Bob Jenkins was in mid-sentence when a deafening explosion three floors above him in New York’s World Trade Center sent the building into a frightening sway.
The retired Marine now living in Carefree drew on his military training to keep calm during the painstaking journey down the jet fuel-soaked stairs of the North Tower one halting step at a time and outside not long before the building collapsed.
Twenty-five years after a day of staggering loss, Jenkins, now 71, wants to ensure the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — and the vivid, painful details of that day — are properly remembered.
“I don’t want it to become just like another day in a history book,” he said. “I think those of us that are left, fortunate to be still here, have a responsibility
to keep telling those stories to keep it alive.”
For him, it’s a blur of time and emotions about an experience he’s embraced perhaps more than ever.
“It’s truly surreal to think that 25 years have gone by.”
It began when Jenkins started a meeting pitching videoconferencing technology to staff for the financial services firm of Lehman Brothers. He was with a Texas-based company. Jenkins didn’t finish a sentence before “an insane explosion” jarred the entire building.
The resulting swaying of the building convinced Jenkins the building was about to topple over.
“I looked down, put my hands in my pockets. I could feel the change that was in my pocket from the cup of coffee that we bought in the lobby, and I just stood there and smiled. I said out loud, ‘So this is where I die.’”
The initial shaking eventually stopped and people fled to the stairwell. People speculated about a massive equipment failure three floors above them, unaware that the deadliest terrorist attack in American history had begun.
Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks in New York, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. That doesn’t account for the first responders and other survivors who have died from cancer believed to be connected to the toxic cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan after the attacks. It also doesn’t include those who took their own lives in the years since, unable to handle the loss of friends, loved ones or issues related to the tragic day.
The toll of the ensuing wars and the emotional weight of it all over a quarter-century bring an incalculable cost to an assault that reset U.S. and global priorities.
Jenkins retired earlier this year and wrote out his recollections of his experience for a forthcoming book. He makes public speeches about the ordeal. His website, survivor911.com, sketches out his piece of an unforgettable tragedy.
And Jenkins, who moved to Arizona 15 years ago, rolls around the Valley in a Mustang wrapped with imagery of the Manhattan skyline and the iconic photo of firefighters raising the American flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center. The car notes “We will never forget” and “9/11 survivor.”
Jenkins has had three bouts with cancer, which he connects to the attacks. He’s largely left behind the trauma of the attacks, though writing his memories of that day coinciding with a milestone memorial have brought back some of the old pain.
For him, there is the haunting memory of two men rushing up the packed stairs to help others while everyone else tried to flee.
Those men died.
There was a large man in a wheelchair in the stairwell unable to get down. Jenkins initially considered trying to carry him down or at least ask others to help him carry the man in the wheelchair.
“I thought, ‘Bob, you don’t need to worry about this. This is what the fire department is trained to do,’” Jenkins recalled.
That man died.
“I had really, really horrible survivor guilt that I didn’t save his life,” Jenkins said.
For those who could make their way down the stairs, it was still no easy task.
Jenkins feared the weight of the crowded stairs would cause that part of the building to collapse. Smoke and the stench of jet fuel threatened to suffocate everyone, he said.
At one point, Jenkins ducked out of the line and into an office space where the air was relatively clean and there was no crowd. For a moment, he considered waiting until the crowd thinned out.
He didn’t.
“There was a couple of moments that day that were probably pretty close calls. I got away with living because of just little micro-decisions that were made unconsciously that I think saved my life,” he said.
Over the years, he’s connected with others who shared their own stories of pure luck that allowed someone to survive: a spilled cup of coffee causing someone to miss the subway train that would have gotten them to the towers earlier; a man who had the flu and didn’t go to work for the financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald that day.
The firm occupied five of the top floors of the North Tower and 658 of its employees were trapped.
Over the years, Jenkins spends Sept. 11 quietly. There’s a brief call to a former co-worker who made it out with him.
“It’s usually just a really quick happy birthday, hope you’re doing well, glad you’re still with us, what do you got planned. And then I usually try to lay low.
“I don’t sit and dwell on it every single day,” Jenkins said of the attacks. “But what I do do every day is the takeaway that I got. Never panic. Panic is what gets people killed. And then don’t sweat the small stuff. … You’re really not having a bad day until you’ve got two choices, and that is to jump to death or burn to death. Anything shy of that, you’re going to be all right.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'So this is where I die.' AZ man recalls 9/11 attacks 25 years later
