For 9/11 Survivor, Every Day Is Sept. 11

CAREFREE, Ariz.—The 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 has passed. For most people, life moves on.

Bob Jenkins keeps driving.

His dark gray Mustang GT convertible is difficult to miss. An eagle in red and white enamel stretches across the hood, flanked by the twin towers and a message: “Never Forget 9/11.”

The rest of the car bears similar images.

“I’ll pull up to a stoplight, and people will give me a thumbs up or honk. Some people don’t say anything,” Jenkins said.

“I drive just to remind people—just to keep the image of 9/11 alive.”

By his own account, Jenkins should have died that day.

After the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m., he was on the 39th floor of the north tower with no clear way out.

His military training taught him not to panic. He found a stairwell and began moving down, one floor at a time, until sunlight struck his face and he could breathe again.

What worries Jenkins most is that future generations will have no connection to that day from a quarter century ago. That Sept. 11, 2001, will become just another entry in the history books, just another date that comes around once per year.

So he keeps driving the Mustang as a rolling memorial.

Jenkins, 71, said he never planned it that way. He never intended to become a mobile advocate for remembering the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.

But he felt that an entire generation was being born for whom 9/11 was just an abstraction.

The retired contractor from Carefree, Arizona, had walked down 39 flights through choking smoke. There had to be a way to make the fall of the World Trade Center real for people who had never experienced it.

One day in 2018, a former client and retired New York City detective mentioned the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, and it gave Jenkins an idea.

He applied for the program, and used part of the money to purchase a Mustang GT that was the color of night. A friend who detailed cars offered to wrap it in 9/11 imagery as a tribute.

Jenkins didn’t need to say a word. He raised both index fingers to represent the twin towers. His friend knew immediately what he wanted. An eagle on the hood. The north and south towers against the New York City skyline. The Statue of Liberty on a rear quarter panel.

On the driver’s and passenger sides, two New York City firefighters raise the flag at Ground Zero.

A message for all to see: “Never Forget 9/11.”

“This car doesn’t belong to me—it belongs to the people that died,” Jenkins told The Epoch Times.

“It’s the only reason I have this car. It’s the only reason I’m doing this.”

Nearly 3,000 people died in the terror attacks, including 343 firefighters and 72 law enforcement officers. Thousands more survivors and first responders have since developed 9/11-related illnesses.

A Beautiful Morning

Jenkins carries more than the memory of Sept. 11, 2001. He has dealt with emotional trauma and physical ailments in the years that followed.

He has had three types of cancer, which he believes were caused by exposure to toxic chemicals inside the 110-story north tower.

Much of that morning remains clear in Jenkins’s mind, although some memories are too painful to revisit.

Sept. 11, 2001, began as a crisp Lower Manhattan morning. The sky was a perfect blue. The previous day’s heat and humidity had broken. Jenkins was on his way to work as a salesman for a Lehman Brothers contractor, coffee in hand.

“It was just the kind of weather that makes you feel good,” Jenkins said.

His team hailed a cab and arrived at the World Trade Center at about 8 a.m. for a morning meeting. People streamed through the doors.

“It was like being in a vacuum getting sucked into the building,” Jenkins said.

He grabbed his ID tag and headed for the elevator.

A conference room had been reserved on the 39th floor. Everybody sat down, pleasantries were exchanged, and the meeting began.

“Nothing fancy, no water, no coffee, just you’re there to do business in a conference room,” Jenkins said.

He said he was briefing attendees on the purpose of the meeting when a violent explosion suddenly erupted above them.

The room jolted.

Everyone froze, eyes wide.

‘This Is Where I Die’

“It was quiet for a nanosecond,” Jenkins said, “and then you felt that energy—that wave, that concussion that came down through the building.”

His Marine training as a combat engineer took over. Familiar with explosives, Jenkins stayed calm.

“A lot of people didn’t realize that a plane had hit the building,” Jenkins said. “The building just started to convulse back and forth.

“Right off the bat, I knew this was not an earthquake.”

Logic told him that the elevators were probably broken. There was no way to climb down from the 39th floor through a window and survive. He feared the stairwells were impassable.

He got up and made his way toward the exit and the windows, then looked out over the city.

There was the Statue of Liberty, the Hudson River, the streets below—and above it all, that “beautiful cobalt blue sky,” Jenkins said.

He saw what looked like white ticker tape, “like snowflakes,” and thought, “God, how beautiful—like parade confetti.”

It was paper and documents blown from the floors above, Jenkins said.

The building swayed back and forth, and he imagined it toppling. He put his hands in his pockets, felt the loose change, and a terrible thought entered his mind.

“This is where I die,” Jenkins said.

“Jumping would have killed me. I couldn’t take the elevator because the elevators were out. The stairs, in my mind, were inoperable.”

As quickly as it started, the building stopped shaking with an audible “clunk.” A woman shouted that there had been an explosion in the mechanical room on the 42nd floor.

One way or another, Jenkins was determined to get out of the north tower and reunite with his family—“at least, I was going to try.”

He rushed to the nearest stairwell, but the crush of people brought him to a crawl. A man in a wheelchair blocked the way on a lower level.

Several stories below, a woman having difficulty keeping pace was slowing the flow.

As they moved down, first responders raced up. Smoke and jet fuel filled the stairwell, making it difficult to breathe.

“At one point, I felt we were going to die of smoke inhalation,” Jenkins recalled.

He remembers counting the floors going down—9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 …

Then, a door opened. He was outside, able to breathe again.

Jenkins was hyperventilating, soaked in sweat, water, and jet fuel.

“I opened the door [to the ground level]. I looked at all the people. I looked at the smoke,” he said.

Jenkins realized he had left his overnight bag inside and thought about going back.

He turned toward the building, took a step, then stopped.

His body seemed to resist, as if invisible hands were gripping his shoulders and pulling him back. He remained on the sidewalk until he finally reconnected with his team.

“That’s the only reason I’m sitting here at this moment—that’s the only reason I’m alive,” Jenkins said.

Survivor’s Guilt

Others were not as fortunate.

From the sidewalk, Jenkins watched people jumping from windows to their deaths, falling like rag dolls.

“I turned around to all these people, and I yelled: ‘Folks, this is not live entertainment. I will not stand here and watch people commit suicide.’”

The man in the wheelchair, the woman blocking the stairwell, the people falling—those are the memories Jenkins said remain hardest to live with.

At first, there was guilt, too, for having survived.

“I was crying hysterically. All I could picture was a man and woman jumping off the building. I was crying like a baby,” Jenkins said.

Twenty-five years later, Jenkins still has the ID card from that day. He plans to keep it for the rest of his life.

He started a webpage, survivor911.com, and is working with Indie Books International to publish his memoir, “Stairway to Heaven,” an account of what preceded 9/11 and the events of that tragic day.

“Part of the reason I wrote the book is that we have people that were not alive then. Or they were so young that they have no knowledge,” Jenkins said.

“It’s now just becoming history. I’m afraid to let it go.”

Jenkins drives his Mustang GT with the top down and the black leather seats immaculate whenever he gets the chance.

He has not met many survivors. Others have told him they would have been in the towers that morning if not for the flu or a missed subway connection.

For Jenkins, those stories are a chilling reminder of how many lives were affected by Sept. 11—and why the day must not be forgotten.

Forgetting is the enemy of 9/11 as the years pass, he said.

“I call it the memorial anniversary,” he said. “There’s nothing to celebrate.”

At that moment, a woman overheard Jenkins telling his story, apologized for interrupting, and gave him a hug.

Before leaving, she said she had to see the memorial Mustang.

Moving On

Jenkins feels that he has come to terms with the terror and aftermath of 9/11. He considers himself fortunate to have had only one nightmare.

In it, he found himself at the Stanley Hotel, made famous by Stephen King’s “The Shining.” He was walking down a hallway near the steel elevators when a little gremlin approached and stopped at his feet.

“We missed you the first time,” the apparition said. “We’ll get you next time.”

Jenkins said, “That freaked me out.”

The nightmare stayed with him. So did the lessons he learned that late summer morning in Lower Manhattan:

Never panic.

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Honor first responders.

Remember 9/11.

Jenkins named his book “Stairway to Heaven” to chronicle a lifetime of experiences leading up to that day.

“Everyone is on a ‘stairway to heaven,’” he said, but not everything that glitters is gold.

There is darkness in the world.

On this day, the Arizona sun is bright, thousands of miles from New York City’s ground zero. His Mustang waits beneath a shady tree in the parking lot.

Jenkins gets behind the wheel, starts the engine, and pulls onto the road.

He knows where he has to go—and he has many miles left before the day he gives up his keys.