Twenty five years ago today, six firefighters slowed down for the slowest person in the stairwell, and that is the only reason any of them are alive. Josephine Harris was 59 years old. A widow and a grandmother from Brooklyn. A bookkeeper for the Port Authority who worked on the 73rd floor of the North Tower. When the building was hit she started walking down. She was still recovering from an accident and her legs were bad, and she was descending a smoke filled stairwell with thousands of other people. She made it more than fifty floors on her own, which is an achievement most people reading this could not manage on a good day. Somewhere around the 20th floor she stopped. She could not go any further. She was exhausted and crying and people were flowing past her. Captain Jay Jonas and Ladder Company 6 were going the other way. They had climbed to the 27th floor when the South Tower came down at 9:59, and Jonas understood immediately what that meant for the building they were standing in. He turned his men around and started them down. Then they found Josephine Harris. They could have gone past her. They had every operational justification. The building they were in was going to fall and they knew it, they had their own men to get out, and she could barely stand. Instead Bill Butler put her arm over his shoulders and they went down at her pace. Step. Rest. Step. Rest. Six firefighters in full gear, descending a skyscraper they expected to lose, at the speed of a 59 year old woman with bad legs. They got to the fourth floor and she stopped completely. She could not take another step. They were still trying to move her when the North Tower came down at 10:28 in the morning. One hundred and ten stories collapsed on top of them. And a short section of Stairwell B, right there in the core, between roughly the second and fourth floors, did not collapse. It held. Fourteen people inside it lived. Jonas and his men, Chief Richard Picciotto, Port Authority officer David Lim, firefighters from other companies, and Josephine Harris. They were buried, in the dark, listening to the building settle. Bill Butler got a call out to his wife to tell her where they were. After a while the dust began to drift and clear, and sunlight came down through the stairwell from above, which is how they finally understood that there was no longer any building over their heads. They were pulled out hours later. Here is the arithmetic those men have lived with ever since. Ladder 6 was moving fast. If they had not stopped for Josephine Harris, they would have been in the lobby or out on the street when the tower came down, and the lobby and the street were killing fields. Her exhaustion held them in the exact place, at the exact minute, where the building chose not to fall. They had a jacket made for her. It said Josephine, Our Guardian Angel, with the Ladder 6 patch. It is in the 9/11 Museum now. She stayed close with those men for the rest of her life. When she died in 2011, the firefighters of Ladder 6 carried her casket. Three hundred and forty three firefighters died that day running toward people they had never met. Six of them lived because they refused to leave one woman behind, and she saved them right back.

Twenty-five years ago today, an accountant in Connecticut left his desk in the middle of the afternoon and went to get a haircut. His name was Dave Karnes. He was a senior accountant at a firm in Wilton, and before that he had spent most of his adult life as a Marine, finishing as a staff sergeant. He watched the towers come down on a screen in his office and told the people around him that they were going to need men like him down there. Then he did the strangest and most deliberate sequence of actions anybody performed that day. He drove home and put on his Marine combat utilities. He stopped at a barbershop and got a regulation Marine haircut, because he was about to be seen in that uniform and it was going to be worn correctly. He stopped at his church and asked his pastor to pray with him. He bought two hamburgers at a McDonald's, because he understood he would not be eating again for a long time. Then he drove 55 miles south toward a city that was closed. Nobody stopped him. In that uniform, nobody stopped him at a single checkpoint. He got to the pile in the evening, when the fires were still burning and crews were being pulled back for the night, and he found another Marine already walking the wreckage. Sergeant Jason Thomas, 27 years old, had left active duty in August. He had been dropping his daughter off at his mother's house on Long Island when he heard, and he had pulled his fatigues out of the trunk of his car and driven in. The two men had never met in their lives. They teamed up without discussion and walked out onto a smoking mountain of steel that everybody else was walking away from, and they started shouting the same thing over and over into the void. "United States Marines. If you can hear us, yell or tap." Twenty feet down, somebody tapped. His name was Will Jimeno, a Port Authority police officer. He had gone in with a squad of five led by Sergeant John McLoughlin. When the South Tower came down on top of them in the concourse, three of the five were killed. Jimeno and McLoughlin were pinned in a void under the rubble, and by that point in the day nobody was looking for them anymore. The Marines refused to leave. Karnes called his wife in Connecticut and had her phone New York dispatch, because that was faster than finding anyone in the chaos on site. Rescuers came. Jimeno came out after 13 hours. McLoughlin came out the next morning after 22. Only 20 people were ever pulled alive from that rubble. Jimeno and McLoughlin were numbers 18 and 19. Then Jason Thomas rode to the hospital with Jimeno and vanished. Karnes stayed at the site, so his name went into the record and Thomas's did not. For five years nobody knew who the second Marine was. When Oliver Stone made a film about the rescue in 2006, the production had no idea and cast a white actor to play him. Thomas, who is Black, saw the trailer and quietly identified himself. Karnes went back into the Marine Corps and served two tours in Iraq. An accountant stopped for a haircut, a stranger pulled a uniform out of his trunk, and two of the twenty people who came out of that pile alive came out because of it.