NEW YORK CITY – When Taylor Field made it home, he got into the shower, clothes on, to wash away the dust from the World Trade Center.
“I didn’t know what was in it,” said Field, who was serving as a North American Mission Board (NAMB) missionary in New York City on September 11, 2001. “So, I took a shower to get everything off of me.”
That morning, 25 years ago, began as a calm, fall morning. Field was already working. His wife was on her commute, and their kids were in school.
“It was a beautiful morning, and my wife, even now, on those type mornings feels a bit of a trigger emotion,” Field said. “She was walking toward work, and she saw that first plane hit the tower.”
Field compared the immediate chaos of American Airlines Flight 11’s 8:46 AM collision into the North Tower to the fog of war. Many morning news broadcasts assumed the crash had been a tragic accident, but when American Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower 17 minutes later, the picture began to crystalize.
This had been no accident. America was under attack.
“My son was in a high school that’s about two blocks away from the World Trade Center, so I was pretty worried, then,” Field said. “It’s my son. What do I do?”
Transportation in New York, especially to Ground Zero, had been shut down. So, Field ran home from work, grabbed one of his son’s bikes, and began the 20-block ride. Police had set up several barriers on the route to the World Trade Center, Field remembered.
“But at each one of them,” said Field, “I could say, ‘My son goes to school at Stuyvesant High,’ and they would let me through.”
While Field made his way to his son’s high school, pure chaos and terror was breaking loose inside the Twin Towers and around World Trade Center Plaza.
In the immediate aftermath, those inside the North Tower were unsure what had happened. Had a bomb had gone off? Had boiler room in the building exploded? Those above the crash zones clamored to identify escape routes that had not been cut off by the impact, fires, or smoke.
Only a handful of people in the South Tower received word of what exactly had taken place in the intervening minutes before of the second plane’s arrival. Then, those who were not immediately killed by the second plane’s impact fought heat, smoke, and for many, burns and other injuries to survive.
Thousands of first responders arrived at the scene in hopes of putting out the fires and rescuing as many people as possible. As the situation in the upper floors became more dire, people –– approximately 200 over the course of the fiery trial –– began jumping or falling to their deaths rather than succumb to the smoke and fire.
In the opening moments, none conceived that collapse of both buildings was imminent, but the South Tower fell a mere 56 minutes after impact despite being hit second. The North Tower lasted 102 minutes.
By the time Field made it to Ground Zero, both Towers had fallen. The eerie quiet and snow-like powder covering the ground remain staunch memories for Field a quarter century later.
“By that time, I had covered my face with a shirt just so I could make sure my son was okay, and I finally got through to the place where his high school was,” said Field. “When I learned that they had evacuated, I felt so much better. I didn’t know what had happened to my son before that.”
Relieved though not yet reunited, Field returned home and took his shower, fully clothed.
Southern Baptists scramble to respond to a terrorist attack
Millions around the nation had their morning gripped by the horror scene in Manhattan.
In Alpharetta, Ga., Mickey Caison, national Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) director at the time, was one of the few people at NAMB’s office building who had a television in his office. Caison was doing paperwork when a coworker came down the hall.
“She said, ‘Mickey, there’s something going on in New York. Turn on the TV,’” Caison said. “So, I reached up, and we turned it on, and in just a few minutes, we saw the second plane hit the second building.”
Others packed into his small office to watch the broadcast, mesmerized by the images as news reporters scrambled to track down information about the incident. As soon as the second plane hit, though, Caison recalled shifting into response mode and told everyone to clear out of his office. He began making phone calls to evaluate what SBDR was going to be able to do.
In April of that year, Caison attended meetings in New York to discuss what a response in the city would look like, though the focus was primarily about a hurricane landfall. The challenges in such a situation would be myriad: difficulties getting SBDR equipment over bridges into downtown, fuel supply challenges, identifying parking lots large enough to host response sites.
“I didn’t understand how we were going to play into it at that moment,” Caison said about responding to 9/11, “because I remembered the inherent problems that were going to be in New York for our feeding units and things.”
Caison, though, didn’t wait. He continued connecting with other Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) members as well as the Baptist Convention of New York.
“I called my wife and said, ‘Pack me a bag. I’m flying to New York,’” Caison said. “My wife said, ‘Mickey, you can’t fly to New York,’ and I said, ‘Baby, this is my job. You know this. I’ve got to go.’ She said, ‘You don’t understand. There are no airplanes flying. They’re grounding them. You can’t fly.’”
By 12:15 PM, the U.S. skies were clear of all commercial and private flights to prevent any further hijacking attempts. American Airlines Flight 77 had crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 AM, and United Airlines Flight 93 crash landed in a Pennsylvania field at 10:03 AM, killing all aboard after passengers disrupted the hijackers to prevent them reaching their destination.
By that evening, Caison and a few others from NAMB began the 14-hour drive through the night in a rented van to the city. Caison was, in the meantime, working with state SBDR directors to coordinate where various units would go.
Along with Caison, Bob Vickers, NAMB’s leader of chaplaincy at the time, made the trip as did some of NAMB’s communications team, including photographer Gibbs Frazeur.
“I can’t remember the exact route we took,” Frazeur said, “but there was that view of the city where you see Manhattan Island and where the Twin Towers had formally been and smoke billowing out of that vacant spot, trailing off into the distance.”
Once they made it into the city, Caison began connecting with the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association, American Red Cross, and others to assess how SBDR could respond, and Frazeur had the opportunity to travel the streets and capture scenes of the city.
“Shock was everywhere,” Frazeur said, as well as “a sense of profound sadness.”
Some held out hope in those first days that there may be survivors under the rubble or who got lost when they scattered away from the collapsing towers.
“When I first got there, immediately what you’d see were these copy machine photos,” Frazeur said, “a picture of the relative, who could’ve been in the building, with their personal information on it…What started as very anonymous became about real people with faces.”
The disaster relief response begins
Sam Porter, SBDR director for Oklahoma Baptists, arrived to coordinate the chaplaincy response, providing emotional and spiritual care for first responders, recovery workers, and other survivors, familiar territory for Southern Baptists.
In just four or five days, Caison said, SBDR equipment and volunteers from around the nation –– Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina among others –– would be providing meals in New York and in Washington, D.C., near the Pentagon, again, work SBDR often provided.
The emergency management office, though, eventually asked Caison for volunteers to assist with a new task for SBDR, cleaning apartments around Ground Zero.
“I said, ‘I have a real problem. I don’t know if we can do this. I’m concerned about lead-based paint. I’m concerned about asbestos.’” Caison remembered saying. “‘I don’t know that I can put our volunteers in that environment…It’s going to present major problems.”
It was perhaps the first time Caison hesitated, but he recalled the mayor’s office offering support and insisting that Southern Baptists help.
Sensing the Lord’s leading to take a step of faith and do something SBDR had never done before, Caison organized an initial team to serve as part of a pilot program to test how to organize a wider-scale volunteer response.
All told, volunteers would clean more than 600 apartments in a few months. The New York Times described the effort as “a first because they are clearing glass, airline parts and acres of dust rather than tree limbs or mud” that come with storms and flooding.
By the end of September 11, Field’s family, his wife and two sons, were safe at home, and he could begin thinking about what ministry was going to look like in this new environment. The attacks claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people. 2,753 perished at the World Trade Center; 184 were killed in the Pentagon crash; and 40 died in the Flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania.
One thing buoyed Field’s efforts to serve the city. Those Southern Baptist yellow shirts made a significant impression after that world-changing day.
“I didn’t see, at that time, a lot of articles that were positive about Southern Baptists until 9/11,” said Field, who retired and moved to North Carolina after nearly 40 years of ministry in New York. “And then, like The New York Times, they were very positive about what Southern Baptists were doing.”
In telling their stories, both Caison and Frazeur described moments where New Yorkers would see their yellow shirts and thank them for the ways they were serving.
“It was a bridge builder for us there in New York City where, often, we are a small fraction of the people as Southern Baptists,” Field said. “The impact of what Southern Baptists did because of disaster relief was deeply appreciated by a lot of New Yorkers.”