Reluctant Hero - 9781620872024

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Michael Benfante wentto work, just like he had day after day, at his office on the eighty-firstfloor in the World Trade Center North Tower. Moments after the first planestruck, just twelve floors above him, Benfante organized his terrifiedemployees, getting them out the office and moving down the stairwells. On hisway down, he and another coworker encountered a woman in a wheelchair on thesixty-eighth floor. Benfante, the woman, and Benfante’s coworker then embarkedon a ninety-six-minute odyssey of escape—the two men carrying the woman downsixty-eight flights of stairs out of the North Tower and into an ambulance thatrushed her to safety just minutes before the tower imploded.

A CBS video camera caught Benfante just as he got out ofthe building, and almost immediately, the national media came calling. Benfantesat on the couch with Oprah Winfrey, where she hailed him as a hero. Almost oneyear to the day after 9/11, Benfante got married and the woman in thewheelchair sat in the front row.

That’s the storybook ending. But in the aftermath of9/11, Benfante began a journey fraught with wrenching personal challenges ofcritical emotional and psychological depth in Reluctant Hero.Benfante shares the trappings of his public heroism, the loneliness of hisprivate anguish, and the hope he finds for himself and for us. Because all ofus—whether we were in the towers, in New York City, or someplace else—we areall 9/11 survivors.