Early on the morning of September 11, Pat Steiner arrived at Logan Airport to catch a plane to Beijing, China, via Chicago. While at Logan, she decided to switch flights. Not only was the LA-bound United Airlines Flight 175 more convenient, Steiner says, but she had a friend on board. Having failed to persuade United personnel to let her switch planes, a "pissed off" Steiner boarded her original flight. Flight 175 became the second plane to strike the World Trade Center, smashing into the South Tower at 9:16 a.m., incinerating the 56 passengers, nine crew members, and four terrorists on board.

Steiner, 46, is vice-president of a software company in Cambridge. She lives in the Boston area with her husband. This is her story.

The day

This was the trip of a lifetime.

I was on my way to Beijing, China, on September 11. My flight was going from Chicago to Beijing, and LA to Beijing is a much better connection, you get a much better rest stop, so when I got to the airport on the morning of the 11th, I went straight to the desk and I said I'd like to change my flight, and they wouldn't do it. I mean, [Flight 175] was practically empty. I said, "Why can't you do it?" "Well, you need a three-hour layover in LA in order for us to switch your bags." And I'm like, "Three hours? Why do you need three hours to move bags from one plane to another? That's ridiculous. You have two hours. Isn't two hours enough?" So I'm at the gate, arguing with the person there, and I'm pretty pissed off. In retrospect, thinking about it, it was just a flight, I was just trying to switch my ticket. It was just annoying, very irritating. So I kept my flight, which left Logan 15 minutes before the killer flights did.

I'm one of those strange people -- I keep my headphones plugged into the pilot's channel. I love to listen to the conversations. We were flying over Lake Michigan when the strangest thing happened. I was listening in and a plane, I think it was a FedEx plane, came on our band. I remember the ground crew saying, "You're not supposed to be talking to us; you're supposed to be talking to ground control in Boston. What are you doing on this frequency?" I thought, this is highly unusual, I never saw this before. Then they cut him off. That was the first sign of something not quite right.

At O'Hare, they grounded our plane. The pilot got on the intercom and said, "Due to events on the East Coast, we've been asked to sit on the tarmac." He made it sound like there was some sort of party going on on the East Coast. We had no clue. We had left the ground at about 7:30 in the morning, and we arrived at O'Hare at about 9:30 Eastern Standard Time, so it was right after all this happened. People were trying to use their cell phones, to get information from outside, but the airwaves were blocked. We were sitting there for about an hour when somebody finally got through. It was the man sitting in back of me, and I heard him say the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been bombed. I looked back at him and I said, "Mister, here we are stuck on this airplane. Do you have to cause this kind of alarm?" and he said, "No, this is really happening."

Sitting on that airplane was the most surreal thing. We were receiving these reports thirdhand, from people on their cell phones, and all we could do was sit on that plane, trying to figure out what was going on. We were sitting on the tarmac for quite a while. It must have been about 11 o'clock when I borrowed somebody's cell phone and was able to get through to my husband. He said, "Oh my God, it's you." I'm, "What do you mean, `Oh my God, it's you'?" And he said, "I had no idea whether you were on that plane." Then he started to tell me: "Don't you know? Haven't you seen?"

At about noon that day, they let us off the plane. At O'Hare they had shut off all the television monitors -- they didn't want to cause any panic. There were thousands and thousands of people who had been stranded. The airport was gearing up for people staying overnight. There were cots being set up, food being brought in. As I was leaving, they began evacuating the airport; they decided no one could stay, so all these people were fleeing the airport on foot with their suitcases, walking out of the airport. There was no place for anybody to go, there were no hotels. It was madness.

My mother had a friend in Chicago, and when she realized I was stranded there she called this friend and the friend picked me up. She said, "Do you know what's going on?" I still didn't know. I was in such denial over the whole thing. To this day, there are a lot of things I've blocked out about what happened that day. Exactly when I realized that it was Flight 175 [that had flown into the World Trade Center], that might have been sometime the next day, when they started to show pictures of the victims. I saw a picture of my friend who was on that flight. Then I got reports that the CFO from my company was also on that flight.

I was numb. I sat there in front of the TV and I just remember saying, "Oh my God, oh my God." I must have just shut down, watching this thing over and over again. The initial impact of seeing what happened -- how does one take that kind of information in? And then realizing that there are people who are close to you who are on that actual flight, and how -- my God! -- I was almost on that flight.

Meanwhile, here I am, 840 miles away from home. How do I get home? Around that time I was starting to experience some very strange dizziness. I found a rental car, but I couldn't drive. It took me four days to work my way back -- a little bit of hitching, a lot of buses. I think it was sometime on Friday when I got home. I didn't want to be alone, so my husband took me with him to a convention. I couldn't see for about 24 hours, I had blurry vision. I couldn't see straight.

The aftermath

Here it is, August.

It's been a year now, and I'm still trying to unravel my feelings about what happened. Why didn't they pick my plane? I mean, my plane was full of fuel. I guess later reports said they had found box cutters on other planes. I don't know whether my plane was one of them or not. How would I have reacted? Would I have frozen in panic? Would I have been killed immediately? I can't imagine what it must have been like for those people. How much terror did they go through before they died? How long before the plane actually hit the building did these people know what was going to happen to them? What must that have been like, the sheer terror of the moments, the half-hour leading up to the actual event? Those people died instantly, but what did they have to go through in order to get to that point?

I just flew back from Oahu yesterday. It's one of the first flights I've made since last year. I was at the very front of the plane, and I was sitting there thinking, if this plane gets
hijacked am I better off at the front of the plane, or am I better off at the back of the plane? Where could I hide? In the bathroom? I'm asking myself where can one hide on an airplane. I'm sitting there with a bulkhead in front of me, and there was no hiding place; if I was sitting one row back and I ducked down, I might be able to hide a little bit. Those are the questions that go through my mind when I fly now. Is that just me or is that everybody?

My life's different now. The incident has put me in a psychological state where I can be more depressed. It's been difficult for my marriage, because I'm starting to question my relationships, my priorities in life. It's not that he and I are pulling any further apart because of this, it's just that I have different issues to deal with now. He's actually been very supportive. The people who were difficult were the ones who were hysterical. I'd get these phone calls from people who I'd have to take care of because they were so upset that I'd had such a close call. But [my husband] realizes I need my time to be upset about this, and to get through whatever I have to get through with this.

I'm still dealing with the shock. I don't know, I might be dealing with it more than normal because I was so close to it, or just because it hit me in a powerful way. I actually started seeing someone about this. I went to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I'm experiencing things in a different way. I'm asking questions that I wasn't asking before. I'm dealing with a certain aloneness. It's always been a sadness with me that there aren't more people in my life, and I'm finding that a lot more painful now. I'm trying to figure out a way around it, but I don't know how. We are the way we are, and people are very lonely. I mean, we're all alone. We all die alone. Those people on that plane, they died alone. Those are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

But my pain is minimal to what a lot of other people go through. When people say, "Pat, you had a close call," I say, "No. I was so far removed from ever being hurt. I'm still here." I often wonder what right do I have to consider myself to be a victim of September 11. I feel guilty about the fact that I'm not giving back enough, that I'm too self-centered, that there are people out there who need help. I have so much to be thankful for, and there's my guilt: I shouldn't be suffering. I should be out there helping other people who are going through much worse than I am.

When I think of talking to you about an article, I think again, I still have my life, I still have my family, I still have my friends, all save one. But here I am taking up your time and a lot of people's time. I guess I've got to accept the fact that I am a victim of this, and it's okay, even though I wasn't directly impacted by this. But I was directly impacted, wasn't I? It's affected my work, it's affected my relationships. I don't have the same optimistic attitude I had before, and I'm working to get that back. There's something that's different now, something that makes it a little harder to get through every day, doing the same types of normal everyday things.

I have been weakened by this. I've been thrown off by this. But I think once I figure it out, I'm going to be stronger. I'm determined to be stronger, because I don't want this terrorist act to have any more of an impact than it has to. I've insisted on going about my life as normally as I possibly can. I think I have that day to -- for lack of better words -- to thank for awakening me to the fact that my life has to change and my life has to be a lot better than it is. I know I have to turn this around into something positive. But it will always be what it is, a terrorist act where thousands of people were killed. How we use it to better ourselves is another story.

I'd like to believe that there's a purpose for me being here, that there's a reason why I survived this, why I didn't get on that plane. I'd like to believe that. Wouldn't that be amazing, if there were some reason why I'm here on this planet that I haven't quite figured out yet.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: September 6 - 12, 2002