The Last Phone Call [excerpts from "Facing The End"]

The Last Phone Call High in the air, from inside the planes and skyscrapers where their final moments slipped away, dozens of victims spoke their last words to faraway people closest to their hearts. Some updated their mothers on developments, like seasoned correspondents calling in reports. A few asked husbands for advice, making vague, impossible requests. But almost all the calls, in the end, turned into love letters.

"Hey, Jules. It's Brian. I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. It doesn't look good. I just want to tell you how much I love you." As United Flight 175 hurtled toward Manhattan, Brian Sweeney, 38, managed to tick off all the important points for his wife Julie in a message on their Cape Cod, Mass., answering machine. "I hope that I call you again. But if not, I want you to have fun. I want you to live your life. I know I'll see you someday." Eight minutes later, after Sweeney made the extemporaneous speech of his life, his plane crashed into the World Trade Center's south tower.

In the age of television, Americans were treated to graphic scenes of soldiers dying. In the age of mobile phones, we can now say goodbye to the casualties before they die. It is a haunting privilege, a glimpse into the mind-set of the doomed. Just like the images, the voices tell us more and less than we want to know.

Julie Sweeney has listened to her husband's message only once. She is trying to resist playing it over and over. "I want to keep listening to it, I want to hear his voice, but I don't know if that's a healthy thing to do." She is glad he called, because "hearing his calm voice, hearing his love for me, was helpful." But it also saddened her, she says, making her feel like a witness to her husband's murder.

The voices do not comfort us with the illusion that these victims died instantly, ignorant of their fate. Quite the contrary. They give us a script to run through in our minds. The victims moved past denial into acceptance at breakneck speed, which meant they understood clearly — more clearly than we — what was happening. Perhaps that's why the hijackers, as some reports have suggested, urged some passengers to call home — quite aware that the drama would inflame our despair.

But it can inspire us as well. In the face of overwhelming fear, most of these people grew calm. They reshuffled their priorities instantly. The terror did not leave them hysterical; it left them lonely, searching to connect with the people who knew them best. And it offered them a fleeting chance to ease the grief to come. Another passenger on Sweeney's plane, Peter Hanson, 32, flying with his wife and small daughter, called his parents just before impact. "I think we're going down, but don't worry. It's going to be quick." From United Flight 93, flight attendant CeeCee Lyles and passenger Lauren Grandcolas called their husbands before crashing outside Pittsburgh. "We have been hijacked," said Grandcolas. "They are being kind. I love you."

Of course, there were other calls that came prematurely, at the peak of panic. From the 92nd floor of the south tower, Steve Cafiero called his mother. He described seeing a plane jutting out of the neighboring tower and people falling to the ground. He sounded calm. But suddenly he started screaming. He dropped the phone. His mother Grace Kneski held the line for half an hour, hoping he'd come back. He never did. Now she assumes her son was screaming at the sight of a plane heading toward his window. Despite that horror, she insists she is glad they spoke. "I can hear his voice from now on, forever," she says. "It's embedded in my brain."

With reporting by Unmesh Kher, Desa Philadelphia, Harriet Barovick, Alice Park, Amanda Bower, Benjamin Nugent

September 16, 2001

First Battle

By Jim Quinn

Quinn in the Morning

WARROOM

As we sift through football fields of rubble with cement dust clogging
our eyes and throats it may hardly seem that there is victory
anywhere in this landscape of catastrophe, but there is. The first
battle of the war has been fought and it was a decisive victory for
America. It didn't happen on the ground, it just ended up there. It
happened sometime between 10:00 am and 10:37 am in the sky over This was not just a symbolic victory; it was a win for the practical utility of freedom versus the robotic behavior of programmed fanaticism. In other words, it was a test of who we are versus who they are, and we won!

While there is some evidence that our military may have been forced to make a terrible choice last Tuesday it's clear that with or without an "assist" from one of our flyers, whom we shall hold blameless. The other members of our military on board the plane had already made their decision. The contents of cell phone calls from the plane bear witness to this. "But military?” what in the world are you talking about Quinn? Allow me to explain. These people weren't in the military when they boarded the plane. They enlisted in flight. They did it without a recruiter. There was no paper work and no promise of a college education or a career skill to secure their future. They signed up knowing their future would be less than 15 minutes.

The significance of the outcome of this battle will be lost on these over funded, over educated, oil saturated former Nomads. It should make them drop to their knees and make them pray to Allah for forgiveness, but it won't. Here's why:

The Battle of Fight 93 was a short but decisive encounter where the fanatic met the free. Where a group of people who have been programmed from birth to believe in the sanctity of self destruction and mass murder in the name of a god who does not exist as they envision him, came face to face with something they never understood; free people who are used to thinking for themselves.

It took decades of preparation, training and pseudo religious indoctrination to prepare these men to sacrifice their lives for their twisted purpose. It took a bunch of free Americans about two minutes to prepare to sacrifice theirs. These men and women who began their day with a toothbrush and a plane ticket and nothing more on their plate than the expectation of a business meeting and dinner at Fisherman's Wharf; these people with husbands, wives and children to consider, unhesitatingly chose to give their lives for their fellow Americans in less time than it takes to boil an egg.

Advantage: Freedom!

As I write this, God is probably hearing from a vast number of people He hasn't heard from in a while. In times of difficulty we are moved to turn back to that which we have neglected. Freedom will be the tool of victory in all battles as it was in this one. It is of desperate importance that we understand from whence the tool of victory emanates. You'll find it in the writings of the Framers of our Constitution. Faith and Freedom will triumph over fanaticism.

In those few dreadful seconds over Somerset, the template for the coming battles emerged from the fires in which they were forged. Free Americans fought the first battle "on the fly" and "by the seats of their pants". They did it with the only tool they had the resourcefulness of people who can still think for themselves. They earned victory and the admiration of the Free World. The fanatics earned a smoking hole in the ground.

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