The Hero

"Our lives have changed forever."

The Afternoon of 9/11

On the afternoon of 9/11, three firefighters hoisted an American flag above the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center. Unbeknownst to them, about 30 feet beneath the ash-coated rubble, was a tiny, coffin-like space where a Port Authority cop named John McLoughlin was trapped. He would become the last rescue worker pulled alive from the collapsed towers.

For his new film, World Trade Center, director Oliver Stone chose Nicolas Cage to portray McLoughlin, 53. The resemblance between actor and real-life character is all in the eyes: sorrowful, hangdog, burdened.

McLoughlin, an even-tempered, reserved man, had been on the Port Authority police force for 22 years -- 12 assigned to the World Trade Center -- when he got word of the attack that September morning. "A plane just flew into the towers," his commanding officer shouted. "Get a group of cops. We're going down."

Within minutes, McLoughlin and a four-man team were at the complex, crossing its underground concourse level, making their way toward Tower One. Then, Tower Two fell.

"There was nothing but a brown wall rolling toward us," McLoughlin remembers. "We weren't going to survive if we stayed where we were. I told the guys to take cover in an elevator vestibule around the corner."

They were still running when the full weight of the tower crashed onto the ground-level plaza above them, slamming into the concourse and plunging McLoughlin and his men into a chaotic world of dust and concrete.

John McLoughlin met his wife, Donna, on a blind date in 1973. He was working as a banker and volunteer firefighter in Massapequa, Long Island. "I was instantly attracted," says Donna. "He's got a tough exterior, but would bend over backward to help people. He was someone I wanted to spend my life with." The two have four children; in 2001, they ranged in age from 4 to 15.

Everything in the life of the McLoughlin family is divided into a pre-9/11 and post-9/11 time period. Pre-9/11, John juggled the demands of his work, while Donna stayed home with the kids. They filled their scarce free time with T-ball, soccer, Boy Scouts, and with barbecues on their lawn in a village north of New York City. It was a quiet, American Dream existence.

For Donna, being a police officer's wife was never easy. "You learn to assume the best until you hear otherwise," she says. So on 9/11, when hours went by with no word from her husband, she didn't panic. But when John's brother Patrick, himself a Port Authority veteran, pulled into the driveway and walked toward her, she momentarily lost it. "Do you have something to tell me?" she screamed. "Because if you do, you can get out!" What Patrick had to tell her was that her husband had gone into the Trade Center, and was now missing.

Trapped Under the Rubble

"I wasn't injured, but I was trapped," McLoughlin says. "A slab fell across me. The wall of debris at my feet was solid. My right arm was locked underneath me. My helmet was stuck."

He called out to his men, but only two answered: Dominick Pezzulo and Will Jimeno. Jimeno was pinned and badly hurt, but Pezzulo managed to pull himself free. McLoughlin instructed Pezzulo to try and get Jimeno out before going for help. "So," he says, lowering his eyes, "Dominick was doing his best at freeing Will when the North Tower fell." A chunk of concrete landed on Pezzulo, killing him.

A shower of twisted metal shifted the debris surrounding McLoughlin. "That's when I got nailed," he says. "I was on my side on a cement slab, my knees and hips were between two pieces of concrete, and the bones were being crushed together. I didn't know how I was going to survive, the pain was so bad."

Sweaty, thirsty and alone, the two men began talking about their families. As the afternoon wore on, balls of flame fell into the hole, and the heat burned Jimeno's arm. Later, Pezzulo's overheated gun fired, narrowly missing them. Always, there was the grinding pain. They prayed together.

Late that evening, each man began making his peace with the idea of death. Then Jimeno heard a muffled voice shouting, "U.S. Marines!"

"Hey!" he shouted. "Down here!"

Within minutes, a group of rescuers gathered above them. "There was such relief," says McLoughlin, "knowing we were going to get out of there, that we were going to live." It took the workers three hours to extricate Jimeno, who, today, still has nerve damage and wears a brace. McLoughlin was in much deeper.

Donna, who left the children with friends and rushed to Manhattan to be near John, was approached by the rescuers at dawn. They told her that they might have to amputate John's legs. Did they have her permission? "Just get him out," she said.

They crawled through smoking wreckage to reach McLoughlin, and were finally able to free him without amputating. At about 7 a.m. on September 12, 2001, he was pulled from the rubble -- legs and all.

A New Lease on Life

The years since have not been easy. McLoughlin spent the first six weeks in a medically induced coma, touch- and-go the whole way. So much of his lower body was crushed that he's had large sections of destroyed muscle tissue excised. He wears suspenders every day now because there's no longer enough flesh around his hips to keep his pants up.

His family life was upended as well. In the early days after 9/11, everything revolved around John's needs. He spent two and a half months in New York's Bellevue Hospital, seven weeks at a rehabilitation center in Rockland County, then three years as an outpatient, enduring grueling therapy sessions that left him so exhausted he could do little more than come home and sleep. For the first 18 months, he used a wheelchair, so the house had to be retrofitted. At times McLoughlin lost patience. "I'd get frustrated," he admits. "It's the simple little things in life that you can't do anymore. One of the kids leaves a sock on the floor and I can't get my wheelchair over it."

Defying doctors' expectations, he persevered, walking with two canes, then one, and now on his own thanks to braces on his lower legs. He can drive again. He still struggles with medical issues, but having retired from the Port Authority, he can spend his time coaching his kids' teams, serving as an assistant Scoutmaster and being a full-time dad.

McLoughlin hasn't had psychological counseling. "I haven't felt the need," he says. But he's received amazing support from friends, family, and total strangers. "Donna picks up on it when I'm starting to get down. She's right there to bring me out of it."

One summer day in 2004, the McLoughlins gathered in the backyard. The kids were in the pool, friends were visiting and the grill was on. "I looked around," McLoughlin explains, "and all of a sudden I realized things were kind of back to normal."

"It's a new kind of normal," Donna says. "That's what we're searching for. Our lives have changed forever."

"Seeing the planes crash into the buildings and the towers fall down still makes me uncomfortable," McLoughlin admits. "But when people ask if it's too soon for a film, many of us feel that we need to be reminded of the human suffering that went on that day. If we forget, we're allowing ourselves to be set up for another hit."

Out of a deeply felt duty to honor the dead, McLoughlin helped Nicolas Cage and the other actors in World Trade Center reconstruct what happened to him and his colleagues on 9/11. "We were the last to see many of the rescuers alive," McLoughlin says. "Only we can tell the story of their heroism. People have to understand that kind of bravery." What he doesn't seem to realize is that kind of bravery is also his own.