COLUMN: You can never make peace with a day like 9/11

You never forget where your boots were when Neil Armstrong stuck his foot on the moon and took a “giant leap for mankind.’’

Or who you were with and what you were eating for breakfast when a friend called to tell you Elvis was dead. 

Time stands still in those moments.

So, of course, Brian Kunzelmann remembers where he was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. 

He was on the 61st floor of the World Trade Center, four times higher than any building back home in Macon. 

Kunzelmann can still recall the details with precision, as if they were happening in real time. Whenever he hits the “rewind” button and pushes “play,’’ it is like trying to wake up from a bad dream.

The smoke. The glass. The dust. The rubble. The blood. The fear.

Sept. 11, 2001. It’s hard to believe, but next year will mark the 25th anniversary of a day that changed America.

You can never make peace with a day like that, the deadliest terror attack in history. It either swallows you like quicksand or smothers you like a weighted blanket.

Kunzelmann was attending a training seminar in the South Tower with 287 financial advisers for Morgan Stanley. He caught a taxi from his hotel that morning. He spent the first hour in a meeting, then took a short coffee break. 

Looking out the window across Manhattan, shielded from a view of the North Tower, he saw paper floating in the sky. It was too high for a ticker-tape parade. He assumed a plane had been dropping flyers to promote an event or business.

Yes, there was an airplane.

When he returned to his seat, members in his group were told to evacuate the building. Nothing was said about a plane hitting the North Tower. 

A man two seats down from him turned and asked if he smelled jet fuel.

“I couldn’t smell it at first, but within a few moments I did,” Kunzelmann said. “I didn’t know it was jet fuel. I just knew it was some kind of petroleum product like gasoline.”

They were instructed to use the stairwell. It was a long way down. A man in front of him was carrying a walkie-talkie. He told them the North Tower had been hit, but the South Tower was secure. Kunzelman and others followed him to an elevator — one of 99 in the building — and went back to the 61st floor. They then took a local elevator down to the 41st floor.

“I was milling around with a bunch of other people,” he said.  “We didn’t know what was going on and whether we should continue our descent.”

Within minutes, at 9:03 a.m., the second hijacked plane hit 40 floors above them. The 110-story building rocked.

“It was shaking, like there was a tremor,’’ Kunzelmann recalled. “I guess you could describe it as like being in an earthquake. I’ve experienced earthquakes but never a big one like that. Stuff was flying out of the walls. Everybody knew we had to get out of there.”

He prayed God would lead him to safety.

When he reached the ground, glass and debris were everywhere. They were routed to the east side of the building. He glanced up and saw the smoke and flames. People were leaping to their deaths in desperation. He tried to call his family, but there was no cell service.

It took him two hours to walk back to his hotel near Madison Square Garden. He spent the rest of the day shaking as he watched the horror unfold on TV.

The South Tower was the first to collapse at 9:59 a.m. The North Tower fell 29 minutes later. Both buildings were destroyed. 

The death toll in New York that day was 2,753.

Brian Kunzelmann is a survivor. He is 65 now.

“I’ve been through a lot in my life from a very early age,’’ he said. “I’ve fallen off a two-and-a-half story building. I’ve been run over by a boat.

“Thank God, I’ve survived, and He has brought me through. To me, it’s just one more thing. Not everybody has had the experiences that I have or has necessarily had the same faith and approach to life.’’

He left Macon in 2019 and moved to the mountains of western North Carolina. He is a survivor there, too. This month marks the one-year anniversary of the flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. 

Kunzelmann does not dwell on Sept. 11. He rarely looks at photographs or reads books about it. He doesn’t give oxygen to all the conspiracy theories.

If someone asks him to share his story, he will. Many have told him they have never met anyone who had been at the World Trade Center that day. He understands there is a generation of young people who either weren’t born in 2001 or are too young to remember it.

Never forget. That has become the mantra of Sept. 11.

An airline attendant once told him she had been a student in China during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

“She said she was there when the tanks rolled through,’’ Kunzelmann said. “I said, ‘Thank God you got out,’ and she said that’s how she got to America … because of God.’’ 

He told her he had also been on the front lines of history — a touchstone moment that had defined him and everyone around him.

Some fires can never be put out.

Ed Grisamore is the author of nine books and was the recipient of the 2010 Will Rogers Humanitarian Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.