Red meat for red states

Sorry about the lack of updates. In an effort to soothe the sensitivities of my easily slighted readers, I have planned for this weekend a special series of by-request posts. But for tonight, I wanted to pass along a story from work today.

I haven't written much here lately in part because I've been writing so much at work. I worked 43 hours in the last four days, and even before my glorious four-day weekend, I was writing quite a bit at the paper — about a 50-inch-per-day clip (where one inch = I'm not really sure, 15 words maybe) over the past week. Needless to say, during the holiday, when Adam Dorris was in Austin, I didn't write a damn thing in anticipation that he would continue his long legacy of finding himself in revolting, yet hysterical, situations. Like this one time with a girl named ... ah, ha ha, at least a few of you just went, "Oh, God, no!" Everyone else, just use your imaginations. What happened is probably worse.

Anyways, what I was getting to was that once or twice this week I brought those long hours on myself. Yesterday, for instance, I halfway talked the editor into letting me shoot the two stories I was assigned to cover in the morning with a Nikon D1, one of our back-up digital SLRs, because both of our primary photogs were going to have to work long into the night shooting football games.

The first event was a short 9/11 memorial at the high school before school started. No problem, except for the cock-crow start. I was able to familiarize myself with the camera, and get enough photos and just enough quotes to put together a pretty crappy story. Wham, bam, done. I was just happy to be using a real camera and to look like an authentic photojournalist.

It was the second assignment that got me: a survivor from the World Trade Center speaking at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. I figured he'd have a "typical" survivor's story. Woo, boy — no.

I'm posting the story I wrote below, which, as you will see, gave me fits. I wrote it incredibly long because I couldn't figure out what to cut. And I wrote it in such a way that I'm not entirely sure it maintains the appropriate level of journalistic skepticism, detachment, distance, what have you. Basically, I wrote it in a way that I thought would please my audience. Which is my job, I guess.

But either way, with two assignments to photograph and write, I knew I was in for long hours — yet I chose to tell the entire story. What was I supposed to do, not tell it? Read on for yourself and see.

By MATT WRIGHT

The images most of us saw on television during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were horrible enough, but they are nothing compared to what Stanley Praimnaith experienced.

From his office on the 81st floor of World Trade Center Tower II he caught a glimpse of American Airlines Flight 11 seconds before it ripped through his building — the wing of the plane passing just feet above his head — and exploded.

Amazingly, Praimnaith survived. He was one of only four people who were on the 81st floor or above when the second plane struck to make it out of Tower II alive.

For Praimnaith, who is a deacon at Bethel Assembly of God in Elmont, Long Island, the incredible events of that tragic day strengthened his already rock-solid faith. And it was this message that he brought to close to 1,200 people in the packed University of Mary-Hardin Baylor chapel Friday.

Stanley's Story

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, started like any other day for Praimnaith. He showered, he dressed, he prayed and he headed to his job as an assistant vice president at Fuji Bank Limited.

Stepping out of the elevator into his office, he greeted a coworker, Delise, who had arrived before him and went to check his voicemail. While he was on the phone, he looked out the window and saw "fireballs coming down in the sky" from World Trade Center Tower I. He immediately called his boss, who worked in the other tower. When no one responded, he told Delise, "Go, go, go — let's get out."

Neither had any idea what had just happened, but Praimnaith said that as he walked to the elevator, he thought of the 1997 attacks, when terrorists set off bombs in lower levels of the World Trade Center.

"Nobody told me the building was hit. I didn't have a clue," Praimnaith said.

He and Delise descended to the 78th floor, where they met up with coworkers, including the president, CEO and human resources director of the company. The group made its way a little further down to the concourse level, but there a security guard stopped them and asked where they were going.

Praimnaith explained the fireballs he had seen, but the security guard assured them everything was fine.

"That was just an accident," Praimnaith recalled the guard saying. "Two World Trade is secured. Go back to your office."

Praimnaith's higher-ups walked back into the elevator, but he could tell that Delise was still worried. He gave her the day off, even though, after some deliberation, he and his other coworkers decided to return to their offices. That decision would prove fatal to everyone in the group except for Praimnaith.

Almost as soon as he was back in his office, a friend called from Chicago to see if Praimnaith was watching the news. She told him that he had to get out of the building.

"Everything's fine," Praimnaith recalled telling her, just before he looked up to see the huge gray form of the American Airlines plane heading directly toward the building — less than 100 yards away.

"I only had time to dive under my desk," he said. "I prayed, 'Lord, you take control. I can't help myself here.'"

Praimnaith curled under his desk as the plane exploded through the window. The wing tore through the ceiling of his office, nearly burying him under debris — but he was, miraculously, not seriously injured.

Temporarily deafened by the impact, Praimnaith prayed for strength as he clawed his way out from under the pile. He stood up to find his office reduced to rubble. Walls had collapsed, office equipment lay in mangled heaps, and the sprinkler system was drenching everything, while live electrical wire dangled from the ceiling and sent sparks across the room.

"I knew the floor was going to collapse," he said, and he knew he had to get out.

Praimnaith began climbing over the piles of rubble. During the frantic search, he continued to pray: "Lord, I have to go home to my loved ones, I have to make it. You have to help me."

Suddenly, Praimnaith said, he saw a light from a flashlight. He didn't believe it at first.

"My first gut reaction was, 'This is my guardian angel — my Lord sent somebody to save me!" he said. "I began screaming, 'I see the light! I see the light!'"

The voice behind the wall called back to him, but as Praimnaith tried to climb through the rubble toward the light, he found every exit blocked. A collapsed sheet rock wall stood between him and the staircase.

Praimnaith recalled that as he began talking to the man on the other side, he found out his name was Brian Clark.

"'Do you go to church?'" he said he asked Clark.

"'Never miss a Sunday,'" came the response.

By this time, the air in the building was becoming unbreathable. Praimnaith realized he would have to climb over the wall to escape, but when he reached on top of the wall, a nail went through his palm. He pulled the nail out, but climbing would be almost impossible.

"I asked," he said, "'Lord, why did you bring all the way here to die?' Ninety-five percent of my body was black and blue, but (I prayed), and with all of my being, I punched above my head."

Praimnaith's fist busted through the sheet rock on the first try. It was not long before Clark was pulling him through the punched-out whole in the wall.

The two men fell on top of each other on the floor. Praimnaith gave Clark a kiss, he said, and told him, "You're my guardian angel."

"You're a nut," he replied with a smile.

The two began a dangerous journey down 81 flights of stairs. As they hobbled past floor after floor, they encountered only two other people: a badly injured man and the security guard who was watching over him. The security guard refused to let Praimnaith carry the injured man downstairs, saying it would be better to send someone up.

Praimnaith and Clark continued down to the concourse level, which was surrounded by fire. The only people they encountered were firefighters.

"They were saying, 'Run! Run! Run!' They were telling us to run out, but they were not concerned about themselves," Praimnaith said.

There was no option for the two men but to wet themselves down under the sprinklers and brave the flames.

They made it out, bruised and bloodied, escaping to Trinity Church just two blocks away. As soon as they got to the gate, Tower II collapsed.

Praimnaith and Clark continued out of the danger zone and were finally out of harm's way. Before they were separated, Praimnaith gave Clark a business card, telling him, "If I don't see you, I'll see you in heaven."

They were out of the building, but the journey was far from over.

Ahead of Praimnaith lay even more challenges: the struggle just to get home that day; a wife who assumed her husband was dead; a daughter who didn't recognize her bloodied, dirty and tattered father when he walked through the door; and emotional scars that persisted long after his injuries had healed.

But Praimnaith had survived, and now he lived to tell about it.

The Speaker

"In my heart, I have to spread the message of deliverance," Praimnaith said shortly before speaking at Mary Hardin-Baylor. "Because God saw it fit to pick me, and I don't know how, and I don't know why."

His speaking engagements took him to 48 states last year alone.

"As long as I have the strength in my body, I will take my message across America," he said.

He brought his message to the university at the request of Dr. George Loutherback, assistant vice president and dean of spiritual life and student organizations at the school. Loutherback said he called an organization in Tennessee looking for a speaker such as Praimnaith on a whim.

"It just came to me," he said. "I had no idea there were any speakers like him. I asked if there were any (survivors from Sept. 11) who had a connection to the Lord. He just fit exactly what I thought our students would respond to."

After the event, at least a few students agreed with the dean.

"I loved it, that was amazing," said Kristyn Mechan.

"It was obvious the impact God had," another student, Kristin Hampton, agreed.

"I remember when the plane tilted," Ms. Mechan said, "I fully believe God had a hand in that."

She was referring to a tiny lurch American Airlines Flight 11 made as it hit Tower II — a slight upward tilt of the wing at the last second that so many of us saw on the newscasts but did not think much about.

But it is that turn, those few feet, which Praimnaith credits with sparing his life.

Looking over it again here, I see some areas that aren't crystal clear, but considering I wrote the entire thing as a first draft, I'm pretty satisfied with it. Admittedly, I normally would have shied away from some of the prosletyzing in a few of the quotes, but that's what was so difficult about the assignment: that was such a huge part of Stanley's speech.

Well, for better or worse, there it is. A good story for today, if nothing else. Below are a couple more photos from the event. The last one, a force perspective involving the sign-language interpreter, may be one of the funniest pictures I've ever taken.

Enjoy.










This one is so awesome. Makes me smile every time I see it.



Ha ha, she's huge!

UPDATE: For another unique take on the day and the towers, check out this extremely well written piece in the Times: "Sounds of a Silent Place."

UPDATE II: Here's the Killen paper's article on the UMHB speaker. It includes several details that I wish I'd had in my piece and, I think, paints a better picture of the event itself. Unfortunately, I wasn't sure how to balance telling that story and the story of the man himself. My notes were not very good, but then again, this is why a writer usually doesn't also do the photographs for a spot news piece. Anyways, any suggestions?

UPDATE III: So just where does the U.S. stand in our fight against al-Qaeda three years after its inception? Juan Cole says bluntly, "The US is not winning the war on terror":

Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri's recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.

The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.

Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden's wisdom and foresightedness.

...

It remains to be seen whether the US will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis want an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden dreams.

His post provides an excellent backgrounder for this conflict as a whole, and I highly recommend you read the whole thing.

Hat tip, Kevin Drum.