I arrived in New York on September 11, 2001, hours before the Twin Towers fell.
This is a true story. The one who came to the Big Apple for a job opportunity and encountered four terrorist attacks that changed the world forever.
On September 11, 2001, I landed at 5:45 am in New York on flight AA 956, from Bolivia, not knowing that that day would change the lives of so many people and mine. I remember as if it were today that they had us fifteen eternal minutes on the airstrip because the JFK international airport opened at 6 am. After making migrations, we took a taxi to the New York Palace, right in front of the headquarters of DDB, one of the most important advertising agencies in the world. It was a summer day in Manhattan, with the sky deep blue. I arrived at the Hotel with some colleagues from the local DDB branch at that time, excited, because that same night we would receive a very important award. Between one thing and another, we checked in and each one went up to his room. It was 7:45 am. After disassembling the suitcase, I took a shower to sleep for a couple more hours, since the first meeting was only at 12 noon. As I closed my eyes, the phone woke me up.
On the other end of the line, cries could be heard: “But what the fuck is going on there?” Half asleep I improvised a “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But from my city, Tarija, they insisted: “Didn’t you see anything? I turned on the TV.” There I found the image of the twin towers, one of them on fire. “They say it’s a plane.” Already sitting on the bed I took a good look: “I don’t think… too smoky to be a plane.” Like most people around the world, we tried to understand what was happening, when suddenly the second plane burst live and direct — this time one of the line — and crashed squarely into the second tower. The reflex action made me hang up the phone. I literally jumped out of bed, put on the first thing I had, and went downstairs to find out what it was. The lobby was in chaos, although it was surprising how calmly the hotel security employees had everything under control.
A dozen men dressed in black guarded the exits with folders in hand that contained the photo and printed data of each of the hundreds of passengers in the hotel. Big Brother? A joke next to this. After checking my documentation, I made it out, crossed the street, and went up to the DDB Worldwide headquarters. The place was a sample of the prevailing chaos: people running, screaming, crying, the occasional sitting staring out the window at nothing. I especially remember Bernard Brochand (at that time international president of DDB, owner of Paris Saint Germain, years later mayor of Cannes) yelling at the global financier in his English with a marked Parisian accent “I’m going to fuck off here. be”. The guy was a bull. He always got what he wanted. In fact, hours later he left on a plane sent by Jacques Chirac. The flights did not leave, but Bernard did.
If there really is a Big Brother, the one who ran the central control must have said: “In this country no one commits suicide.” So, magically, all the TV networks went to a cut and eliminated any trace that, in parallel, the fans uploaded to the internet. The mayor was Rudolph Giuliani, the man who ruled with cancer, who from that day would become a hero by leading the rescue, along with the New York firefighters. From the rubble he appeared in television communications, divided screen, with George Bush (h), who was reborn from his ashes before an imminent war against a new force of evil. Rudolph repeated over and over again that “no one uses the water from the middle of the island to the north because we are needing all the power to put out this disaster in the south of the Big Apple.” And all, without exception, listened to him. Under my breath I thought that if the same thing were happening in Bolivia, everyone would run to fill the bathtubs in their houses just in case. That’s how geniuses we are.
As the hours passed, I decided to leave the DDB office to see what was happening in the streets, to feel a little the weather that was shown on television. Walking down Fifth Avenue and 40th Street, I saw one of the towers fall down there in the distance (not that far, actually). It was all very crazy, but I kept moving towards ground zero knowing that at some point they would not let me continue any more. After a while, if I remember correctly, at the height of Washington Square Park, I saw the second collapse. Then I learned about the plane that hit the Pentagon. Then, of the other plane that the same passengers shot down to avoid another tragedy. I do not know in what order this nightmare happened, what I was sure is that it was real “Could it be that I am so unlucky to have taken a plane to come to see the third world war live when in my country does not a damn thing happen? “I asked myself over and over again.
Logic would say that we were returning to paradise after such an experience. But you saw what our beloved country is like, right? And so, in a loop, like an eternal September 11 where the flames do not go out no matter how much firefighters come from all over the planet.
