September 11, 2001

AS THIS ISSUE WENT TO PRESS, EIGHT ALUMNI WERE CONFIRMED dead in the tragic events of September 11 (see box next page; for updates check the Dartmouth Web site at www.alum.dartmouth.org/alumni/memory.html ).

A number of alumni witnessed the horrible attacks firsthand, and others participated in rescue efforts. In the days following the terrorist strikes, alumni politicians and members of the national media helped shape public opinion and policy, while other alumni dealt with the ongoing investigation and national security concerns. Here are some of their stories:

Time photo journalist James Nachtwey '70 has traveled the world photographing its war-torn cities and ravaged countrysides. On September 11 the carnage came to him. A resident of downtown Manhattan, Nachtwey heard the crashes, grabbed his gear and raced from his apartment to the scene. He was standing next to the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) when it started to collapse. The tower listed to the west. Nachtwey was on its east side. As the massive avalanche of steel, concrete and glass headed toward him, he realized he had only seconds to save his life. He dashed inside a nearby hotel lobby and into an open elevator as the avalanche cascaded by. Enveloped in blackness, he crawled until he thought he saw dim, blinking lights through the haze. He had found his way to the street—and safety; the lights came from abandoned cars with their turn signals left on. Nachtwey spent the remainder of the day shooting rescue efforts at Ground Zero, with the results appearing in Time and on its Web site. "I think they document a crucial historical watershed," says the award-winning photographer. "And I think America is now part of the world in a way in which it never has been before." New York City police officer Brandon del Pozo '96 was one of several officers sent to the WTC site from Brooklyn, where he was on his regular patrol that morning. His team, which arrived as the second plane struck the south tower, helped evacuate and shut down the Stock Exchange on Wall Street. After the first tower collapsed del Pozo, a native New Yorker, called his mother, who thought he was safe in Brooklyn. "To her horror, I told her I was inside the Exchange. I told her I loved her and that I was alive, and I asked her to tell my fiancee the same thing. Then I hung up the phone and went outside to pull more people in," he says. "Once outside, you could only take about one or two breaths without choking." The memories will linger. "You could hear over citywide radio a woman officer screaming for help, and then the radio went dead," he says. "It was bloodchilling, things no cop could ever forget."

Del Pozo went home for a few hours, then returned to the site as a company commander with the first National Guard unit at Ground Zero. For the next week his unit kept the search area secure, and in that time del Pozo spent only six hours at home.

Several alums who worked in or near the towers escaped alive. Among them were Peter Phelan '93, who works for Commerzbank AG, Port Authority executive Cruz Russell 75, and Michael Rieger '86, a California-based portfolio manager who was in town on business. Steve Adnopoz '78 had been working on the 85th floor of the south tower only 10 weeks when the terrorists struck. As the first plane crashed, he was coming out of the subway. His law firm, Harris Beech, lost five employees, and getting back to work wasn't easy the next week. "That the place where I sat was pulverized is not a particularly comforting thought," he says. Damon Austin '01, a first-year analyst for Lehman Brothers in 3 World Financial Center, next door to the WTC, emerged from the subway just after the first crash. "I heard a huge sound behind me, and I turned around just in time to see a big plane go right over my head. My first thought was, Whoa, why is thatrescue plane so big and going so fast? I watched it go right overhead and smash into the second tower. At that point I knew that it was not an accident." Like Adnopoz, Austin made his way to safety before the towers collapsed.

Paul Gigot '77, new editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, was thankful he didn't have a place to call his own that morning. He had flown to New York on the 6 a.m. shuttle from Washington, D.C., dropped off his laptop at the Journal's offices, just blocks from the WTC, and departed to go apartment-hunting. Ten minutes later, the first plane struck. The Journal offices did not go unscathed, leaving Gigot not only without an apartment but no office as well.

Jamie Heller '89, a freelance writer and. author of this issues cover story, had dropped off her 5-month-old son at a daycare center around 8:30 a.m. and was back home in her apartment—near the WTC—when the first plane penetrated the tower. "The whole building shook, my desk shook, my body shook," she says. Heller raced back to grab her infant and joined the exodus of people fleeing north. "I knew my son was young enough not to know what was going on, but I didn't want him to know that I was scared. I kept trying to sing him songs, like Old Mac Donald, and then I would break down and cry between verses. It was terrifying. Heller made it to her in-laws' apartment in Greenwich Village, feeling "fortunate to have my family intact," but she was unable to return to her home for days without a National Guard escort. "Our apartment we can clean up," she says. "What's more disheartening is what this horror did to our neighborhood the stores, the park, the quality of life.

When United Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, Randy Kahn '91 and his wife, Kelly Green Kahn '90, heard the explosion and saw the smoke from their Crystal City, Virginia, home, located just minutes from the Pentagon.

Al Cotton '64 actually felt it. Cotton, a plastics industry executive, was in a hotel directly across the street from the Pentagon in a windowless meeting room. "We thought it was an earthquake," he says. After learning the truth, Cotton watched an amazing and efficient rescue effort unfold. "Everyone in uniform hit the street—police, firemen, sailors, soldiers. Wherever you looked you sawuniforms. I think that developed a sense of confidence among the people who were there. There was no panic and no pandemonium."

Reagan National Airport manager Chris Browne 'BO was outside the terminal talking with staff when he heard that a plane had hit the WTC. "I used to fly F-14S in the Navy, and my first remaik was, 'What's the weather in New York?' I figured it had to be a bad day for someone to fly into a skyscraper," he says. Then he learned of the second crash and went to the airport's command center only to learn of other hijacks in progress. With hijacked United Flight 93 still in the air, he ordered an immediate evacuation of the airport's terminal and had aircraft on the runways brought back to their gates. The airport's airspace was also closed to incoming planes. "Then it was a question of locking down the facility," he says. "There were cash drawers left open, rental cars with the keys in them. People had left the building quickly."

Back in New York, alumni joined search and rescue efforts at Ground Zero.

"I was probably one of the first five or six doctors on the scene, says Dr. Emil Chynn '87. "The buildings had just col- lapsed. I got there around 11 a.m. A lot of fire trucks and ambulances were on fire and exploding. It was really scary."

Chynn helped set up a triage center in a Burger King located a block from the WTC, using water hosed in from a nearby pizza shop. When the restaurant was later secured for evidence, he moved the operation to a Brooks Brothers store.

"We took body parts to the morgue. It was very depressing,' he says. We had to fill out the identification form with descriptions like, 'piece of a scalp with long blond hair, could be either male or female,' and that's all we'd have."

Chynn set up a Web site at www. wtcpics.com initially as a place where people could put up pictures of loved ones who were missing. With so few survivors pulled from the scene, Chynn says he hopes the Web site will become a memorial where people can put up pictures of their family members and friends and share their comments.

The night of the attacks, student Alexios Monopolis '03 boarded a train from the Upper Valley to New York. A trained search-and-rescue worker and member of the Upper Valley Wilderness Response Team, he found himself at Ground Zero the next day as one of the youngest rescuers. "It quickly dawned on me, however, that this was going to be more of a retrieval effort than a rescue effort," he says. For several days he recovered body parts from the site, which led to flashback nightmares a week later. "I'm glad I went, but it wasn't easy," he says. Only three words can sum up the experience: absolute surreal insanity."

Paramedic Ben Jones '44 was summoned from his fishing boat on Long Island Sound to join a Shelter Island ambulance team heading to Manhattan. He spent most of Tuesday night helping injured rescuers. After midnight, the team drove in silence back to Long Island. I couldn't stop thinking of those 200 ambulance crews waiting patiently for injured people who never came," he says.

Albany, New York, fireman Patrick Hines '93 spent 16 days searching the rubble at Ground Zero. New York City fire marshal Phil Gibbs '81 spent days supervising operations in temporary morgues in downtown Manhattan. His work included the grim task of identifying the remains of at least four fellow firefighters. Among the many firemen who perished was Richard Prunty, age 57, father of Lisa Prunty '97.

And as chair of the board of governors of the American Red Cross, DavidMcLaughlin '54, Tu'55, a former president of the College, was involved in organizing relief supplies and touring the WTC site.

Following the attacks, Reagan National Airport remain closed for more than two weeks, suffering dire economic consequences. During that time, airport manager Browne addressed the coming overhaul of aviation and airport security and higher fares. "I think air travel will be set back 30 years to the deregulation days," Browne told DAM.

Chicago City Aviation Commissioner Thomas Walker '70 also had his hands full with revamping airport rules. They'll force "a cultural change for people who are used to just walking onto aircraft with no questions asked," says Walker, who oversees O'Hare International Airport, among others. "But it gives us the comfort that we are doing what is necessary to ensure safety and security at our airports.

Meanwhile, FBI special agent JimMargolin '78, spokesman forthe New York bureau, has been working out of a temporary command center in the parking garage of a west Manhattan office, where federal agents and the New York City police department are investigating the attacks. "We really hit the ground running," Margolin says of the quest for information. "We're accessing intelligence from around the world. There's a lot of legwork involved. We're determining who might be associates of the hijackers, and whether there might be other things that are planned but have not been carried outyet. Our primary objective is prevention, not detection."

Margolin hasn't been back to his regular office, near the WTC, since the attacks, which he also witnessed firsthand. "Some days you can smell the smoldering from the Trade Center if the wind is blowing from that direction," he says.

As the shocked country settled into postattack life, alumni congressmen, journalists and pundits spoke out in newspapers and on the airwaves. "At a time like this, Congress needs to be careful not to assert itself too much in a military and intelligence global operation," warned Rep. Rob Portman '78 (R-Ohio). Rep. Michael Capuano '73 (D-Massachusetts) cautioned Congress not to get caught up in its newfound unity. "Terrorism is not an excuse to end democracy, " he said, "and democracy means checks and balances."

David Shribman '76, Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe and a Dartmouth trustee, echoed that sentiment. "Embedded in the effort to recover and rebuild from [the attacks] are a series of peculiarly incendiary subjects that will threaten the survival of this new political solidarity," he wrote, "because many of the most important elements of the fight against terrorism are themselves laced with contention." Robert Reich '68 spoke on National Public Radio about an erosion of civil liberties: "To gain back more of our security, some will say that we have to give up more of our privacy. But before we embark on this course, we must be sure it is necessary. The willing loss of our privacy would be another tragic consequence of the horror that occurred September xi, 2001."

On CBS News, veteran correspondent Tom Fenton '52 spoke cautiously about an attack on Afghanistan. "The odds on America succeeding where two previous imperial powers failed so miserably cannot be very good," he said. Conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza '83 helped spark a controversy while appearing on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect by joining the host in asserting that the terrorists were not "cowards," as President Bush had declared. Stephen Bosworth '61, who is dean of Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy as well as a Dartmouth trustee and former United States ambassador to Tunisia, the Philippines, and South Korea, pondered how to deal with the roots of terrorism. "We need to respond in order to deter, not just punish, " he wrote in The Boston Globe. "We also need to redouble our efforts to address the underlying political and social conditions that create the breeding ground for terrorism."

And in Washington, D.C., Michael Vatis, director of Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies, testified before the House Committee on Government Reform on September 26. "What is needed today is essentially a Manhattan Project for counter-terrorism technology," he told Congress. Vatis joined other electronic security experts in saying the country should step up efforts to defend against an increase in computer viruses and worms, "denial of service" attacks that knock Web sites offline, and other efforts to disable the Internet and other vital electronic systems. "It is demonstrably the case that terrorists are increasingly using this technology to thwart lawful government efforts to gain vital intelligence and thereby to prevent terrorist attacks," Vatis added.

In Hanover, many students had not yet arrived on campus by September 11, but students on First-Year Trips had no way of hearing the news. So student volunteers, teamed with staff members from outdoor programs, the ski team and the athletic department, headed into the woods to notify them.

President Jim Wright spoke eloquently of the disaster in his September 24 Convocation speech. "While you have come to a place where we try to make sense of things, there is no act of intellectual legerdemain by which we can transform the irrational, suddenly, into the rational," he told students. "But it is critical that we not surrender to either fear or hatred."

When classes got under way, some courses seemed more relevant than ever. Enrollments more than doubled in Arabic 1, Religion 16 (Modern Islam) and History 5 (The Islamic World).

Alumni continuing education programs remain on track for the fall, and coordinator Roberta Moore anticipates only temporary worries from participants. "We are a nation of explorers and travelers, " she says. "Once security measures are improved and people begin flying again, the wanderlust will take hold and we'll be seeking new adventures."

Ground Zero Searchand-rescue worker Alexios Monopolis '03took these photographs(and the image on thepreceding pages) in thedays and nights following the attacks on theWorld Trade Center.

Reporting by Jennifer Kay '01, JenniferAvellino '89, Roxanne Khamsi'02, LauraTepper'02 and DAM staff.