The 9/11 Story Everyone Should Know

It was bigger than the evacuation of Dunkirk and some 24 times faster

It’s the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. A senior in college a week and a few days shy of my 21st birthday, I’m watching as the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City collapse on live television. I’m standing there, stunned as clouds of smoke and dust turn Lower Manhattan into something like an apocalyptic war zone.

We were in John Barry Hall, home of the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Villanova University. We were wearing our midshipmen uniforms—that’s how I always remember that it was a Tuesday.

I looked around at my fellow seniors. We began to realize that in eight months, we’d not only be commissioned officers in the U.S. Navy or U.S. Marine Corps, we’d also likely be going to war.

And during the next two decades, most of us did go to war in some fashion—some aboard ships or aircraft, others in ground combat or other roles in Iraq or Afghanistan. Others served in other ways supporting these and various efforts that all trace back to that day in September 2001.

We heard stories of tremendous heroism relatively soon after that Tuesday, before the dust even settled. Most notably, many of these involved New York City firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. But it wasn’t until a number of years later that I learned what has become the one story I remind myself about every year on September 11.

This is that story.

Nowhere to Run

First, it’s important to understand a bit about the geography of Manhattan. This borough of New York City is indeed an island, bordered by rivers on three sides and a bay to the south.

When the towers fell, people understandably panicked and ran. Many of them fled south, but that only lasted for a number of city blocks before they hit a dead end. Thousands upon thousands of people reached the water’s edge, where they realized that they were trapped. To the north was ground zero; to the west, south, and east was water.

It’s also important to understand that no one really knew what was going on in those first minutes and hours after the attacks. We didn’t know if there were going to be more attacks, if the World Trade Center—along with the attack on the Pentagon and the thwarted attack that crashed in rural Pennsylvania—were just the beginning.

So you had thousands of people, many covered in dust and blood and all of them scared for their lives, trapped in Lower Manhattan.

The Boatlift

Given its geography and proximity to the water, New York City is also home to a robust collection of boats of all types—ferries, tugs, shipping vessels, and more. Upon seeing people crowding onto the edges of Lower Manhattan, a number of brave mariners started to help by loading their boats with desperate passengers, many of whom didn’t even care where the boat was headed.

As Vincent Ardolino, captain of the Amberjack V, stated in the short documentary BOATLIFT, An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience:

I'm the type of person who can't stand by and watch other people suffer. They wanted to get off the island, and there was no way for them to do so other than by water.

I had noticed, while watching television, the ferries coming up into the slips and taking people off. I thought we could do the same thing—I could take people on my boat and get them where they needed to go.

And that's what we did.

At some point, the U.S. Coast Guard realized that they needed to better organize the effort. They put a call out on the radio for any available boats that could assist in the evacuation to report to Governors Island, located about half a mile from the southernmost point of Manhattan.

Within minutes, dozens upon dozens, maybe even hundreds of boats dotted the horizon, all making their way at top speed to assist. They didn’t know if they were making themselves targets for another attack. They didn’t know exactly what was going on within and around the giant black and gray cloud that hung over the city.

But they responded—with haste.

During the course of the rest of the day, boat after boat made trips back and forth between Lower Manhattan and a variety of nearby destinations. Boat crews spray painted destinations on bedsheets and hung them outside so people could choose where to go. The boat captains loaded their vessels to capacity and beyond, over and over again.

When all was said and done, they had rescued nearly 500,000 people in less than nine hours. Up until that point in history, the largest waterborne evacuation had been the 9-day effort in World War II to rescue some 339,000 soldiers from Dunkirk on the northern coast of France.

Moral Beauty and the Duty to Respond

What gets me every time I watch BOATLIFT (which you should certainly take 12 minutes to do) is how it illumines humanity at its very best, strangers stepping up to help other strangers in need, pulling together the resources at hand to alleviate suffering.

It shows courage, self-organization, leadership, teamwork, and above all, a desire to help others. It makes me wonder what would I do.

It’s an example of what researcher Rhett Diessner calls “moral beauty,” defined as “an impressive act of charity or loyalty or kindness or compassion or forgiveness or sacrifice for others or sincere service to others.” These acts and our knowledge of them are important because they ignite our imagination, broadening our sense of what’s possible and expanding our notions of what we also might do in service of our fellow humans.

Just like we need to know and remember the history of 9/11 and its aftermath, we need to know these types of stories and pass them on to each other—and to our children. While it’s true that we all have the capacity for wrongdoing and evil, it’s also true that—to paraphrase the psychologist Philip Zimbardo—we’re all heroes in waiting.

There almost certainly come moments in all of our lives when something happens and we have the opportunity to respond, to do what we can to help another person. That may come in the form of rendering first aid, pulling someone to safety, calling for additional help, or just being present with a fellow human who is suffering.

May the best stories of 9/11 awaken our creative imagination, igniting our vigilance for those moments and motivating us to act when needed. We likely won’t be involved in the greatest waterborne evacuation in history, but if we’re mindful, our time will come to do something.

May our response not be found wanting.

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References and for further reading

Diessner, Rhett, Rebecca D. Solom, Nellie K. Frost, Lucas Parsons, and John Davidson. "Engagement with beauty: Appreciating natural, artistic, and moral beauty." The Journal of Psychology 142, no. 3 (2008): 303-332. Link

Pohling, Rico, and Rhett Diessner. "Moral elevation and moral beauty: A review of the empirical literature." Review of General Psychology 20, no. 4 (2016): 412-425. Link