Kendall Stanley: 9/11 not an easily forgettable day

It’s easy for me to remember 9/11 — my Mom was celebrating her 75th birthday. Not easily forgettable.

But beyond the conspiracy folks who come out of the woodwork every year — it was a false flag operation, the government was behind it, etc. — CBS reran its “60 Minutes” story on members of the New York Fire Department who were on the scene, sending firefighters up into the towers to quell the blazes that would consume the buildings into mountains of twisted metal and ash.

For one fire commander, it was watching his brother go up into the building, knowing he would probably never make it back out.

Typical of Eastern big city fire departments, NYFD is a family affair with multiple generations of families joining the force. Everybody, it would seem, lost a relative in that historic day.

One telling part of that story is a group of firefighters hearing breaking glass and crashes — they finally determined it was the bodies of those jumping from the towers hitting the ground.

Which brings us to an Esquire piece on the Falling Man.

You may remember the image that was seared into your brain at the time — a man hurtling toward earth, the image where he seemingly is following the image of the two towers, perfectly vertical, seemingly perfectly at ease.

The photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, ran on an inside page in The New York Times the next day — never to be run in the Times since.

Esquire writer Tom Junod in 2021 wrote of the mystery of The Falling Man. There has never been a determinative identification of the man in the photograph.

Junod, in a great piece of writing, starts his story thusly:

“In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did — who jumped — appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of 32 feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.”

Drew, for his part, said he didn’t take the picture, the camera did. He said he didn’t know what he had photographed until he got back to his office, the camera had just captured the image (indeed there were others of the Falling Man where he wasn’t vertical and spearlike).

Any photojournalist can relate. Cameras are shields, a barrier between the photographer’s eye and the event unfolding before it. The camera, Junod suggests, creates history and it is up to us if we choose to view it or not.

For Drew, history is in his portfolio — photographs of a shot Bobby Kennedy and the chaos around that horrible moment when he is assassinated.

But as a journalist for 40 years, I can tell you I’ve used that shield, letting the camera record a history that tells a story in a way that words cannot.

Junod writes a compelling story that places you on the streets of New York City, watching helplessly as helpless people make that fateful leap.

The Falling Man remains unidentified but if you saw the photograph he remains with you.

We really don’t need a name to recall the horror.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Kendall Stanley: 9/11 not an easily forgettable day