When the Twin Towers fell, Brendan Greeley ran. This is his story .
When the South Tower started to fall I was the last to turn, rooted on Cedar Street for maybe a second as people streamed past me. Then I ran, just fast enough, in the right direction. I stopped behind a bagel cart on Nassau Street and then a low glass wall on Chase Manhattan Plaza, and then the cloud hit me, black and heavy. I found an open door, I still don't know how, and stepped through it.
It was just a drawing of lots. A lot of people died. I watched them die. I know the soft thud of each floor collapsing in turn. People around me died. I assumed I would die. And then I didn't. There is a hierarchy of grief and I know my place in it. I lost no one. I never fought in the wars that followed. I never came home from those wars missing a limb or a friend. I just stumbled around lower Manhattan for two hours.
When I heard the North Tower go, I tried to fling myself through a glass door into a copy shop for safety. I bounced off, humiliated in the middle of my own terror. Someone told me to go to a hospital and the instructions were a relief. I moved oxygen tanks, pushed people in wheelchairs from triage up on to the wards. I helped someone into an ambulance that had arrived from an Orthodox Jewish community in Queens. Then there were no more people and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and into the rest of my life.
If you grew up white and American at the end of the 20th century, you grew up knowing that nothing bad would ever happen to you. An accident, perhaps — a tragedy, but not a catastrophe. And so all I did on the morning of September 11 was become one of those people that bad things happen to. It is a large group of people. It includes most of the people in the world.