Beneath New York's tough shell is a deep wound

2001 photo by Carmen Taylor, AP Sept. 11 marked the beginning of one of the most unnerving periods in U.S. history.    POST-9/11 FEARS STILL RESONATE Many continue to worry about more terrorist activities in the USA, but few have changed the way they live or have planned for attacks in their communities. Respondents think a majority of Americans have permanently changed the way they live as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks.1 Changed: 53% Not changed: 46% Yet fewer than one in four say they have changed themselves.1 Changed: 22% Not changed: 78%   In most cases, people say they are less reluctant to participate in activities that might attract terrorists. Those less willing to: Travel overseas Sept. 14-15, 2001: 48% Aug. 18-20, 2006: 47% Fly on airplanes Sept. 14-15, 2001: 43% Aug. 18-20, 2006: 30% Go into skyscrapers Sept. 14-15, 2001: 35% Aug. 18-20, 2006: 22% Attend events with thousands of people Sept. 14-15, 2001: 30% Aug. 18-20, 2006: 23% Few families in the past year have discussed plans for responding to a terrorist attack. Yes, have discussed: 27% No, have not: 73% Source: USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,001 people nationwide Aug. 18-20. Margin of error: ±3 percentage points. The 2001 USA TODAY/Gallup Poll was asked of 1,032 adults. 1 Questions were asked of a half-sample and have a margin of error of ±5 percentage points.   In 2002, then Marine Brian Murphy, left, met his pen pal Claire McGrath in Buffalo. McGrath credits the friendship with helping her overcome post-9/11 fears prompted by her father's job as a commercial airline pilot.    9/11 ANNIVERSARY

Five years later, Claire McGrath's mother can still hear her daughter's cries. "It was a terrible time," Lynette McGrath says. "It's a time I'd like to forget."

It's a time no one can forget — late summer and early fall, 2001. It was our season of fear, a season that never really ended. There were the 9/11 attacks; the anthrax scare; a jumbo jet crash in New York that killed all 260 on board, five on the ground, and for a few hours inspired fears of terrorism.

They combined with other events to make the last third of 2001 one of the most unnerving periods in American history. Never have so many of us been so angry, so frustrated, so scared. We were afraid to get on a plane, open the mail, eat Halloween candy. In Chicago, guacamole on the sidewalk prompted hysteria; in Boston, burning pizza evacuated a mall.

Today, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, that season of fear seems like more than just a bad dream and less than the advent of a "new normal." According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll last month, about half of Americans think people have permanently changed the way they live as a result of 9/11. But fewer than 1 in 4 say they themselves have changed the way they live.

In retrospect, the days and weeks after 9/11 were not as much a time when everythingchanged as wheneveryone changed. Kim Johnson, 41, of Lincoln, Neb., experienced the season's traumas mostly via television. Still, she said, "I feel like a memory was forced on me."

'We're different'

Roxane Cohen Silver is a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) who has studied the mental health of a national sample audience since shortly after the terror attacks. "We're not where we were on Sept. 12, 2001," Silver says, "but we're not back to where we were on Sept. 10, 2001. We're different."

On Sept. 12, 2001, in suburban Buffalo, 12-year-old Claire McGrath felt what she later described as "an unbearable weight on my shoulders." Her father was a Delta pilot who flew Boeing 757s, a model the hijackers had seized. She didn't want him to go back to work.

To make matters worse, her yellow Labrador — who waited with her each day for the school bus and was sitting there when she got off — died three days after the attacks.

Her mother had to read her to sleep and often spend the night with her. The next morning she'd drop Claire off at school, only to be called later to pick her up because she was crying. Claire's grades suffered. She couldn't concentrate; she was withdrawn, anxious. Her father tried to reassure her, telling her how airline security had improved dramatically, what he'd do if anything happened. It didn't ease her fears.

A therapist helped. "But she didn't really know me," Claire recalls. "I didn't feel it was enough."

In October, Claire's Girl Scout troop decided to write letters to members of the U.S. military in the Middle East. Her letter, addressed to "Dear Friend," wound up in the mailbox of a Marine pilot, Capt. Brian Murphy, then 28. It was the first step in a recovery from fear that would mirror her nation's.

Five autumns ago, a generation of Americans found out what history really feels like — not an inevitable sequence of events marching across the page, but calamity and chaos, like Paris 1789, Sarajevo 1914, Honolulu 1941.

Terrorism seemed everywhere — even when it wasn't.

In one week in early October:

• Greyhound idled its national fleet of buses for eight hours after a passenger stabbed a bus driver on a highway in Tennessee.

• A Russian airliner exploded over the Black Sea (accidentally hit by a Ukrainian missile).

• A Washington, D.C., subway station was closed for six hours after a fare jumper squirted a liquid (that proved harmless) at other passengers.

On Nov. 12, when it seemed New York couldn't get any more tense, mental health workers gathered in a Manhattan hotel ballroom for Red Cross post-9/11 disaster-assistance training. They were watching a video about the 1988 terrorist bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, when suddenly the lights went up.

The session organizer, Paul Ofman, stepped to the podium. He said an airliner had just crashed in Queens. "This was too much, too scary," Ofman recalls today. "It felt like a siege in many different places, not just New York. ... Tragedies, horrors, threats — everywhere."

When mechanical failure was determined to have caused the Flight 587 crash, it passed for good news. As New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, "It could have been worse" — it could have been terrorism.

In those early weeks, Americans took more anti-depressants and placed more calls to mental health hotlines. Some psychologists prescribed media abstinence for patients overwrought by 24/7 terror news. Gas masks sold out after the revelation that the hijackers had investigated crop dusters.

Everyone seemed to be afraid of something: stock brokers of a market crash, retailers of a recession, Arab-Americans of misguided retaliation.

It wasn't just New York and Washington. Air Force fighters patrolled the skies over a dozen other big cities. After someone began sending anthrax-tainted letters to politicians and journalists the fear spread geographically.

Two weeks after the first anthrax report, postal authorities reported receiving reports of 4,600 incidents around the nation, most involving items such as talcum powder and jelly donuts. At the U.S. Capitol, even the police dogs got nasal swabs for anthrax.

On Halloween, fear wasn't as much fun. The mayor of Seat Pleasant, Md., told trick-or-treaters to stay home. In Madison, Wis., the zoo's Tunnel of Terror was renamed the Tunnel of Thrills and Chills.

A hazmat team responded after green goo was found on a Chicago sidewalk. It wasn't lethal. "Guacamole is not dangerous. It's good for you," Mayor Richard Daley said. "People have to start calming down."

Surfer and snowboarder

At his airbase in Pakistan, Brian Murphy got more than a dozen letters from strangers back home and replied to all. Only one person wrote back — Claire McGrath. They were an unlikely pair: he a 6-foot surfer and Harley rider from Southern California, she a 5-foot snowboarder from Upstate New York.

Over the next three years, through wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they exchanged scores of letters and e-mails. He'd write of scorpions, of sandstorms, of digging a hole to sleep in at night — tales to fascinate and appall an adolescent girl. He'd kid her about being grounded — he sent her an MRE ("meals ready to eat") to eat in her room — and complain about the lack of surf on the Tigris River.

She sent him a Groucho-style nose, glasses and mustache disguise for use in Iraq, chewing tobacco (valuable currency in the war zone), and stuff to eat. He sent her a Republican Guard beret, a flag that had flown over the caskets of fallen Marines in his air transport cargo bay, and a discarded copy of a physics exam from Saddam University College of Science in Baghdad.

In January, a fellow Marine pilot whom Murphy had befriended in flight school was killed along with six others when their KC-130 cargo plane crashed in Pakistan.

"I was so relieved that your name wasn't on the list," Claire e-mailed him. "But I still feel so terrible that they were friends of yours. I can't imagine how you must feel."

She used her babysitting money to buy some outfits for the Marine's infant son and mailed them to Murphy. That was a watershed in their correspondence, Murphy says: "My writing about how that affected me helped Claire to open up."

She agrees. "Even though the times were really depressing, everything seemed to be getting better after I started writing to him." She felt she was contributing. "Even though it was just one Marine, I really felt like I was doing something."

Brian's nonchalant confidence — "I only honestly remember having been shot at twice, personally" he wrote while serving an infantry tour in Iraq — undercut her anxiety.

"He didn't talk about all the bad stuff that was going on," she says. "When he wrote, everything seemed OK. I felt more secure. I was reassured by that. ... I felt I could tell him anything and he would understand. It was like talking back and forth to a friend, not a counselor or anything."

In religion class at Claire's Catholic high school, students asked how God could have let the terrorists succeed. "It seemed so nonsensical," she thought. In the end, she did not blame God for terrorism; she thanked God for Brian — "a special gift," she called him.

Back from fear

Claire McGrath's recovery from the season of fear shared the same elements as the nation's.

There was faith — in God or America or ourselves. There was action — coping through doing, from writing to soldiers to enlisting to fight with them.

There was leadership — from officials such as Giuliani and President Bush, and from those in the field, like Murphy.

That confidence was bolstered as one milestone after another passed without incident: Halloween, New Year's Eve, the State of the Union address, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics. The anthrax scare ended after the fifth death in November 2001. But for some, the season of fear has never ended.

Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner says her research indicates that, as a result of that period, some Americans still have a "heightened response to fear"— not just of terrorism, but of garden-variety risks like getting the flu.

Some people around the nation continue to experience post-traumatic stress symptoms, according to research by Silver, the UCI psychologist.

Two years ago, the last time Silver's group was surveyed, 4.5% still reported such symptoms. People who merely watched the attacks on television or otherwise learned about them secondhand reported symptoms "at levels comparable" to those who were at or near the scene, Silver says.

Claire McGrath is now 17 and getting ready to apply to college. She keeps in touch with Murphy, who has visited the McGraths twice since becoming Claire's pen pal. He left the Marines last year and is getting his MBA at the University of Southern California.

Lynette McGrath says her daughter is "more mature at the same age than my other daughters were. It makes you grow up fast to have to deal with these things."

Claire agrees that she learned a few things:

• No matter the problem, it's OK to ask for help.

• If you love someone — like a dad you're worried about — then tell him so, every day, before he leaves for work.

• Sometimes when you try to help someone else — like a lonely soldier overseas — you end up helping yourself.

That's what one girl took away from her season of fear. In the weeks ahead, the nation faces a similar reckoning.

Standing on the spot where two-thirds of Flight 93 hit the ground at over 500 mph, Somerset County coroner Wallace Miller recalls the scene on Sept. 11, 2001. Because the bodies were vaporized, "I realized early on you didn't need a coroner, you needed a funeral director," Miller said. By Jeff Swensen, for USA TODAY    9/11 ANNIVERSARY   keep scrolling down

After Sept. 11, 2001, their names and faces suddenly were familiar to millions, only to fade in public memory in the five years since.

The day's principal actors — Bush, Rumsfeld, Giuliani — have never left the stage. And we've never stopped waiting for bin Laden's next appearance.

But what of the supporting cast? The aide who whispered the catastrophic news in Bush's ear, the commissioners at Giuliani's side, the air traffic manager who grounded every plane in the sky.

Some have prospered. Former New York fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen wrote a book and joined Rudy Giuliani's security consulting firm, which does a brisk business thanks largely to the former mayor's 9/11 reputation.

Former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, on the other hand, was blocked from becoming Homeland Security secretary because of tax and immigration issues involving a nanny. Then he admitted illegally accepting $165,000 in apartment renovations from a company that had alleged Mob ties and was fined $221,000.

Some have embraced celebrity. Ben Sliney, the FAA manager who grounded the planes, even played himself in the recent movie United 93.

Some have shunned it like a curse. The three firemen who raised an American flag in the wreckage of the World Trade Center have refused countless personal appearance invitations and interview requests. Ron DiFrancesco, the last person to escape from the south tower of the Trade Center, gave up a fast-track financial career in New York and moved back to his native Canada.

Some have moved on. Andrew Card, the chief of staff who told Bush of the attack as the president sat with schoolchildren in Florida, left the White House this year to return to private life. Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent in Minneapolis who blew the whistle on the failure to thoroughly investigate warnings before the attacks, is running for Congress.

Some have gone back. Sliney left his national managerial post near Washington in 2003 to again supervise air traffic controllers in New York. He prefers the action and says he feels a new urgency: "Can you ever look at a plane in the sky the same way again?"

Some have stayed put. Thomas Franklin, who snapped the photograph of the three firemen, still works at The Record of Hackensack, N.J. "A lot of people involved with 9/11 really haven't moved on," Franklin says. "I would have thought we would have. But it still hovers over us."

One reason: The ultimate meaning of the day — and his photo — "is still up for grabs," he says. "The ending hasn't been written yet. Are we safer? Are we at peace?"

The man at Bush's side

At a pivotal moment in George W. Bush's presidency, no one was closer than Bob Beckwith.

Remember the scene? The president and an old fireman standing on a battered firetruck at Ground Zero three days after the attack. The president has his arm around the fireman and a bullhorn in his hand, saying, "I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us."

Beckwith's proximity yanked him out of a retirement devoted to fishing and grandchildren and turned him into a fundraiser for charity and advocate for Bush who attended the 2004 Republican National Convention. "It changed everything," he says.

On 9/11, he was 69, retired seven years. His family told him he was too old to report for duty. But he knew the father of a missing fireman, and three days after the attacks, he grabbed his old helmet and gear, drove into the city and talked his way into Ground Zero.

Then he heard the president was coming. For a look, he stood up on a fire engine that had been pulled from the wreckage. A man (Bush political adviser Karl Rove, Beckwith later learned) came over and asked him to jump up and down to see whether the firetruck was stable. Satisfied, he dusted off a spot next to Beckwith and told him a VIP was going to stand there; when he got up, Beckwith should get down. The VIP was Bush.

The fireman helped the president up and began to step down as instructed. But Bush said, "Where you goin'? ... Stay here."

Beckwith continues to support Bush and the president's pursuit of the war on terrorism: "I like the guy — he's a real man. ... I think he's doing a good job."

Coroner did what was needed

As coroner in Somerset County, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, Wally Miller became what he calls "the local face" of the tragedy: "The nation was gonna draw its conclusions about us based on me."

The self-described "hick coroner" was not a forensic pathologist or even a doctor, just a part-time elected official who also ran the funeral business he inherited from his father.

Because the bodies were vaporized in the crash, "I realized early on that you didn't need a coroner, you needed a funeral director. This was going to be a giant funeral service, so I put that hat on."

He welcomed the victims' families when they came to see the crash site in Shanksville and guided, advised and consoled them. He befriended many; this summer he attended a birthday party for one.

Miller planted grass and wildflowers at the crash site, which has been returned to local property owners pending creation of a memorial. In early August it was "waist-deep in clover — beautiful," he says.

When the Boeing 757 hit the ground at more than 500 mph, debris was thrown up into the trees around the site. It still drifts down slowly, week after week. Miller still finds pieces of wreckage — insulation, fabric, pieces of fuselage — and human remains. "We found some bony tissue last week," he says. "You're walking through a cemetery."

All remains, mostly small pieces of dried skin, are "casketed" with 350 pounds of other such material for eventual incorporation into a memorial.

Miller was re-elected easily last November and says that's the extent of his ambition: "I'm not writing a book. My job is to be the coroner." Although he has received many awards, he keeps only one reminder of his biggest case in his office: a 5-by-7-inch photo of a United Airlines 757.

The briefcase man

The week after 9/11, Ed Fine got a call from a friend: "I think that's you on the cover of Fortune."

The magazine displayed a striking image: a refugee from the Trade Center covered with ash, trudging resolutely on, briefcase in hand.

The photo, widely distributed by Agence France-Presse, struck a chord. Rick Kirkland, Fortune's managing editor, said the then-unidentified man seemed like "everybusinessman — battered but unbowed."

Fine says he was no kind of hero. "My picture got taken. It was a perfect picture, but all I was trying to do was get uptown."

On 9/11, the 58-year-old investment consultant from New Jersey had a meeting in the north tower. He walked down 78 stories after American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the tower 15 stories above. Outside, he was bowled over by a cloud of debris when the south tower collapsed.

He pulled himself up, covered his face with a damp towel someone handed him and starting walking.

Fine says the experience "made me realize how transitory life really is. You can be doing nothing but normal things, and your life can be wiped out in an instant."

He says that before 9/11 he was a workaholic. On vacations, he used to spend "half a day on the phone and the other half on the computer." Now, "if I make one business call a day, that's a lot." He says he and his wife have learned more about each other in the past five years than in the previous 37.

The battered black briefcase from 9/11 sits in his closet. He used it until a couple of years ago, when his wife insisted he get a new one, if only for appearances.

He agreed, he says, "but I felt a little disloyal."

Remembering the Pentagon

When planes began crashing, Debra Burlingame, who lives in the New York suburbs, didn't know she would become a 9/11 family member. Or that she'd be reassured by a president she had always considered a "cowboy."

"For the first part of that morning, I was just another person who was seeing my hometown under attack," says Burlingame, now 52. And "I didn't particularly like George Bush."

But late that day she learned her big brother, Capt. Charles "Chic" Burlingame, had been the pilot of the American Airlines jet that terrorists seized and crashed into the Pentagon. With her country under attack, "I was just an American, and there was the president, and you want him to succeed."

The 9/11 attack intensified the natural "gregariousness" that had served her as a lawyer and Court TV producer. She fought successfully to have her brother, a Navy reservist, buried at Arlington National Cemetery, although he did not meet the cemetery's standard criteria. She appeared at the 2004 Republican convention and campaigned for Bush. "With the fifth anniversary, now it's time for me to really figure out what to do with the rest of my life," she says. "Because it really came to a standstill."

Burlingame is on the board for the World Trade Center memorial. The memorial will list the names of all who died on Sept. 11 — including those killed at the Pentagon and aboard the four planes — and the six people killed in the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center. A memorial is under construction at the Pentagon for the 184 victims who died there.

She says the Pentagon attack is often overlooked because the death toll there is dwarfed by the number killed in New York. But more died at the Pentagon than in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

"That just goes to show you how the world of terrorism has changed," she says. "It's really, really sad ... 184 people, it's almost like a footnote."

'That girl' and the marshal

They always call her "that girl," Dominic Guadagnoli says. As in, "How's that girl?"

That girl he was photographed carrying to an ambulance after she staggered out of the Trade Center, bleeding and burned. It was a photo that went around the world.

That girl — Donna Spera, now 41 and living in New Jersey — hasn't set foot in New York City since 9/11. Spera, who was an administrative assistant at Aon Financial Services, doesn't work now.

Her arms are scarred, and her left hand, which was shattered, remains weak. She is a member of a small club: those injured in the attack who survived. It's a club of which few are aware, she says: "When you hear the word 'survivors,' it's not me. It's the widows."

She's become fast friends with Guadagnoli, 37, a U.S. marshal who ran to the scene that morning from the federal courthouse. They talk on the phone and send e-mails. He flies up from Florida, where he now lives, to visit. (She still won't fly.)

They understand each other in a way their spouses can't: Why they get edgy and snappish as September approaches. How it feels to know that you survived when others died, but not know why. How exhausting it is to encounter references to 9/11 every day.

The photo that unites them in the public memory hasn't gone away. It's on copshop.com. Guadagnoli's parents saw it on a T-shirt at the mall. When he volunteered to help as a counselor in an employee assistance program, it was there on the brochure for post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I think that picture changed my life more than 9/11 did," he says.

It's also in a frame in Spera's living room, along with her battered World Trade Center ID and a Mass card for a friend who died in the north tower.

Spera says she's now both more anxious and more relaxed than before 9/11. (Her boss coined the word "Speratude" for her excess of attitude.)

"I got mellow. I look at things differently. I live each day. That's the only good thing that came out of it," she says. Then, nodding toward Guadagnoli, she adds, "besides meeting him."