Thirty years ago today, terrorists dropped a bomb weighing more than half a ton in a rented van parked under the World Trade Center, a workplace for tens of thousands. The smoldering fuse took about 12 minutes to close the gap between the mundane and the horrific.
The lunchtime blast left a crater several stories deep, billowing acrid smoke in the center’s north tower and killing six people. More than 1,000 others were injured that day, including a dark-haired trader just meters from the underground blast.
Eight years later, that same man, Tim Lang, was fleeing Lower Manhattan when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center again, this time with jets. He saw the first of the two towers collapse and fall in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, including those close to him.
Mr. Lang is now 69, has white hair and pictures of grandchildren on his smartphone. He describes himself as an unremarkable man. But he is also a cross between two remarkable events: the attacks of September 11, 2001, which rocked world politics, and the bombing of February 26, 1993, less indelibly burned in the collective memory, but equally ominous. foreplay.
“Almost everyone forgets,” he said.
Not Mr. Lang. He continues to process what happened – while fighting against feelings of hatred that could consume him as easily as the burning hole left by the bomb. “There’s a saying,” he said. “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.”
Yet that February Friday and September Tuesday have become a part of him. He looks forward to anniversaries.
“In the days leading up to it, I don’t sleep,” said Mr. Lang. “And that has already begun. February is here. So I have problems.”
•
In the winter of 1993, Mr. Long success on Wall Street and failed in almost everything else. He was the nearly divorced father of two boys and two girls, estranged from devout Roman Catholic parents who believed in the sanctity of marriage. Now Tim, the fourth of twelve children they’d raised in working-class Brooklyn, lived alone and felt alone.
He hadn’t wanted to go into town that day, but his partner insisted he was needed for a 12:30 meeting. A reluctant Mr. Lang left his New Jersey apartment and drove his Toyota 4Runner through the cold, late-morning gray.
As he descended a ramp into the World Trade Center underground garage, a buzzing Ford Taurus cut out in front of him. After a short wait, the two vehicles entered the garage, the Ford turned right and the Toyota turned left.
If Mr. Lang saw the Ryder van on the same floor, he paid no attention. He parked his SUV next to a concrete wall, got out and opened a backseat door to retrieve his coat and some documents. Then came a bang like lightning.
He felt his whole body squeeze as he was lifted and thrown. His head hit something and he was out.
Mr. Lang awoke in darkness, thick smoke burning in his throat and dozens of car alarms bleating in his ear. He checked his legs and arms and felt a sticky wetness on the back of his head. His inability to see made him think for a moment that he was now the second blind bagpiper in his pipe band.
Thoughts like these raced through his head. Had the car exploded next to him? Was this mafia related? What about that page from a calendar of biblical sayings he had put in his wallet that morning? Genesis: Do not be afraid.
Coughing and too dizzy to stand, Mr. Lang crawled through the sharp rubble towards a light in the distance – he could see! – coming from what turned out to be his Toyota. He climbed in to drive away, only to realize it was crumpled.
Low to the ground and with his sweater pulled over his nose, he tried to find an exit. Familiar with the layout of the garage, he made his way to the ruined manager’s office to find a phone, fell on top of a corpse, then crawled to the edge of the smoldering chasm created by the explosion.
“So if things were bad where I was before, this pit spews things from the bottom of hell,” Mr. Lang recently recalled on “Operation Trade Bomb”, a podcast about the bombing.
He crawled away, lay down by a car, prayed for his children and for the courage to die. A calmness began to come over him. Then a bang sounded in the distance.
“And I cried out,” he said.
Someone who heard his screams alerted two members of the New York City Police Department’s Emergency Services Unit who arrived early: Detective Edward Joergens and Officer Cory Cuneo. Carrying inflatables and using a fire hose coiled like a chain near a door, they made their way through the consuming darkness.
“We had huge flashlights with us, and yet you couldn’t see six inches in front of you,” Mr. Cuneo recalled.
Their fire hose lifeline ran out, but sporadic calls for help beckon above the cacophony of the car alarm. They pushed through.
Minutes later, a rescue boot illuminated by a flashlight appeared in front of Mr. Lang, and he grabbed hold of it. Finally: connection.
The hope that he would survive competed with the fear that he wouldn’t be able to breathe – and whatever he was used to be breathing was poisonous. He grabbed Mr. Cuneo’s hand.
“I didn’t want to let go of his hand,” Mr. Lang recalled. “I was shaking and crying and would never let go of his hand.”
With two supporting one, the men stumbled and made their way through the darkness. Finally, they reached a stairwell, daylight, and Liberty Street, where the soot-covered man was gently lowered onto the sidewalk in shock.
After several hours in the hospital, Mr. Lang returned to his isolation along the Jersey Shore. “It was the darkest time of my life,” he said. “Now I can look back and say, you know, the Lord can give you a little push, or he can blow you up to make it up to you.”
Mr. Lang would sit by the water’s edge, grateful to be alive – happy just to have the coffee in his hand – but also grieving for the loss of other lives, for the state of affairs, for his own condition. He thought of that line from Genesis and of that driver of the Taurus who cut him off, turned right, and was killed. Sometimes he cried.
“Whatever my priorities were, they changed when I came out,” he said. “Like so many balls that get thrown in the air and land in a different order.”
•
It took time to understand the new order. He found a therapist. He devoted himself more deeply to his faith. He reconciled with his parents and siblings. He remarried and became the father of two more girls.
He also read a lot about radical Islam. “Who are these people?” Mr. Lang said he wanted to know. “And why did they try to kill me?”
He learned that the mastermind behind the bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was disappointed with the death toll and had hoped that the North Tower would fall into the South Tower.
“I always knew they’d come back,” Mr. Lang said.
Mr. Yousef, who fled the United States hours after the bombing, was said to be working with his maternal uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who had sent money via wire transfer to one of Mr. Yousef’s co-conspirators. Terror plots continued.
Mr. Yousef was captured in 1995 and eventually convicted of the trade center bombing and a subsequent plot to shoot down several US aircraft. He is serving life without parole in a federal “supermax” prison in Colorado.
But his uncle continued to evade capture. And on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mr. Lang and his brother Richard were walking into their lower Manhattan building when someone said a plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. They hurried to Rector Street and saw the point of impact and ensuing fire – just below where their sister Rosanne worked as a stock trader.
The brothers ran to their high office and tried to call her. No answer. Then they heard a huge rattling sound on the ground and looked out to see the second jet fly by, into the South Tower.
Fearing more attacks, the Lang brothers reached Pier 11 on the east side of Wall Street and boarded one of the first ferries to evacuate people to New Jersey. As the ship drove away, they saw the south tower fall.
“We must pray,” Mr. Lang recalls saying.
Little did the men know that their cousin Brendan, 30, a project manager for a construction company, was among those killed in the collapse of the South Tower. And when their ferry approached the dock in Highlands some 40 minutes later, the captain announced that the north tower had also fallen.
Four of the Lang brothers – Tim, Richard, Donald and Marty, a newly retired firefighter from New York – left for lower Manhattan the next day, hoping to find their loved ones alive. But they knew.
Rosanne Lang, 42, was the divorced mother of a teenage son. A glimpse of her effect on others came when Mr. Lang and a brother went to pick up her Mercedes from her usual Jersey City parking lot. He pointed to the car and the attendant burst into tears.
Federal authorities have identified Mr. Yousef’s uncle, Mr. Mohammed, as the main architect of the September 11 attacks. He was captured in 2003 and has been held in a military prison in Guantánamo Bay since 2006, where efforts to prosecute him have been delayed by numerous complications, including his torture at the hands of the CIA
In 2019, Mr. Long part of a group invited by the federal government to observe the Guantánamo Bay trials. When he saw Mr. Mohammed up close, in custody, he felt no hatred, he says – only a deep sadness for lives lost, lives wasted and belief systems that allow the killing of innocent people in retaliation.
“There is a complexity in other people’s lives that is beyond my understanding,” he said.
Today, Mr. Lang runs a stock trading company, Global Liquidity Partners, from an office near his home in Monmouth Beach. He plays golf, attends a men’s prayer group, plays the bagpipes, marches in parades, and enjoys the company of his seven grandchildren, all boys.
The years come and go, just like birthdays.
A few days ago, on Ash Wednesday, Mr. Lang went to a Catholic church and received the gray spot on his forehead to remind him of his mortality, among other things. Two other days on his calendar do the same.