By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
New York City – Before the four ex-presidents, the politicians and the assorted VIPs came to speak at the National 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan on Friday, ordinary people arrived by the thousands to remember.
Many carried flowers, often roses — red, yellow, white and pink. They laid them down or tucked them upright into niches cut into the dark bronze parapet where the names of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, are etched.
Two thousand nine hundred eighty-three names — 2,977 men, women and children killed on 9/11, plus five men and one pregnant woman who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — adorn the solemn outdoor walls that trace the former footprints of the old World Trade Center’s North and South towers.
The stories behind them are legion, and every year they deepen.
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, a New York woman, no longer young, came alone to the memorial to single out one name for remembrance. Amber, who declined to give her last name, said she had not known Antoinette M. Sherman, but felt compelled to come and pay her respects after learning about Sherman’s life in a documentary.
Amber set a fresh bouquet of bright red roses atop Antoinette’s name, which lives permanently on the northwest edge of the South Tower’s footprint, where crystalline waterfalls empty into pools that vanish into a void.
“She was only 35 when she died,” Amber said after stepping back for a few moments to wipe a few tears away. “It’s so sad.”
THE FIREBALL
On Sept. 11, U.S. Army budget analyst Antoinette M. “Toni” Sherman was at work at the world’s largest office building in Arlington, Virginia. She was attending a routine presentation on the second floor, in Room 2E487, in the Pentagon’s outer ring. About 35 people were in the conference room, directly in the path of a hijacked American Airlines Boeing 757 passenger jet bearing down on the building’s western facade at 530 mph.
Flight 77, bound for Los Angeles, had taken off from Dulles International Airport about 27 miles away at 8:20 a.m. Among its 58 passengers and six crew members was a team of five al Qaeda terrorists who seized control and changed course about a half-hour later.
At precisely 9:37:46 a.m., the jet slammed into the Pentagon, sending a 3,800-degree fireball into the sky and tearing through the room where Toni Sherman and her colleagues had assembled.
U.S. Navy Capt. William Toti would later write that he ran out of the Pentagon to the point of impact. He saw total, silent devastation: a piece of aluminum with a red “A” from American Airlines, “an engine rotor and what little else is left of the plane in a burning fissure in the side of the building.”
At first, Toti saw no evacuees. Then he spotted an emergency exit “with thick black smoke billowing out through the door” and what looked like movement near the floor.
“For just a few feet inside, I came across a lady crawling towards the door,” Toti wrote for Naval History and Heritage Command. “I tried to help her up, but she couldn’t stand. So I tried to lift her, but she was not a small woman, and I am not a big man. Worse, when I pulled on her arm, her skin came off in my hands.”
He ran for help, and two Army officers followed him back inside. Together, they “half-carried, half-dragged” Sherman outside. After secondary explosions went off a few yards away “in the pit,” they carried her up a hill, where a doctor hooked her to an IV line.
‘DOCTOR, AM I GOING TO DIE?’
Moments later, an “agitated” Sherman said, “I can’t breathe.” A nearby EMT grabbed an oxygen bottle and brought it over. “As the flow began and she began to calm down, she looked at me like she wanted to say something,” Toti wrote. “I kneeled down beside her and said, ‘Is that better? Are you all right?’ And then came the moment I’ll never forget. She blinked and asked, ‘Doctor, am I going to die?’” It was a question he never thought he’d have to answer.
“What’s your name?” Toti said.
“She said, ‘Antoinette.’”
“I said, ‘No, Antoinette, you’re not going to die, not if I can help it. We have a helicopter coming for you. I’m going to stay with you until you’re on it.’”
A medevac chopper arrived minutes later. Sherman was taken to the Burn Unit of Washington Hospital Center. Her parents, Eloise and Charles Clark Edwards, and foster son, Jamal, hoped she might pull through. She was awake and alert when she was wheeled in, but after surgery she “never opened her eyes again,” according to her biography on the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial page.
Antoinette Sherman died of her injuries a week later.
Twenty-five years later, at Ground Zero in New York, Amber found it difficult to talk about the woman she never knew yet finds so meaningful. What did they have in common?
Amber didn’t say. What did she know about Antoinette, whose home was in suburban Maryland, beyond the fact that she died because of that terrible day at the Pentagon?
What did the two women share in common? Not race. One was white, the other Black. Children? Family? Work? Was there another, unspoken memory at play? Or was it simply their humanity?
Amber set the roses on Antoinette’s name and stepped away with her hand to her cheek. Had she visited before? She seemed more interested in living in the moment than answering questions.
Then, she walked away.
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