Paige Pantezzi is one of the lucky ones. On the 24th floor of the North Tower when the first plane struck five years ago yesterday, she knew she had to get out fast. “I realized it was something really bad.” She passed scorched bodies on the mezzanine but kept going; it took eight minutes to reach the street.
Once outside, Paige, who is now 34, stopped briefly to look back just as the second aircraft plowed in. “I remember seeing the fire and thinking instantly that we were under attack,” she says.
She had no problem when President Bush moved weeks later to invade Afghanistan and oust the Taleban who had played host to Osama Bin Laden. “I felt that we were going after the people who had attacked us,” she recalls.
But today she has many questions about what has been done in the name of 9/11 — and what has not. For example: “Where is Osama Bin Laden?”
Ms. Pantezzi, who is single, stops short of condemning the war in Iraq and Washington’s attempts to cite terrorism to justify it. She insists upon her support for the soldiers there. But her wider discomfort is not hard to decode. “I have never felt that spreading democracy at the end of a gun is a good idea.”
More than that, she worries that aggression by America and its allies is backfiring. “Attacking people is not solving things, “ she says, suggesting that the threat of further terrorist attacks has by no means been reduced. An old friend from high school lives in a flat in London immediately above one of the tube stations attacked last summer. “There are more threats surfacing”.
Her main concern is that no one, here or in the Muslim community, is doing enough to calm the enmity that propelled the attackers in the first place. “Where is the hatred coming from and what are we doing to address it?” she asks repeatedly. “Where are the voices of moderation which could solve this hatred? I don’t hear them. In fact, I just feel that the split between us is getting worse and worse”.
For the last few months, Ms. Pantezzi has been leading tours of Ground Zero for groups of tourists. But the public’s lack of awareness can be depressing. She has had people insisting that the passengers on the two planes were all Iraqis. “Not one!” she almost laughs. And she recalls somebody insisting that the man on trial in Baghdad right now was Bin Laden. She wishes it were so.
Mickey Kross retired from the New York Fire Department a few weeks ago and misses the cocoon of the firehouse and the distraction of a daily routine. Nothing, however, could ever protect him from the memories of the day when 343 of his colleagues perished while, almost inexplicably, he escaped death.
