled into doing his homework. “I owed it to myself, and my family,” Austin said. “For my dad. He was always big on school and making sure I studied.” He received a scholarship to Xavier, a Jesuit high school in Chelsea whose traditions date to the mid-‐19th century. It is a school that understands loss — 10 alumni died in the attacks, their memory enshrined in a plaque honoring “The Lost Sons of Xavier” that hangs by the front entrance on West 16th Street. At Xavier he has taken the hardest courses he could, and though he did not make the basketball team, he joined the track team, where he has been a sprinter. “I’m not the fastest guy,” he said. “But track’s about the mental toughness. Once the pain sets in, you want to finish. It definitely shows you how strong you are.” His junior year has been the most challenging emotionally and intellectually, starting with a religious retreat where he had ample time to reflect on the course of his life. The news about Osama bin Laden’s death came while he was studying on a Sunday night. His cellphone flashed a stream of text messages from his friends. His mother called out to him that the president would be addressing the nation. That night, his mother could hear him crying in his room. “Over the years he never talked much about his father’s death,” she said. “I used to wonder, what was he thinking. But that night, oh, he cried and cried.”


In the coming days, he went online to research as much as he could about Bin Laden. In school, the topic came up, as students in his religion class wrestled with questions of forgiveness and celebration. The class was among his favorites, since it was the kind of class that rewarded thought and reason. It was, he said, about life. “Some people in class asked if Bin Laden could be forgiven,” he said. “How can you forgive somebody like that? He clearly didn’t care about what he was doing. To forgive somebody, they have to be sorry. He didn’t care.” The Rev. Ralph Rivera said Austin was among the best students in his religion class. “This has been about finding meaning in tragedy and not being a victim,” he said. “He is clearly still in pain, but he is also seeking answers. As long as he seeks answers, there is hope. I am very optimistic for him.” A Special Haven On one of the hottest days of the summer, Austin headed out to school for a practice test. His mother sat at her desk in a corner of the living room, the television set to a financial news channel as she tracked the market on a trio of computer monitors and executed trades. She has worked from home for several years, allowing her a little more flexibility. She bristles at how some people ask whether she landed a hefty financial settlement or whether she has “gotten over it” and started dating someone. “I’d give any amount of money to have my life back,” she said. “I feel sorry seeing these boys without a male influence in their lives often enough. Watching them grow up, my heart aches for them.” Austin has now thrown himself into researching and applying to colleges. He knows his mother would prefer he stay close to home — she can’t bear the thought of his being away for four years. But he thinks it might be good to go out of town, though not too far. This summer, on a trip to England sponsored by the British government for children of Sept. 11 victims, he visited a dormitory for the first time, saw Oxford and toured London. Back in Brooklyn, he prepared to take the SAT again — his third time, though he has already scored 2000, among the top 10 percent — and brushed up on physics for an Advanced Placement course. This summer also marks his last visit to America’s Camp, a haven in the Berkshires for young people who lost parents to terrorism. He has come to see his friends there as his closest. Where he once refused to let his life be defined by the tragedy that changed his world, he now accepts it as part of who he is. It is a legacy. “I sometimes wonder, if this could have happened to anybody, why did it happen to me?” he said. “I’m still dealing with this. I don’t think it’ll ever go away. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s good to remember.”


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