Twenty years on from 9/11, remember bravery and sacrifice

While hate-filled mullahs celebrated, thousands of ordinary men and women raced towards the Twin Towers to help, writes Piers Akerman.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US reminded the West of the medieval barbarity underlying Islamist fundamentalism.

The immediate response to Osama bin Laden’s assault served to remind the world of the intrinsic decency and altruism that has guided the development of Western civilisation over millennia.

While hate-filled mullahs and imams from Iran to Indonesia were celebrating the murder of infidels, thousands of ordinary men and women were racing toward the smoking ruins of the World Trade Centre towers to volunteer their assistance.

The world knows of the hundreds of firemen and police officers who died as the twin towers collapsed into fiery piles of twisted steel and powdery concrete but the stories of those who later fought their way toward the smoking ruins are not as well-known.

A fiery blasts rocks the south tower of the World Trade Center. Picture: Getty

One of the many who signed up to enter Ground Zero even as the fires were burning deep in the bedrock basements and the tortured beams were creaking and collapsing was Leo Champion, a 20-year-old Australian working in Boston.

Now a novelist and publisher living back in Sydney, Champion told me that what he remembers most is “not the horror, but the human spirit, the way everyone came together”.

“Cab drivers would not take your money if they learned they were taking you down there,” he says.

“Ground Zero was all walks of life in America’s toughest city remembering that they had more in common than they had against each other.”

Champion recorded his immediate thoughts in emails which he shared with me.

When he took the bus from Boston to New York he intended to stay for the weekend, he stayed a fortnight and lost his job.

When he arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal in Times Square “wind had blown the dust clouds in a different direction, but not the impact”, he wrote. He walked south looking for somewhere to volunteer.

“After a few blocks it started getting to me. Every so often there were shrines, they had been in places since Chinatown. There were Missing posters, little messages, candles
that had gone out – dead, like the rest of the city,” his email reads.

“For my own sanity I took a right turn into the main city and bought a cheap disposable cigarette lighter from the nearest little convenience store.

“I could do something about those dead candles. As I passed the shrines I stopped to relight them. A meaningless gesture, but … the shrines themselves were meaningful to someone, and it was action that was within my power to take. When it’s all you can do, you do the little things.”

A firefighter stands in the rubble of the World Trade Centre. Picture: Nathan Edwards

He signed up to deliver ice and water and cutting tools to the men clearing a path through the debris and collecting remnants of the victims.

“At the very tip of the spear the metal under your boots is so hot it’s painful. The air is vile and caustic, burning asbestos just one element, and you can’t see more than six or eight feet in any direction,” Champion wrote.

“Thick, billowing smoke everywhere, glowing green and yellow chem-lights every three to four feet marking the safe path, stuck in place with clamps because the heat melted the duct tape we’d tried earlier.”

He tried a shortcut but the girder he stepped on to bucked.

“I dropped the buckets and in some half-instant’s calculation followed the impulse to run forwards, throwing myself toward the glowstick with arms reaching outwards as the ground below me disappeared,” he wrote.

“Red flames for a moment in the gap, dull orange flames where I would have fallen.”

And he learnt that after two weeks of intense heat, some rain, and a whole lot of smoke, the human body jellifies. And in this demonic cauldron of smoke and fire and noise he stepped into a body.

“As soon as I was in a clear area, brown dust and dirt everywhere, I bent over and my stomach went into fits, vomiting itself empty, then bile, then traces of bile,” Champion wrote.

“There was goo all over my boots. Goo that two weeks earlier had been a person.”

An emergency medical technician consoled him: “It’s OK, they’re past noticing.”

All who worked in the reeking dust and heat displayed a bravery and selflessness, reaffirming what is good in us at a time when many were paralysed by fear and introspection.