A hero lays his life down so that we will NEVER FORGET

ELIZABETHTOWN - There is an important initiative at Bladen Community College, “A Walk to Remember,” created in honor of the brave first responders who risked their lives September 11, 2001.

From Sept. 9 to Sept. 23, we invite the community to visit our campus and take part in this reflective experience. The walking trail is 1 mile long, designed to be walked twice, symbolizing the 110 flights of stairs that first responders climbed during their rescue efforts. Along the trail, visitors can learn more about 9/11 through informative displays.

Maps for “A Walk to Remember” will be available on campus, and the trail is accessible to the public at all hours during these dates. We hope you can help us spread the word and encourage community participation in this meaningful tribute.

The article I wrote won national acclaim and was called “Fifteen years and the tears have not dried… An intimate look at the day America lost its innocence.

This is the Jimmy Lanza story retold so that Lanza’s message to “NEVER FORGET” will never die. It is a reprise of the thoughts and memories as a journalist in Minnesota.

“I remember sitting in my office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on a cool September morning, working on rewrites for a novel I was crafting. A phone call. A plane crash into one of the twin towers in New York.

I just figured it to be a freaky, “oh that’s interesting” story, when I heard the words that took me from the pages of my passion to the front page of America. “Another plane just hit the other tower.”

I was thrown face first into history with the rest of the country as we all began to rewrite the memoirs that would be forever remembered simply as “9/11.”

It was a day that would forever connect every American to the same page of remembrance. A moment in time that shoots every lucid thought back to a morning when, just a hint of autumn had come calling.

At the Dodge County Fair, here in Kasson, thousands of people came and revisited that page in our history as the Stephen Siller 9/11 Never Forget Exhibit arrived Tuesday in the midst of great pomp and fanfare.

Watching people lined up at the exhibit all week, I saw firsthand a people who would never forget and as they exited the exhibit, I realized that although it’s been 15 years, the tears have not yet dried. Perhaps they never will.

On Saturday, my profession afforded me an incredible opportunity to sit down and speak with one of the firefighters who was there on the day we all remember. He told his story of a time that he will never forget.

We all had an agenda for the day. Nobody remembers what it was. It was a day that took control of every schedule, every task and every thought. Certainly, it changed not only the day, but the destiny of Jimmy Lanza.

We must remember that to share again and again, the events of that infamous day, takes a special heart beating inside of a hero. To be willing to relive that day is a mantle that carries a weight that I cannot comprehend.

I wrote in my column this week, “I listened to his story and for someone who had only experienced the tragedy from the safety of the Midwest, 15 years ago, I finally understood the scope as I saw the reflection of that day in his stoic eyes.”

Lanza is not a tall man. He is not a muscle-bound caped crusader from Metropolis. He doesn’t have a booming voice. But he exemplifies and solidifies the very fact that heroes come in every shape and size.

Lanza worked as a New York City firefighter for 28 years and Sept. 11, 2001, he worked in ladder 43. Stationed in East Harlem.

On that morning, he was outside and off duty when he heard from a neighbor that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. As I ask him about that morning, he looks away from my eyes and squints slightly as he looks back into the distance.

“It was a beautiful, clear, sunny day, without a cloud in the sky,” he begins his descent into the disaster area. “And I knew that with visual flight rules and even without the instruments on, there’s no way a plane would hit that tower.

“Unless they had mechanical trouble. And the news kept showin’ it over and over; and to me, it looked like it was intentional.”

Lanza went on to explain the fact that the city has major air traffic from LaGuardia, Newark and Kennedy and most air traffic is not over the city. He stated very clearly that planes that make that kind of a drastic change in path are duly noted and flagged.

He fully believed that in the moments before impact and at the time of the crashes, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had already known what was happening. They all began to brace for the worst while hoping for the best.

“I went down to the firehouse and met up with 13 other firefighters,” Lanza said. “We got another fire truck as my own company had already left to go to the Trade Center. We got down there and they held us back until the second building came down.

“And it was like a nuclear winter with the smoke, the debris, asbestos… who knows what was in the air. Unfortunately, some of it was the smell of human remains.”

When finally released to go into the belly of this hell, Lanza’s crew was assigned to go into the stairways through the A tower and the B tower. What they encountered was something horrific. With Lanza’s words or my writing and recounting of those scenes, if you let your imagination read between our lines, I still feel hollow and inadequate to fully describe the carnage.

Lanza describes finding and aiding in the rescue of firefighters like Captain Jay Jonas from 6 truck and guys from 39 engine, like Jimmy McGlinn who had fallen down floors when the tower collapsed and trapped below floors.

“We also found Chief Amante, unfortunately he was passed away,” he said. “And after that it was like a recovery effort because everyone you found was dead or a body part.”

As Lanza began to describe delicately the handling of the body parts found, he mentioned that a fortunate part of finding something like that was found in the faces of the thousands of people who were standing outside for days with pictures of their loved ones. Waiting for news. Waiting for confirmation. Waiting for closure.

After days of waiting, checking hospitals and piles of human remains, it gave a sense of purpose in recovering anything that could lead to some peace of mind in those who waited. And waited. And cried. And waited.

“When we found a body part or a body, we would put it on a stretcher, cover it with an American flag, march it out with honor to a temporary morgue that the city had set up,” Lanza recounts with an inflection of great pain. “They had gathered hairbrushes, toothbrushes and DNA samples from family members and tried to quickly set up a DNA database. The rewarding part of that which may sound crazy to somebody else was that we knew we were giving closure to a family or a parent or a daughter.”

Lanza, who was a steamfitter after his military experience and college career, explained his ideas behind the actual collapse of the buildings. He explained that above the impact, most likely people had been incinerated due to the explosion. Below the crash where the jet fuel began to pour down the main elevator shafts, the fire was so intense that it caused the steel to expand.

“They put the horizontal beams to the vertical beams,” Lanza explained. “They bolted them together. When the heat from that jet fuel came down on those beams, the heat had to be 1200-1400 degrees. At that temperature steel expands.

“I believe that it expanded a few inches and sheared those bolts. Then you get what we call in the fire department a pancake collapse. One floor falls on the other floor.”

Lanza went on to describe the rigors of the job and the challenges that come with the calling. He described accident scenes or perhaps the baby who had died in a fire. As a true firefighter trained in his position, he reflected with a calmness and a reverent demeanor how those things impacted him but did not deter him from continuing to do a job that he was called to do.

“It’s not nice all the time, but you do the best you can,” he said.

He seemed to point toward the actual steps of the schedule and routine that at times kept him on track so that he would be able to maintain focus on “fruition of mission.” In other words, keeping busy thinking of the steps instead of the situation.

“But there’s times when you get a break,” he said. “And you look at how bad it is. And then I’m sayin’ to myself, who’s gonna want to build here again? The last thing I wanted to see was a 15-block cemetery or desolate place.”

In crisis, the mind seems to try to find a way to mentally rebuild it and to dream about restoration, but in the midst of what was happening on that Tuesday in September, Lanza was at an impasse. He had been working for 36 hours and then on again, off again shifts of search and rescue that were 12 hours in scope. Just to think of that is something I was not trained in public school in America to handle. 12-hour shifts to find remains and to try to put the pieces of “normal” back together.

“To me, if was a cemetery, then the bad guys would win,” he said. “All seven buildings are built again. I go to the freedom tower every now and then, eat a hot dog, have a soda and I just watch the people comin’ out of the subway.

“Runnin’ into the buildings to go to work. Coming out to go to a restaurant. So, the bad guys really hurt us, and I feel sorry for the families of those who lost loved ones, especially firefighter friends of mine, but the bad guys didn’t win. They didn’t change our way of life.”

The day seized us, but from it, we learned how to seize the day. I got the unusual opportunity to sit with a bona fide hero. A man small in stature but huge in purpose. Sitting there under that small tent at a county fair made me feel as if I were seated in the shadow of 9/11 itself. It brought a shiver to my spine. It brought a new perspective to the word “sacrifice.” It brought tears.

“ That is perhaps the most poignant, the most powerfully simple thing to say that will leave a need to speak no more. It brought tears. ”

A true hero who served and followed the call of his heart

They called him the overbearing Samaritan. It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since the eulogy in New York City. Looking back and remembering the things experienced at that time, Jimmy Lanza, friend, firefighter, hero and brother is still missed by so many.

There are some people who can alter YOUR course with THEIR experiences. They can renew your hope with their words. And they can break your heart with their passing.

All good things, they say, must come to an end. A very good thing came to an end in 2017 when people said goodbye to a man who never thought of himself too highly. A man who knew the difference between confidence and arrogance.

Confidence can save a life. Jimmy Lanza saved mine although I was not one of the survivors that he rescued on 9/11 in the ruble of the Twin Towers. Instead, I was battling to find my way out of the rubble of my own life. And he showed up.

A big deal came to a little town just off the prairie in Minnesota when the 9/11 exhibit came rolling in. The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers exhibit was a hot item at the county fair and the lines were always longer than the shadows of sunset. Something told me I had to go. Perhaps it was the thought of my publisher who would be questioning why I didn’t have a submission on the biggest story of the summer, or perhaps it was an inner voice that was directing my path.

Jimmy Lanza did an interview with me that I captured on DVD and little did I know that it would be among one of the most poignant recollections of that dark September day that anyone had heard. What he shared with me off camera is what changed my life. What he gave me on camera gave me information that I would share for a newspaper story. What he gave me off camera would give me the words I needed for his funeral.

He spoke about purpose at a time when I had just left the ministry and was struggling with my own.

He was shocked when he got to ground zero and found the annihilation that awaited him. His initial shift lasted over 36 hours and after their stints, firefighters would head to St. Paul’s Chapel to rest and recover. It was built in 1766 and remains the oldest surviving church building in Manhattan. After that day it has been called, “The Little Chapel That Stood.”

The church was in the destruction zone and intact after the attacks, which was a miracle as it was still standing among the bruised and broken skyscrapers, withstanding the blasts and becoming a fortress for those who were tired and weary from fighting on the very precipice of hell.

It is Ironic that the holy war that had come to America could not destroy our place of worship that was in the middle of the chaos. After a few hours of exhausted sleep, the first responders would return to scavenging for body parts and for the dead.

Lanza collapsed against a back wall of the chapel in an exhausted heap, tears welling up in his eyes which were sore and swollen from the blizzarding ash and debris. Outside it was still snowing burnt metal and electrical ash. Those smells mixed with burning jet fuel, and the unmistakable smell of human remains were in the lungs of everyone in the containment zone.

All of a sudden, the magnitude of the disaster hit him. “I felt numb,” he said. “My city was in shambles, I realized that there were more people dead than alive and most didn’t get out. And I could do little to help. I knew we weren’t going to find anyone else alive.”

That, perhaps was the worst hit of all since the overbearing Samaritan felt helpless. NYFD Captain Kirk Lester of Ladder Company 43 and a fellow firefighter with Lanza spoke at one of the four wakes needed to accommodate all the people. He said, “Jimmy wouldn’t just help people when they fell down, he would run up to them and help them if they ‘looked’ like they were going to fall down.”

“I was exhausted,” Lanza said. “I didn’t know how I was going to get up and start again – or how this city was going to get up and start again. I felt like every time we’d take one step forward, there was another explosion and we’d take 10 steps back. Something happened to me in that little church and I thought I was going crazy,” he continued.

His ears were still ringing from the underground gas explosions, sirens and the groaning of the metal as it would bend, waiting to take its turn to fall into the massive piles of rubble that were sinking into the massive underground caverns.

The entire city lay stunned and the world watched to see if it would be able to take one more breath.

The firefighters, Port Authority Police and volunteers continued hour-after-hour, going down and coming up out of the holes with body parts on stretchers, draped in American flags, amid a thousand people holding pictures of missing loved ones.

Drawn, weary faces covered with ashen remains of carnage and the dead who were now just wandering in the wind. Under their eyes, it looked like mud where the tears, the ash and the soot of a war-torn city had pooled.

And in the silence inside that mighty church, he heard a still small voice. He looked around to see if it was someone who needed help or one of his friends, but he was all alone.

Something deep inside was beckoning him to go on. Then, clear as a bell, the words came, “All your life you’ve always been about purpose. You’ve often asked what your purpose was, and now, here you are, standing right in front of it. For such a time as this and standing face to face with your purpose, go and finish strong.”

He did go back and he did step into his destiny. Lanza assisted in the rescue of 16 survivors out of the famous Miracle Stairwell B of the North Tower. He shared with me how restless his life had been up until the terror attack, but after 9/11 – there was a calm that came to his life. When a man finds his purpose in a crisis, he can find his true north.

Through his experience and his wisdom, Lanza taught me something about life in the crunch. When you find your purpose in crisis and step into it, something turns inside the heart and changes your perspective. And that can change your destiny.

Never have I seen the William Shakespeare quote ring more true than in the case of Jimmy Lanza. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

As I stood before his casket in 2017 in the midst of New York’s finest who came to say “goodbye” to one of their own, I realized that I was simply viewing the cape and fleshly garment of a bona fide crusader who had been recently reassigned to a higher ladder company well beyond my sightline or thought process.

I would challenge you to find your purpose in your crisis and make a difference in this world before your final tone.

The world seems a little emptier this year, but I’m sure heaven is a little more crowded.

There is much more that was recorded in the live interview with Lanza and you can view that video online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9ZETSuDEps entitled “Trip to Honor Jimmy.” It is worth a look and a moment of your day to view an honest to goodness 21st century hero who took the time, left his family, sacrificed his agenda to come and sit with all of those Americans who, on that day could only watch from a distance.”

Mark DeLap is a journalist, photographer and the editor and general manager of the Bladen Journal. To email him, send a message to: [email protected]