Commentary
Total darkness. The other side of midnight. For the first time in his 20 years of service with NYPD, Sergeant Don Young was paralyzed and didn’t know what to do. On a clear cloudless day in lower Manhattan, he had suddenly been plunged into a total black hole of smoke. At approximately 10:28 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Don was just one block away from 200 Greenwich Street on his way to conduct rescue operations there. As he approached the World Trade Center, the building at 1 World Trade Center—the North Tower—began its collapse, sending out a cloud of toxic smoke that instantly turned the entire atmosphere into noxious poison….