Mike Benfante IN HIS OWN WORDS

Benfante wasnt a reghter, he was a salesman working on the 81st oor of the North Tower when the rst plane hit. Not only did he organize his entire team and get them to the stairway within four minutes, but on his way down he saw a woman in a wheelchair who needed help and carried her down 68 ights of stairs and into an ambulance minutes before the tower imploded.

9/11 SURVIVORS 10 YEARS LATER

My life now? Well, its not the way it was ten years ago, I can tell you that. Once youve seen certain things they cant be unseen, or unremembered. I remember all of it. It sits in me. It sits in me every day I wake up. Hows my life today? Its different. I dont count on sleep. Im more cautious in many ways. Trauma changes you. Youre still you but fundamentally, almost molecularly, rearranged. Its like when you have children for the first time (if youve ever had children). Theres just a whole new standard for whats important to you. 9/11 did that to me. You ask me what Ive learned? Im not sure, really. But I know that on that day, I learned that for whatever measure of human cruelty exist in the world there is a hundred-fold measure of human decency ready to respond to it. What confuses me is how much of that human decency the countless and unrecorded acts of kindness, aid and mercy that happened on that day were lost on so many in the years that followed. My hope is that we can remember that higher calling so many heard and acted upon when the fire came and let it be the call we answer every morning, fire or no fire. Benfante encourages us all to commemorate 9/11 each year with random acts of kindness for strangers, like the one that he did on 9/11 when no one was watching. He says that through seless actions we remind ourselves that were all in this together, and that we can survive anything as a nation. Mike Benfante has written a book called Relectant Hero a memoir of his most intimate thoughts immediately before, during, and in the decade following 9/11, along with his reections of who we are and where weve come as a nation. A Distinctive Style will interview Mike Benfante for the Fall 2011 issue, and he would like 3 of our readers to receive an autographed copy of his book Relectant Hero.
24 A DiSTiNCTive STyle . CoM

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PHOTO CREDIT: U.S. Air Force Photo