Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Film

Tragic test

Pulled from the massacre of 9/11, Port Authority Officer Will Jimeno lives to tell a harrowing and hopeful story, the heart of Oliver Stone's film World Trade Center.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published August 4, 2006

[AP photo]

Actor Michael Pena, left, greets Will Jimeno, and actor Nicolas Cage greets John McLoughlin, right, their real-life counterparts, on the film set.

	[Getty Images (2002)]
	Jimeno, right, and McLoughlin make an appearance on NBC’s Today show. They were among the few to survive the towers’ collapse.

MIAMI

Will Jimeno's left leg is a 9/11 memorial, a daily reminder of the brutality of terrorist hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, and lives lost when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

The leg is horribly scarred, a swirl of bunched flesh and tissue grafts Jimeno displays with disarming matter-of-factness. He'll prove a finger fits into a hole in his inner thigh surgeons couldn't fill. He runs his hand over a scabbed pattern of mesh where skin wouldn't hold firm, down to a plastic brace securing a foot left limp by severed nerves.

Despite chronic pain, Jimeno, 38, walks with barely a limp, a symbol of suffering and survival. He is one of only 20 people pulled alive from the Twin Towers wreckage, a Port Authority police officer who was in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 doing his duty.

He wouldn't be alive today except for many other people doing theirs.

Jimeno's 13-hour ordeal, trapped under tons of crushing mortar and metal until rescuers dug him free, is at the core of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, opening Wednesday. The film is exceedingly tough to watch at times, as Jimeno played by Michael Pena and fellow Port Authority Officer John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) endure watching colleagues die, sudden firestorms and debris shifts, even an overheated handgun wildly spraying bullets. All while excruciating pain measures their resolve to live.

Jimeno constantly relives Sept. 11, 2001. He says during an interview in Miami, where he is promoting the film, that the day he'll be at peace with what happened is the day he'll be buried. "And the day I'll get the only answer I want is when I see God and I can ask: 'Why me? Why did I survive?'

"Maybe this movie will help some people. Maybe that's just a small piece of why."

Jimeno calls Stone's version of events about 95 percent accurate. The other 5 percent is a tiny bit of dramatic license in Jimeno's delirious vision of Jesus, and a lot of restraint.

"You couldn't show the way things really were and still have a PG-13 movie," he says. "Twenty or 30 years from now there will be a movie about 9/11 that shows you everything. But people will say, 'Hey, my son or daughter, you want to see the good that came out of that day? Watch this film.' "

What they'll see are first responders risking their lives for others, their families and friends awaiting any news from ground zero. They'll see fatigued rescuers refusing to quit, joined by volunteers such as Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), a former Marine with no official authority to be at the scene, who discovered Jimeno and McLoughlin in the rubble.

They'll see how Jimeno's then-pregnant wife, Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), clung to hopes that her husband would survive. Gyllenhaal's performance is strong, yet it doesn't fully convey Allison's devotion and backbone, instantly recognizable when she joins Will for an interview.

She says nothing he did on Sept. 11, 2001, surprised her.

"I could've predicted everything he did," she says. "I knew he was in that building although nobody actually told me that. I knew he would have left midtown Manhattan to go to the World Trade Center to help. I didn't need anybody to tell me that.

"My one question that I just needed to know for a fact was: Did he go into the building before it collapsed? I wasn't sure if he made it down there before that happened. I remember trying to calculate in my head, because I spoke to him (by telephone) at 9 o'clock and he was still in midtown. I didn't know he was going. He didn't tell me that. But I remember trying to figure out how long it would've taken him to get there."

Will Jimeno had volunteered to join McLoughlin, a veteran sergeant who helped create a terrorist response strategy when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. "Sarge knew that building like the back of his hand," Jimeno says. One thing his U.S. Navy service taught the Colombian immigrant was to trust who you follow into combat: "That's the difference between living and dying."

Even McLoughlin's insight was useless in such a nightmarish scenario. Nobody ever expected the nation's tallest buildings to collapse like a house of cards.

"Sgt. McLoughlin said if he knew the towers could come down he never would've taken us into harm's way," Jimeno says. "We knew we were going to see bad things. We knew we might get hurt. But we never thought we might die."

Jimeno and McLoughlin were among five Port Authority officers rounding up oxygen tanks and hot suits for rescue searches when the first tower fell. Within seconds they and thousands of civilians and other first responders were smothered by debris. Stone's harrowing movie captures Jimeno and McLoughlin's shared will to survive, urging each other to stay awake and optimistic, making noises to attract searchers and, almost unbelievably, cracking jokes.

"You've got to know police humor," Jimeno says. "In a bad situation humor alleviates a lot of tension. We talked about my wife's cooking, about barbecues, anything to keep your mind off what was happening. It also helps the rescuers because at that point they could die at any moment.

"If you're going to die, I think you'd rather go out with a smile than terror. We had already been through so much terror, as well as everybody on the outside."

In the midst of calamity, Jimeno experienced a moment of spiritual calm, inspiring one of the film's most memorable scenes.

"It was really close (in the movie) to how it happened," Jimeno says. "I had made my peace with God. You've got to understand that we've been crushed, we've been burnt, we've been shot at. I wanted to die.

"I closed my eyes, made my peace with God, said thank you for my family, my friends, my sergeant, everything. I knew we were all going to heaven.

"Everything went black and I remember seeing, first, a field of tall blades of grass. Then, way in the back, a lake with some trees, real peaceful. Then I saw a finger coming toward me and it was glowing. Then I saw this person coming toward me. I could not see the face but in my heart I already knew who it was. It was Jesus. He didn't have the harp and stuff. Those are things Oliver is using to convey to the audience and I can appreciate that.

"But I just saw a man and he had a bottle of water. When I was making my peace I said when I get to heaven I hope I can have something to drink. My mouth felt like a beach. He never made it to me. I snapped out of it. That's when I told Sarge we're going to get the 'f' out of here. That gave me the will to keep on fighting."

Hours later, Jimeno was hoisted on a stretcher into the evening. He remembers seeing stars where the Twin Towers should have been.

"I asked a simple question: 'Where is everything?' " Jimeno says. "Somebody told me: 'It's all gone.' Nobody needed to say anything else. It didn't take a rocket scientist to know what happened. I didn't know the extent of the casualties but I knew we were going to have a lot of deceased people. That was devastating."

It still is, again raising the question (after United 93 earlier this year): Is it too soon to revisit 9/11 in cinematic form? Jimeno thinks it isn't soon enough.

"I respect the fact that some people will say they can't see this movie," he says. "If you're not ready to see this film, don't go see it. That's the freedom we have here. But I think you'll miss out on seeing the good aspects of that day.

"It's like watching the news every night. I don't care where I am in the country, the first thing you see is horror. But, man, when you get that story about one person helping another person it changes you.

"We're ready for this (movie) because people want to know the good of that day. Me and John are just vehicles. We're two little guys who are here because of the love and honor of so many people. That makes it not too soon."

Allison Jimeno adds: "We realize the opportunity we have here, to actually honor all the people from that day, to show all the good because we all know about the bad from that day. There was so much more than that. It's never too soon to let people know about the good."

Widows of two Port Authority officers killed on 9/11 publicly criticized Jimeno and McLoughlin for assisting Stone's movie, accepting a reported $200,000 each as creative consultants. Jimeno declined to comment on their complaints, but not his wife.

"People will always wonder why we opened ourselves up to all this," Allison Jimeno says. "Is there an agenda? For the most part, the people who are dead set on saying this shouldn't have been done and we're doing it for the wrong reason, I don't know if we'll ever be able to get through to them."

Will Jimeno retired from the Port Authority police force in 2004 after a promotion to detective and receiving the department's Medal of Honor. A few days after the towers collapsed, when Jimeno was still in critical condition, he told Allison he wanted to return to work. She understood, telling him: "Yes, that's what you are, a cop."

"That shows her belief in me," he said.

Their daughter, Olivia, was born a few months after 9/11. On this day in Miami, Will Jimeno wears a bracelet the 4-year-old gave him before leaving home. "She said, 'Daddy, I want you to wear this while you're gone because you're going to be fine and I'll see you when you come home.'

"People want to call me a hero but I don't buy that. I'm just a lucky individual, a cop doing his job. I hope I'm a hero to my daughter and that's it."

Steve Persall can be reached at (727) 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com.

[Last modified August 3, 2006, 11:14:12]