The Red Bandanna

“From the time he began to play sports, Welles epitomized the try-hard guy, the striver, the kid wringing out whatever ability he has through practice and will. A streak of fearlessness was useful too, as an available substitute for physical genius.”

Welles exemplifies the adage that hard work is worth more than raw talent. Welles is small in stature but big in spirit, and his dedicated effort overcomes physical limitations to make him an asset on any team. His fearlessness will stand him in good stead when the 9/11 disaster requires that he walk calmly through danger to help others. 

“Eleven. Where does that age fall? Both feet still planted firmly in the grass of boyhood, but starting to peer over the fence, to pull gently away from the absolute rule of home, to examine its laws—deciding when to apply and what to obey, and which to amend or ignore.”

Adolescence challenges everyone, and Welles is no exception. His occasional youthful high spirits are tempered by his love for his family, his great respect for his father’s leadership, and his overarching desire to help others. The energy of teen life finds a rare focus in Welles’s generous spirit. 

“For Welles, it was also a time to have a taste of bullying, that phenomenon as old as schooling itself. Boys, like little nation-states in blue jeans and striped shirts, tested one another. Some were neutral, some targets, others aggressors.”

Boys and men will poke and prod one another, testing for weakness, and, especially, testing for strength of character. Most men do so to be sure that others will make good friends or teammates; some do so out of malice. Welles takes a casual ribbing with good nature, but he is short in stature growing up and must literally fight his way out of bullying situations. This grit in his nature serves him well to be brave in the coming disaster. 

“At the interview, Welles was asked, ‘What would you say if I told you we weren’t going to pay you anything this summer?’ ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘The experience will really be worth it.’ ‘Of course we are going to pay you,’ the interviewer said. ‘But I like your attitude.’”

Not only is Welles a generous person, he’s also smart: he recognizes a good opportunity when he sees one. Though he doesn’t yet understand all the ins and outs of salary negotiations, he already possesses an instinct for saying the right thing and harmonizing diplomatically with others. 

“‘I think I want to be a New York City firefighter.’ There it was. He said it. Aloud. To his father.”

It’s been in Welles’s blood since childhood, and his two years as a volunteer fireman help seal the deal. Nothing, not even the lure of big money as an investment banker, can long keep him from his true calling. 

“When did you stop? When did you put the hope away, shifting it from something real to something . . . lesser? As the beach house forever not built, the grand trip always postponed, the pursuit never begun? When did the dream leave you as an aspiration and float off into the province of the never-to-be?”

It’s a question most people must ask themselves, whether their life path is taking them toward their dreams or away. Commitments can build up until there is little or no escape. Welles recognizes early on in his business career that his true passion lies elsewhere. His response is intelligent: he begins a systematic plan to move toward becoming a New York fireman while continuing his Wall Street work, which already has begun to provide him with a nest egg that will help make up for the lesser salary of his most deeply desired vocation. 

“‘He wasn’t the biggest guy,’ Mangia recalled. ‘He wasn’t the loudest guy. He was just somebody thrilled to be a part of the team, who didn’t shy away from anything.’”

Welles’s fearlessness and enthusiasm for challenging work gives him a head start on the road to success in any career. He must labor hard in sports training to make up for his small size and lack of raw talent; this builds in him habits of persistence and grit that are essential, not only in sports, but in high-end financial work as well as firefighting. 

“For the father, the picture calls forth a simple one-word caption. In the boy’s posture, in his open face and eight-year-old frame, in his smile and his lean forward, it’s already there, in the cells of his being—the attitude and the code, the call and the reply. Two syllables. One word. Ready.”

More than anything, it is Welles’s character, strong and vital from a young age, that gives him the wherewithal to become a great sports player, a success in business, and, ultimately, one of the most celebrated heroes in recent American history.

“You’re twenty-four. You’re ready. You’re young. The hours are yours, until the last one arrives. If you knew this might be that time, this could be the end, this may be the very last hour you have to spend, what would you do? And what if the hour, with all its horror and loss, its panic and shock, still somehow gave you a choice—to fly from risk, to escape, to live? What would you do, then, in the last hour of your life?”

The book makes clear that, were he to know that his time inside the South Tower on 9/11 would be his last hour on earth, Welles would simply shrug and head back up the stairs, searching for people to rescue. 

“American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, a Boeing 767 jet with eighty-one passengers and eleven crew aboard, was carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel and traveling at 465 miles per hour when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.”

It’s a darkly ingenious invention, to convert a peaceful, everyday airliner into a devastating weapon that will take down one of the central buildings of the American economy. The attack is planned carefully; the plane is freshly loaded with enough jet fuel to wreak tremendous destruction, and the plane’s speed is calculated to convert the energy of flight into the destructive force of a bomb. 

"It took ten seconds for the tower’s 750 million tons of heavy steel and concrete to drop, erased from the skyline, a sudden phantom. The energy released was an enormous bomb, creating dust storms and debris fields. Nearly all matter within and beneath the tower was crushed flat in those ten seconds, driven down fifty, sixty, seventy feet beneath the street. The collapse strained the bedrock below the building as it compressed cars and trucks and emergency vehicles, all absorbing the impossible weight and violence of the fall.”

No one is fully prepared for the 9/11 disaster, especially the architects and engineers who construct the World Trade Center South Tower. When it falls, the relentless power of gravity unleashes a terrible destructive power as the building pummels downward. In retrospect, the speed of the fall can be analyzed and understood mathematically, but its tremendous force, and the utterly complete destruction it generates in mere seconds, is hard to comprehend. 

“The last alarm has sounded for our brother. To Welles has come that last call. It is the call from which there is no turning away, The imperative and final order, Of the great chief and captain of us all . . .”

Firemen go to work each day knowing it can be their last. Welles understands this, too, yet he steps up without hesitation. Death cannot be undone, and when such a loss occurs, it is to the living to reconcile its finality and to honor the departed. 

“The death of a child before the parents, the fracturing of life’s cycle, the interruption of generations. A permanent emptiness. It is more profound than terror. Terror fades. Grief lasts.”

It’s one thing to lose a parent but quite another to lose a child. Such a loss, the sheer wrongness of it, is nearly unendurable, and the pain never completely fades.  

“He was twenty-four. Those were hours in a day, not years in a life. Not a quarter century reached, not a woman courted and married, no children expected and born, no family of his own to love and raise. He would never have them. The deepest, richest parts of his life, the challenges accepted and rewards gained, the sunsets over the river and the trips back home, the gifts opened and the failures absorbed, all of it interrupted, stopped.”

A young man of such promise halted by tragedy just as he is getting started can seem so unfair, and yet there’s no way to fix it. The sadness would be even worse were it not for the fact that Welles at least lived fully the few years allotted to him and then died a hero. 

“For the first few months, nearly every time she stepped outside the front door, she was unable to return without friends and neighbors offering an embrace or a gesture of comfort. All of it was well meaning, but also exhausting and emptying. There was nowhere in town to go without all who saw her knowing whom she had lost, and how she’d lost him. Alison would end up comforting others who were trying to help her.”

It’s ironic that people in the throes of an agonizing loss often are offered condolences by others who themselves are struggling to come to terms with the same loss. At this point, the first people must break off from their sorrows to help the others. Sometimes this can help them begin to reckon with the pain. In Alison’s case, however, so many people approached her with shared sadness that she became overwhelmed. 

“They needed Welles to be found, and returned. They understood that this was a search that could end only in ritual, but the ritual mattered.”

There is a painful sense of incompleteness in a death when the body has not been recovered. The deceased’s loved ones need to say goodbye, and doing so without a body can seem to cheat the deceased as well as the survivors. For this reason, most cultures go to great lengths to respect remains with ritual traditions. Welles’s body is found at last, and the funeral finally can be held, which helps the Crowthers and the community to find a portion of the closure they need. 

“The date of Welles’s recovery, Tuesday, March 19, brought an odd measure of comfort. Their first child was born on a Tuesday. He died on a Tuesday. On a Tuesday, he was found. And, of course, on the nineteenth, his number in all things since his boyhood, chosen for nearly every jersey he wore, even down to the apartment number he shared with Chuck Platz in the city.”

Strange and eerie correlations haunt Welles’s death. His mother and sisters sense the tragedy as it unfolds; Alison later has the feeling that Welles’s spirit is with her, reassuring her that he’s ok. The coincidences of date hint at some greater purpose or plan and that Welles’s death is not in vain. Whether valid or not, these phenomena create small islands of stability in the chaos of grief and give some small reprieve to the family’s sufferings. 

“To be so close to an escape but to remain inside was not coincidence. Likely, it was a choice. Welles made it. He was helping. He was at work.”

One can argue all day about whether Welles and the FDNY personnel had a chance to escape, but the truth is that they all would have stayed as long as they believed they still had an opportunity to rescue others. For people like these, the danger isn’t an issue, and the choice to help is given. 

“For those Welles left, there was a simple fabric in the absence, a red piece of him that resisted any fading. Somehow, the bandanna mattered, its knot tying together his memory and example to those who still held them, and might perpetuate them.”

Welles is gone, but his bandanna stands in for him as a symbol of his good character, selflessness, and heroism. It also provides the sense that a little bit of that great man is still with us. 

“Wanamaker would die of cancer in 2010, his family believing his death was caused by the time he spent inhaling the toxic fumes at the site. Few could understand what the recovery workers endured, or their dedication.”

The tragedy of 9/11 has rippled out in widening circles over the years, affecting America deeply, changing world affairs, and afflicting many with wounds to the spirit that are hard to heal. That so many recovery workers subsequently succumb to illnesses, likely caused by exposure to toxic aerosols at the Ground Zero site, serves to remind us of the extent of the damage wrought, especially in the loss of so many heroic people. 

“[Welles] had a big laugh, a joy of life, and dreams of seeing the world. He worked in finance, but he had also been a volunteer firefighter. And after the planes hit, he put on that bandanna and spent his final moments saving others.”

President Obama, speaking at the dedication of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, singles out Welles as an exemplar of the heroism on 9/11. In the face of the losses suffered by Americans, Welles reminds us of who we are and who we can be in a crisis; his example is highly appropriate at the dedication of the museum.

“‘My husband, Jefferson, and I could not be more proud of our son,’ she said. ‘For us, he lives on in the people he helped and in the memory of what he chose to do that Tuesday in September. Welles believes that we are all connected as one human family, that we are here to look out for and to care for one another . . . It is our greatest hope,’ she said, her voice ringing through the hall, ‘that when people come here and see Welles’s red bandanna, they will remember how people helped each other that day. And we hope that they will be inspired to do the same, in ways both big and small. This is the true legacy of September 11.’”

This is Alison Crowther’s entire speech at the dedication of the National September 11 Memorial Museum on May 14, 2014. It speaks eloquently for itself. 

“‘We celebrated this game,’ Addazio said, ‘because we celebrated Welles. As a BC man. We celebrated his ability to put other people ahead of himself. Service to others, it’s what our university stands for. Someone who had the opportunity to do something for other people, and he paid the ultimate sacrifice to do that.’”

Boston College football coach Steve Addazio inspires his team to play hard in honor of school alumnus Welles Crowther, and the unranked team defeats national contender USC at home 37-31. Welles has come to symbolize teamwork and self-sacrifice to many sports stars and teams.