September 11, 2026 • 30 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time. Lock and load. The Michael Berry Show
is on the air. Here's Johnny. I am the danger.
I am the one who knocks. We'll do it live.
And we'll do it live.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Last year, I spent more money on spilled liquor in
bars from one side of this world to the other
than you made. You're talking to the Rolex wearing diamond ring,
wearing kiss stealing, wheeling dealing, limousine riding, jet.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Flying, son of a gun.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
And I'm having a hard time holding.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
These alligators down. So leave this one alone. She could
tell right away that I was bad to the bone.
Bad to the bone. Bad to the bone.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Bad. The Senate Leadership Fund and their associated affiliated.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
PACS, Political Action Committees. They alone spent over $ 100 million
against Ken Paxton to help John Cornyn. It didn't help.
(01:30):
He lost. Paxton won. Cornyn has called Paxton a bad candidate,
which is interesting. You're criticizing the guy that just beat you.
he's lazy he's not a good campaigner he's okay and
(01:51):
you are standing there with one wooden leg out in
front of bucky's that's all so thanksgiving and i'm really
happy to be here with y'all i want y'all to
be safe on the roads and also be nice you
know be nice to people and everything and And spay
and neuter your dogs and things. And as you know,
(02:12):
I'm running for the Senate again. And Buc-ee's just stopped
in here, as I always do, because I'm really pretty
much always in Texas and always stopping in on the Buc-ee's.
You know, they have a nice car wash, too. I
really like this place. Vote for me. Doofus Head and
his Dunder Muffins, they had said they had no money
(02:32):
to give to Paxton to help him win. But now
they've coughed up $ 13. 8 million. There's a group called– it's
run by Tim Scott, which should tell you everything, who
oddly has no upper lip. I've never understood how he
has survived that long with just no upper lips, honestly.
Tim Scott. I'm not going to waste time on him.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I'm not. I'm not.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And you know what? I'm going to give them their due.
They've put in third at impact this morning, reported that
13.8 million has been dropped on this race. And I'm happy.
Let's leave it at that. 13.8 million has dropped. You're
going to start seeing more Paxton ads and more anti-Talarico ads.
And both of those will be very helpful. It is 9-11. And,
(03:20):
you know, we spend every September. 11th, talking about New York.
The entirety of our evening show will be 9-11 and
what happened in New York. But 184 people died at
the Pentagon that morning. And I want to tell you
about three who did not. Jerry Henson, 64, retired Navy commander,
(03:46):
72 combat missions over Vietnam. After all that, he came
back as a civilian and worked a desk in the
Navy Command Center. At 9.37, Flight 77 came into that building,
two corridors from where he was sitting. His words, it
(04:12):
was like being hit in the head with a baseball bat.
When he came to, His own desk was on top
of him. He was pinned in his chair with that
desk wedged across the arms. And on top of it
was the ceiling and the bookcases and the wallboard and
(04:34):
the plumbing. His left ear was pinned to his own shoulder.
There was a fire raging above him. There was a
fire at his feet. Jerry Henson figured he had about
five minutes left. And looking back, that was probably generous.
(04:56):
A Navy captain named David Thomas came through that smoke,
found him, got his hands under the pile, and couldn't
move it. Grown man could not budge it. It was
too heavy. So he started screaming, help, help, somebody help me,
help me. I cannot lift this thing up. And here
comes the doctor. Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, Navy physician, 36
(05:21):
years old, 6'4. He rode crew at Stanford. And if
you're rowing at Stanford, you got some pretty, pretty serious
upper body strain. He'd been headed out of the building
and turned around and went back in. The ceiling was melting.
(05:44):
Molten metal down. dripping out of the overhead wiring, burning
black holes through people's skin, live wires arcing in standing water.
I mean, it's hell. Dr. Tarantino crawled into that, got
flat on his back underneath a collapsed desk and a
(06:05):
wall of debris, and leg-pressed it off the floor with
his legs, held it up, David Thomas watched him do it.
He said, he comes crawling in here like a commando.
He gets underneath this thing and he leg presses it
(06:26):
with all his stuff melting and coming down on us.
Jerry Henson squeezed out over the arm of his own chair,
which had him pinned. And then Tarantino stayed under it
a second longer, held the weight to check whether anybody
else was underneath there. About a minute after they got out,
the whole space caught fire and collapsed. Henson grabbed those
(06:49):
men so hard on the way out that Tarantino had
to bruises from his fingers for a week. In December,
they gave both men the Navy and Marine Corps medal.
Henson said it was way below what they deserved. And
there's a name tag in the Smithsonian today because in
the middle of all that, David Thomas reached over and
(07:09):
tore the name tag off that doctor's uniform. So he'd
know who to thank in case neither one of them
made it out. Those are our people. Those are Americans.
That is the spirit of who we are. The next
(07:30):
time you see someone dishonoring this country, whether they be
the mayor of New York or the transitioning state representative
from the People's Republic of Austin that doesn't eat meat
hates Christians. Stop waiting on someone else to come and
save us. Stop waiting on a hero. The heroes of 9-11,
(07:55):
and you will hear, if you listen to our show tonight,
you will hear some amazing stories. But the heroes of
9-11 were not heroes before that day. They were a priest.
They were a little old lady. They were a guy
that had a charter fishing. Do you know it was
the largest waterborne evacuation in American history, how many people
(08:18):
they moved out? They moved out in nine days twice
the number that were moved out of Dunkirk. They moved
out in nine hours twice the number that were evacuated
from Dunkirk in nine days. So a few weeks ago,
We were preparing for today. And the question of how
(08:45):
to pay tribute on 9-11. And we decided that rather
than stats and figures and let me be very clear.
If you're a person who says, I don't believe. that
(09:06):
this was an attack from without. I think it was
an attack from within. I don't trust this. You're free
to believe that. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise.
The reason all of this happened is open to interpretation.
And that's fine. I encourage that. What's not open to
interpretation for me is that people who were going about
(09:30):
their own lives, who had no idea this was going
to happen, were suddenly thrust into situations where there's death
and destruction all around. And you know what I always
think about? When all this happens and, you know, you
see a guy and he's struggling, he's trying to get
down the stairs and all that, well, they didn't get
(09:51):
advanced prep. So, like, one dude that's trying to get
out from under the ceiling and the wall, he was
on his way to poop. Think about that. One dude's
stomach was torn up. He's been blowing dirt all morning.
Just been in there. He's torn the toilet up. It's terrible.
(10:12):
He's going to make it to lunch, and then he
is going home. He's got to finish his project, but
then his stomach is feeling horrible. A bunch of people
are hungover. They're dehydrated. Their head is splitting. Somebody is
(10:33):
in the middle of dialysis, so they do dialysis at
home and come to work, and then tonight they'll plug
in again. It's crazy. I mean, you don't get to
prepare so that you've got your mind and body right
(10:53):
for the horror that is about to befall you. Brian Birdwell, 39,
Army Lieutenant Colonel, Desert Storm veteran, staff officer at the Pentagon.
His office was on the second floor of the E
ring at Corridor 4, the newly renovated wedge, which is
(11:18):
the exact spot Flight 77 hit. At about 9.35, he
was standing in that office with two co-workers watching the
towers burn on TV. Two women, Cheryl Sincott and Sandy Taylor.
Brian Birdwell stopped and prayed with those two women out
(11:40):
loud for the firemen in New York. Then he told
them he'd be right back, and he walked down the
hall to the men's room. Those are the last words
he ever said to either one of them, because both
women were killed. He came back out and got seven
or eight steps down that corridor at 9.37 a.m. The
(12:04):
nose of that airplane came into the building 15 to
20 yards from where he was standing. He said, I
was tossed around like a rag doll. The next thing
I know, I'm trying to get up. It's black except
for the ambient light of fires. I'm on fire. His
uniform was polyester. an officer who found him later said,
(12:28):
if you've ever taken a match to polyester, you know
it turns into a molten glob. That was his pants
onto his legs. He tried to stand up, fell, tried again, fell,
couldn't see, couldn't balance, and he was burning. Brian Birdwell
(12:49):
decided he was going to die in that hallway. And
by all rights, he Probably should have. It's amazing that
we're telling this story and he didn't. So he made
a decision about how. He hollered as loud as he could,
as much as he could get out of his mouth. Jesus,
(13:11):
I'm coming to see you. And then he lay down
on the floor of the Pentagon to die. And then
he felt something run down the side of his face.
He said it was cold. It was water. He had
collapsed underneath one of the only sprinkler heads in that
corridor that was still actually working. And it put him out.
(13:33):
He was no longer on fire. He got up, walked
with a hand on the wall toward a light, fell
down in front of an army colonel named Ray Wallace.
Wallace and three other men picked him up and his
skin came off in their hands. More than 60% of
his body, his face, both arms grafted completely. They gave
(13:57):
him less than a 1% chance of survival. 24 days
on a ventilator. 92 days in a hospital. 39 operations
over four years. His wife, Mel, did his wound care
at home. I'll come back to that. She said, one
(14:18):
thing since that I want every married person listening to hear.
We never walk out the door without saying goodbye. 25
years ago this morning, a man prayed for somebody else's fireman.
It cost him two minutes. And those two minutes are
the only reason he's alive. Life has a funny way
(14:42):
of humbling us. And it can seem so trivial. The
little things, the crazy little things. On Monday, there will
be a celebration of life for Jesse Gay, and he
was married to Misty Gay, who many of you will
remember from the RCC. And Jesse went out, as he
(15:06):
often did, as they both often did, but he went
out for an hour-long run along a levee in Pecan Grove,
where they live, and at an hour and 20 minutes,
they've They're going to dinner. He's supposed to be back,
get showered. They're going to dinner with his parents. Misty called,
(15:29):
and a deputy, Fort Bend County deputy, picked up. Said,
I'm sorry. He went out for a run at 52
years old. So, for those of you who like to
make a big, dramatic story, Exit. Make that other person
(15:51):
feel bad. Hang up on people. Slam the door on
the way out. Don't. Don't.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
20 people were pulled alive out of the rubble of
the World Trade Center. 20. Out of all of it.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Janelle Guzman was the last one. 30 years old, born
and raised in Trinidad. Office job with the Port Authority
on the 64th floor of the North Tower. When the
plane hit 29 floors above her head, the announcement told everybody,
(16:41):
stay put. So about 15 of them stayed, taped the doors,
and waited. They waited an hour. Then the other tower
came down. And they went. She started down stairway B,
holding hands with a co-worker named Rosa Gonzalez, counting the
(17:04):
floors out loud. 47, 46, 40, 35. She was wearing
two-inch heels.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
At the 13th.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Floor landing, 13 floors from the street, she let go
of Rosa's hand to reach down and yank a shoe
off her foot. She said, when we reached the landing
(17:29):
on the 13th floor, I let go of Rosa's hand
to yank off my heels. That's the moment the North
Tower came down. Rosa Gonzalez did not survive. Janelle Guzman
spent the next 27 hours buried about 30 feet underground.
(17:50):
in that pile of rubble. Her head was wedged between
two slabs of concrete. Her right leg was crushed. She
was buried to her thigh. She could move her left hand,
but that was it. She couldn't even get her voice
(18:11):
to work to yell for help. 27 hours. And she
kept praying. God, please save my life. Give me a
second chance. I will change my life. I will do
your will. The part that deserves to be told to
you straight is sometime in there, she worked her left
(18:34):
hand up through a gap in the concrete, and a
hand took hold of it, warm, bare, no glove, and
a man's voice said, I've got you, Janelle. She asked
who it was. He said, my name is Paul. They
(18:56):
dug her out and around the middle of the day
on September 12th, rescued two out of Brooklyn. And when
she asked those men about Paul, not one of them
knew who she was talking about. In 2011, a retired
(19:17):
fireman turned up at her house and read off the
names of the crew that dug her out of the rubble.
One of them was a firefighter named Paul Soman. Her
book's co-author says that settles it. She has never quite
(19:37):
said so. Last year, 24 years later, she was still
telling audiences she is looking for Paul. I'll let you
sort that out. I know what I think, but you
can sort that out for yourself. Roger McMillan proposed to
her in that hospital bed. They married at City Hall
that November. She went back to work for the Port
(19:57):
Authority and she is a supervisor at LaGuardia Airport today.
She says, I was given a new life. 25 years ago, Today.
This morning. She stopped. To take off her shoe. And
(20:17):
it saved her life. Those stories just. There's a movie
called Run Lola Run. It's a German film. And. The
premise is this girl. Is rushing to stop her husband.
From committing a robbery.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
And.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
She doesn't want him to do it, and she's asking
her rich father for the money that they need, which
is the reason he's committing the robbery. And as she
is running to keep him from doing it, different things
happen along the way that slow her down or alter
her course. And one car running a red light. Or
(21:07):
one car stopping and letting her go instead of going
when they could have changes the course of her life
and his life and everybody's life. And the movie makes
this point. She does the run several times. And each time,
there's a subtle change in something that happens. And that
leads to a very different result. And it's a profound,
(21:33):
very profound point. that the movie is making, The Vagaries
of Life. How, you know, if I didn't take a
job at the University of Houston at something called Telefund,
which would call and pester alumni for money when I
got to college, because I already had jobs. This was
(21:55):
just an additional job I could work on campus. And
it was going to pay well. And so I was
working in Midtown at Paul's All-American Seafood. And I had
another job working selling fax paper. And so this was
a job I could go over and work for a
few hours at a time without having to drive anywhere,
get anywhere, and I could make some quick money. If
(22:16):
I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have met my wife.
If I hadn't met my wife, my life would have
taken a very different direction. And I don't know what
that direction is. I may have married another woman. I may...
Have not. I may be single today. I may have
had 10 kids. I may have had none. I may
(22:37):
have not gone to law school. I may have not
gone into real estate. May not have gone into politics.
May have not gone into radio. We might live near
her family in some other state or country. I mean,
how your life takes these changes, not just whether you're
happy or not. It's amazing to think. And all we
can do. is live our lives, do our best, be
(22:59):
bold and courageous and faithful.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Hey, this is Tracy Bird, and I tip my hat
to the keeper of the stars.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And the stars. I don't want to root for the
demise of New York. I don't want to be happy
when they fail and they go bankrupt. when the rats
are bigger than a possum. I don't want to point
(23:33):
to what they do with regard to crime that leads
to murder. I want our cities and our country to
be great. New York has fallen the moment we decide,
and how can we not, that everybody needs to get out.
(23:55):
It's tragic. Without a shot fired. The nice neighbor. The
turn-the-other-cheek American. The white, guilt, overly kind, suicidally empathetic person
who simply cannot understand that dog bites. Just after 5
(24:18):
o'clock on the evening of September 11th, three New York
firemen found a flagpole standing on West Street with a
faded green flag on it, Ramone. Dan McWilliams had spotted
an American flag flying off the back of a yacht
tied up in the marina. So he went and got it.
George Johnson and Billy Isengrin helped him run it up.
(24:40):
Little flag, three by five. Newspaper photographer named Thomas Franklin
was standing good ways off with a long lens and
he took the picture. You've seen the picture. You know
this picture. Everybody on the earth, on this earth, knows
this picture. If you saw it, you'd know that you
know it. Eisengrin described the whole thing later like this.
(25:03):
We stood there and looked at it for a second
and went about our way. That flag was gone within hours,
off the pole. Nobody saw who took it. And nobody noticed.
Because another flag turned up that everybody assumed was that flag.
That flag flew at City Hall. That flag was at
(25:23):
Yankee Stadium for the prayer service where Pataki, then governor,
and Giuliani, then mayor, signed it. That flag got handed
to an admiral, flown out to the USS Theodore Roosevelt,
and carried into the war. The whole country stood up
for that flag, but it was their own flag. The
couple who owned that yacht asked to borrow their flag back.
(25:46):
They unfolded it five by eight, way too big. The
lady's line about it is perfect. She said, this wraps
around the two of us and we're not the thinnest
people on earth. So we knew right away it was
the wrong flag. Somewhere in the confusion of that week,
somebody handed someone the wrong flag and it went to
(26:07):
sea and was saluted by the U.S. Navy and the
real one was gone. For 13 years, this story wouldn't
be a story if it didn't have this ending. November 2014, Everett, Washington,
about as far from lower Manhattan as you can get
and still be in the continental United States. A man
(26:28):
walks into a fire station carrying a shopping bag, a
Joann's Fabric shopping bag. Tells him he thinks he has
the Ground Zero flag. He'd been watching a History Channel
show about the missing flag and recognized the rope and
the electrical tape wrapped around it. Says his name's Brian.
(26:49):
And then he leaves before anybody gets a last name.
Everett Popo worked at for two years. And listen to
how they proved it. They sent the dust off that
flag to the state crime lab and a forensic scientist
found asbestos and mica. And is it mica or mica? M-I-C-A.
I don't know. Somebody email me and let me know.
(27:12):
They found asbestos and mica. Might be mica. and cement
in the fibers in the right proportions to match verified
World Trade Center debris. Then a detective sat down with
24 photographs Thomas Franklin never published and compared that rope
to the rope in the pictures. And he found one
(27:35):
specific tear in the electrical tape in 2001 and in
his hands. Same flag. 2016, the man came forward on
his own, Brian Brown. Somebody had given him that flag
earlier as a gag gift, and he had no idea
what it was. His words, I took care of it.
It was never dishonored or flown or anything. He would
(27:58):
not take a reward. He said, donate it to the museum.
And that's where it is, right next to the photograph.
25 years ago today, three tired firemen ran up somebody
else's flag because they thought it needed to be up.
Took 15 years and a stranger. How many states is
(28:21):
New York to Washington? Seven states away? Probably 10 states
away to get it home. I love those stories. Absolutely
love them. Of course, I also love the stories of
when a dog goes missing, family goes on vacation, jumps
out of the back of the family station wagon, runs
(28:44):
off to chase a squirrel. They look everywhere, calling for
the dog. Can't find the dog. They got to go home.
The kids are bawling. The parents feel awful. The dad,
shut up. We got to go home. He's lost. It happens.
We'll get another one. You can't get another dog. You
can't replace that dog, daddy.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Why would you say that?
Speaker 1 (29:08):
And he's got to listen to that the whole way home.
And they get home. I'm making this up as I'm
going along. Shut up. They get home and days later,
here comes the dog. Dogs have this look on their face.
(29:31):
There's not a complicated series of tiers of emotion. like T-I-E-R,
tier of levels of emotion. You can just tell with
all their being, they're as excited as their body can
possibly be. Hey, y'all, I'm home. Yeah, I'm home. Is
there anything better than that look? You ever lost your kid?
(29:54):
You ever lost your kids? Lost Crockett in the mall
one day. Oh, man, when I saw him, it's that
combination of you want to strangle him and hold him
as tight as you can. Strangle him and don't run off.
But I'm so glad you're here. Don't run off ever again.
I'm so glad you're here. Little buggers. 713-999-1000 is the
number to the Michael Berry show.
It's that time. Lock and load. The Michael Berry Show
is on the air. Here's Johnny. I am the danger.
I am the one who knocks. We'll do it live.
And we'll do it live.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Last year, I spent more money on spilled liquor in
bars from one side of this world to the other
than you made. You're talking to the Rolex wearing diamond ring,
wearing kiss stealing, wheeling dealing, limousine riding, jet.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Flying, son of a gun.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
And I'm having a hard time holding.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
These alligators down. So leave this one alone. She could
tell right away that I was bad to the bone.
Bad to the bone. Bad to the bone.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Bad. The Senate Leadership Fund and their associated affiliated.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
PACS, Political Action Committees. They alone spent over $ 100 million
against Ken Paxton to help John Cornyn. It didn't help.
(01:30):
He lost. Paxton won. Cornyn has called Paxton a bad candidate,
which is interesting. You're criticizing the guy that just beat you.
he's lazy he's not a good campaigner he's okay and
(01:51):
you are standing there with one wooden leg out in
front of bucky's that's all so thanksgiving and i'm really
happy to be here with y'all i want y'all to
be safe on the roads and also be nice you
know be nice to people and everything and And spay
and neuter your dogs and things. And as you know,
(02:12):
I'm running for the Senate again. And Buc-ee's just stopped
in here, as I always do, because I'm really pretty
much always in Texas and always stopping in on the Buc-ee's.
You know, they have a nice car wash, too. I
really like this place. Vote for me. Doofus Head and
his Dunder Muffins, they had said they had no money
(02:32):
to give to Paxton to help him win. But now
they've coughed up $ 13. 8 million. There's a group called– it's
run by Tim Scott, which should tell you everything, who
oddly has no upper lip. I've never understood how he
has survived that long with just no upper lips, honestly.
Tim Scott. I'm not going to waste time on him.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
I'm not. I'm not.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
And you know what? I'm going to give them their due.
They've put in third at impact this morning, reported that
13.8 million has been dropped on this race. And I'm happy.
Let's leave it at that. 13.8 million has dropped. You're
going to start seeing more Paxton ads and more anti-Talarico ads.
And both of those will be very helpful. It is 9-11. And,
(03:20):
you know, we spend every September. 11th, talking about New York.
The entirety of our evening show will be 9-11 and
what happened in New York. But 184 people died at
the Pentagon that morning. And I want to tell you
about three who did not. Jerry Henson, 64, retired Navy commander,
(03:46):
72 combat missions over Vietnam. After all that, he came
back as a civilian and worked a desk in the
Navy Command Center. At 9.37, Flight 77 came into that building,
two corridors from where he was sitting. His words, it
(04:12):
was like being hit in the head with a baseball bat.
When he came to, His own desk was on top
of him. He was pinned in his chair with that
desk wedged across the arms. And on top of it
was the ceiling and the bookcases and the wallboard and
(04:34):
the plumbing. His left ear was pinned to his own shoulder.
There was a fire raging above him. There was a
fire at his feet. Jerry Henson figured he had about
five minutes left. And looking back, that was probably generous.
(04:56):
A Navy captain named David Thomas came through that smoke,
found him, got his hands under the pile, and couldn't
move it. Grown man could not budge it. It was
too heavy. So he started screaming, help, help, somebody help me,
help me. I cannot lift this thing up. And here
comes the doctor. Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, Navy physician, 36
(05:21):
years old, 6'4. He rode crew at Stanford. And if
you're rowing at Stanford, you got some pretty, pretty serious
upper body strain. He'd been headed out of the building
and turned around and went back in. The ceiling was melting.
(05:44):
Molten metal down. dripping out of the overhead wiring, burning
black holes through people's skin, live wires arcing in standing water.
I mean, it's hell. Dr. Tarantino crawled into that, got
flat on his back underneath a collapsed desk and a
(06:05):
wall of debris, and leg-pressed it off the floor with
his legs, held it up, David Thomas watched him do it.
He said, he comes crawling in here like a commando.
He gets underneath this thing and he leg presses it
(06:26):
with all his stuff melting and coming down on us.
Jerry Henson squeezed out over the arm of his own chair,
which had him pinned. And then Tarantino stayed under it
a second longer, held the weight to check whether anybody
else was underneath there. About a minute after they got out,
the whole space caught fire and collapsed. Henson grabbed those
(06:49):
men so hard on the way out that Tarantino had
to bruises from his fingers for a week. In December,
they gave both men the Navy and Marine Corps medal.
Henson said it was way below what they deserved. And
there's a name tag in the Smithsonian today because in
the middle of all that, David Thomas reached over and
(07:09):
tore the name tag off that doctor's uniform. So he'd
know who to thank in case neither one of them
made it out. Those are our people. Those are Americans.
That is the spirit of who we are. The next
(07:30):
time you see someone dishonoring this country, whether they be
the mayor of New York or the transitioning state representative
from the People's Republic of Austin that doesn't eat meat
hates Christians. Stop waiting on someone else to come and
save us. Stop waiting on a hero. The heroes of 9-11,
(07:55):
and you will hear, if you listen to our show tonight,
you will hear some amazing stories. But the heroes of
9-11 were not heroes before that day. They were a priest.
They were a little old lady. They were a guy
that had a charter fishing. Do you know it was
the largest waterborne evacuation in American history, how many people
(08:18):
they moved out? They moved out in nine days twice
the number that were moved out of Dunkirk. They moved
out in nine hours twice the number that were evacuated
from Dunkirk in nine days. So a few weeks ago,
We were preparing for today. And the question of how
(08:45):
to pay tribute on 9-11. And we decided that rather
than stats and figures and let me be very clear.
If you're a person who says, I don't believe. that
(09:06):
this was an attack from without. I think it was
an attack from within. I don't trust this. You're free
to believe that. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise.
The reason all of this happened is open to interpretation.
And that's fine. I encourage that. What's not open to
interpretation for me is that people who were going about
(09:30):
their own lives, who had no idea this was going
to happen, were suddenly thrust into situations where there's death
and destruction all around. And you know what I always
think about? When all this happens and, you know, you
see a guy and he's struggling, he's trying to get
down the stairs and all that, well, they didn't get
(09:51):
advanced prep. So, like, one dude that's trying to get
out from under the ceiling and the wall, he was
on his way to poop. Think about that. One dude's
stomach was torn up. He's been blowing dirt all morning.
Just been in there. He's torn the toilet up. It's terrible.
(10:12):
He's going to make it to lunch, and then he
is going home. He's got to finish his project, but
then his stomach is feeling horrible. A bunch of people
are hungover. They're dehydrated. Their head is splitting. Somebody is
(10:33):
in the middle of dialysis, so they do dialysis at
home and come to work, and then tonight they'll plug
in again. It's crazy. I mean, you don't get to
prepare so that you've got your mind and body right
(10:53):
for the horror that is about to befall you. Brian Birdwell, 39,
Army Lieutenant Colonel, Desert Storm veteran, staff officer at the Pentagon.
His office was on the second floor of the E
ring at Corridor 4, the newly renovated wedge, which is
(11:18):
the exact spot Flight 77 hit. At about 9.35, he
was standing in that office with two co-workers watching the
towers burn on TV. Two women, Cheryl Sincott and Sandy Taylor.
Brian Birdwell stopped and prayed with those two women out
(11:40):
loud for the firemen in New York. Then he told
them he'd be right back, and he walked down the
hall to the men's room. Those are the last words
he ever said to either one of them, because both
women were killed. He came back out and got seven
or eight steps down that corridor at 9.37 a.m. The
(12:04):
nose of that airplane came into the building 15 to
20 yards from where he was standing. He said, I
was tossed around like a rag doll. The next thing
I know, I'm trying to get up. It's black except
for the ambient light of fires. I'm on fire. His
uniform was polyester. an officer who found him later said,
(12:28):
if you've ever taken a match to polyester, you know
it turns into a molten glob. That was his pants
onto his legs. He tried to stand up, fell, tried again, fell,
couldn't see, couldn't balance, and he was burning. Brian Birdwell
(12:49):
decided he was going to die in that hallway. And
by all rights, he Probably should have. It's amazing that
we're telling this story and he didn't. So he made
a decision about how. He hollered as loud as he could,
as much as he could get out of his mouth. Jesus,
(13:11):
I'm coming to see you. And then he lay down
on the floor of the Pentagon to die. And then
he felt something run down the side of his face.
He said it was cold. It was water. He had
collapsed underneath one of the only sprinkler heads in that
corridor that was still actually working. And it put him out.
(13:33):
He was no longer on fire. He got up, walked
with a hand on the wall toward a light, fell
down in front of an army colonel named Ray Wallace.
Wallace and three other men picked him up and his
skin came off in their hands. More than 60% of
his body, his face, both arms grafted completely. They gave
(13:57):
him less than a 1% chance of survival. 24 days
on a ventilator. 92 days in a hospital. 39 operations
over four years. His wife, Mel, did his wound care
at home. I'll come back to that. She said, one
(14:18):
thing since that I want every married person listening to hear.
We never walk out the door without saying goodbye. 25
years ago this morning, a man prayed for somebody else's fireman.
It cost him two minutes. And those two minutes are
the only reason he's alive. Life has a funny way
(14:42):
of humbling us. And it can seem so trivial. The
little things, the crazy little things. On Monday, there will
be a celebration of life for Jesse Gay, and he
was married to Misty Gay, who many of you will
remember from the RCC. And Jesse went out, as he
(15:06):
often did, as they both often did, but he went
out for an hour-long run along a levee in Pecan Grove,
where they live, and at an hour and 20 minutes,
they've They're going to dinner. He's supposed to be back,
get showered. They're going to dinner with his parents. Misty called,
(15:29):
and a deputy, Fort Bend County deputy, picked up. Said,
I'm sorry. He went out for a run at 52
years old. So, for those of you who like to
make a big, dramatic story, Exit. Make that other person
(15:51):
feel bad. Hang up on people. Slam the door on
the way out. Don't. Don't.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
20 people were pulled alive out of the rubble of
the World Trade Center. 20. Out of all of it.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Janelle Guzman was the last one. 30 years old, born
and raised in Trinidad. Office job with the Port Authority
on the 64th floor of the North Tower. When the
plane hit 29 floors above her head, the announcement told everybody,
(16:41):
stay put. So about 15 of them stayed, taped the doors,
and waited. They waited an hour. Then the other tower
came down. And they went. She started down stairway B,
holding hands with a co-worker named Rosa Gonzalez, counting the
(17:04):
floors out loud. 47, 46, 40, 35. She was wearing
two-inch heels.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
At the 13th.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Floor landing, 13 floors from the street, she let go
of Rosa's hand to reach down and yank a shoe
off her foot. She said, when we reached the landing
(17:29):
on the 13th floor, I let go of Rosa's hand
to yank off my heels. That's the moment the North
Tower came down. Rosa Gonzalez did not survive. Janelle Guzman
spent the next 27 hours buried about 30 feet underground.
(17:50):
in that pile of rubble. Her head was wedged between
two slabs of concrete. Her right leg was crushed. She
was buried to her thigh. She could move her left hand,
but that was it. She couldn't even get her voice
(18:11):
to work to yell for help. 27 hours. And she
kept praying. God, please save my life. Give me a
second chance. I will change my life. I will do
your will. The part that deserves to be told to
you straight is sometime in there, she worked her left
(18:34):
hand up through a gap in the concrete, and a
hand took hold of it, warm, bare, no glove, and
a man's voice said, I've got you, Janelle. She asked
who it was. He said, my name is Paul. They
(18:56):
dug her out and around the middle of the day
on September 12th, rescued two out of Brooklyn. And when
she asked those men about Paul, not one of them
knew who she was talking about. In 2011, a retired
(19:17):
fireman turned up at her house and read off the
names of the crew that dug her out of the rubble.
One of them was a firefighter named Paul Soman. Her
book's co-author says that settles it. She has never quite
(19:37):
said so. Last year, 24 years later, she was still
telling audiences she is looking for Paul. I'll let you
sort that out. I know what I think, but you
can sort that out for yourself. Roger McMillan proposed to
her in that hospital bed. They married at City Hall
that November. She went back to work for the Port
(19:57):
Authority and she is a supervisor at LaGuardia Airport today.
She says, I was given a new life. 25 years ago, Today.
This morning. She stopped. To take off her shoe. And
(20:17):
it saved her life. Those stories just. There's a movie
called Run Lola Run. It's a German film. And. The
premise is this girl. Is rushing to stop her husband.
From committing a robbery.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
And.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
She doesn't want him to do it, and she's asking
her rich father for the money that they need, which
is the reason he's committing the robbery. And as she
is running to keep him from doing it, different things
happen along the way that slow her down or alter
her course. And one car running a red light. Or
(21:07):
one car stopping and letting her go instead of going
when they could have changes the course of her life
and his life and everybody's life. And the movie makes
this point. She does the run several times. And each time,
there's a subtle change in something that happens. And that
leads to a very different result. And it's a profound,
(21:33):
very profound point. that the movie is making, The Vagaries
of Life. How, you know, if I didn't take a
job at the University of Houston at something called Telefund,
which would call and pester alumni for money when I
got to college, because I already had jobs. This was
(21:55):
just an additional job I could work on campus. And
it was going to pay well. And so I was
working in Midtown at Paul's All-American Seafood. And I had
another job working selling fax paper. And so this was
a job I could go over and work for a
few hours at a time without having to drive anywhere,
get anywhere, and I could make some quick money. If
(22:16):
I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have met my wife.
If I hadn't met my wife, my life would have
taken a very different direction. And I don't know what
that direction is. I may have married another woman. I may...
Have not. I may be single today. I may have
had 10 kids. I may have had none. I may
(22:37):
have not gone to law school. I may have not
gone into real estate. May not have gone into politics.
May have not gone into radio. We might live near
her family in some other state or country. I mean,
how your life takes these changes, not just whether you're
happy or not. It's amazing to think. And all we
can do. is live our lives, do our best, be
(22:59):
bold and courageous and faithful.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Hey, this is Tracy Bird, and I tip my hat
to the keeper of the stars.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And the stars. I don't want to root for the
demise of New York. I don't want to be happy
when they fail and they go bankrupt. when the rats
are bigger than a possum. I don't want to point
(23:33):
to what they do with regard to crime that leads
to murder. I want our cities and our country to
be great. New York has fallen the moment we decide,
and how can we not, that everybody needs to get out.
(23:55):
It's tragic. Without a shot fired. The nice neighbor. The
turn-the-other-cheek American. The white, guilt, overly kind, suicidally empathetic person
who simply cannot understand that dog bites. Just after 5
(24:18):
o'clock on the evening of September 11th, three New York
firemen found a flagpole standing on West Street with a
faded green flag on it, Ramone. Dan McWilliams had spotted
an American flag flying off the back of a yacht
tied up in the marina. So he went and got it.
George Johnson and Billy Isengrin helped him run it up.
(24:40):
Little flag, three by five. Newspaper photographer named Thomas Franklin
was standing good ways off with a long lens and
he took the picture. You've seen the picture. You know
this picture. Everybody on the earth, on this earth, knows
this picture. If you saw it, you'd know that you
know it. Eisengrin described the whole thing later like this.
(25:03):
We stood there and looked at it for a second
and went about our way. That flag was gone within hours,
off the pole. Nobody saw who took it. And nobody noticed.
Because another flag turned up that everybody assumed was that flag.
That flag flew at City Hall. That flag was at
(25:23):
Yankee Stadium for the prayer service where Pataki, then governor,
and Giuliani, then mayor, signed it. That flag got handed
to an admiral, flown out to the USS Theodore Roosevelt,
and carried into the war. The whole country stood up
for that flag, but it was their own flag. The
couple who owned that yacht asked to borrow their flag back.
(25:46):
They unfolded it five by eight, way too big. The
lady's line about it is perfect. She said, this wraps
around the two of us and we're not the thinnest
people on earth. So we knew right away it was
the wrong flag. Somewhere in the confusion of that week,
somebody handed someone the wrong flag and it went to
(26:07):
sea and was saluted by the U.S. Navy and the
real one was gone. For 13 years, this story wouldn't
be a story if it didn't have this ending. November 2014, Everett, Washington,
about as far from lower Manhattan as you can get
and still be in the continental United States. A man
(26:28):
walks into a fire station carrying a shopping bag, a
Joann's Fabric shopping bag. Tells him he thinks he has
the Ground Zero flag. He'd been watching a History Channel
show about the missing flag and recognized the rope and
the electrical tape wrapped around it. Says his name's Brian.
(26:49):
And then he leaves before anybody gets a last name.
Everett Popo worked at for two years. And listen to
how they proved it. They sent the dust off that
flag to the state crime lab and a forensic scientist
found asbestos and mica. And is it mica or mica? M-I-C-A.
I don't know. Somebody email me and let me know.
(27:12):
They found asbestos and mica. Might be mica. and cement
in the fibers in the right proportions to match verified
World Trade Center debris. Then a detective sat down with
24 photographs Thomas Franklin never published and compared that rope
to the rope in the pictures. And he found one
(27:35):
specific tear in the electrical tape in 2001 and in
his hands. Same flag. 2016, the man came forward on
his own, Brian Brown. Somebody had given him that flag
earlier as a gag gift, and he had no idea
what it was. His words, I took care of it.
It was never dishonored or flown or anything. He would
(27:58):
not take a reward. He said, donate it to the museum.
And that's where it is, right next to the photograph.
25 years ago today, three tired firemen ran up somebody
else's flag because they thought it needed to be up.
Took 15 years and a stranger. How many states is
(28:21):
New York to Washington? Seven states away? Probably 10 states
away to get it home. I love those stories. Absolutely
love them. Of course, I also love the stories of
when a dog goes missing, family goes on vacation, jumps
out of the back of the family station wagon, runs
(28:44):
off to chase a squirrel. They look everywhere, calling for
the dog. Can't find the dog. They got to go home.
The kids are bawling. The parents feel awful. The dad,
shut up. We got to go home. He's lost. It happens.
We'll get another one. You can't get another dog. You
can't replace that dog, daddy.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Why would you say that?
Speaker 1 (29:08):
And he's got to listen to that the whole way home.
And they get home. I'm making this up as I'm
going along. Shut up. They get home and days later,
here comes the dog. Dogs have this look on their face.
(29:31):
There's not a complicated series of tiers of emotion. like T-I-E-R,
tier of levels of emotion. You can just tell with
all their being, they're as excited as their body can
possibly be. Hey, y'all, I'm home. Yeah, I'm home. Is
there anything better than that look? You ever lost your kid?
(29:54):
You ever lost your kids? Lost Crockett in the mall
one day. Oh, man, when I saw him, it's that
combination of you want to strangle him and hold him
as tight as you can. Strangle him and don't run off.
But I'm so glad you're here. Don't run off ever again.
I'm so glad you're here. Little buggers. 713-999-1000 is the
number to the Michael Berry show.
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