[somber brass music]
- Vaughn Allex: I didn't know what I had done.
It wasn't until the next day, September 12th,
that I started finding out what happened.
I came to work, and people wouldn't look at me in the eye.
And they handed me the manifest for the flight.
I just stared at it for a second and then I looked up, I go,
"I did it, didn't I?"
I checked in a family.
It was a retiree and his wife.
I had time to talk to them.
There was a student group, and I checked in
a lot of those kids and parents, teachers.
And, uh, they were gone.
They were just all gone.
Once it became known, people didn't talk to me.
And I had this wild kind of thing in my mind
that everything that happened on September 11th
was my fault personally.
That I could've changed it.
I felt there was no place for me in the world.
There were all these support groups
and I didn't belong there,
because how do I sit in a room with people that are,
that are mourning and crying and they're like,
"What's your role in this whole thing?"
"Well, I checked in a couple of the hijackers
and made sure they got on the flight."
I might go weeks or months
and everything would be just going along fine,
and then there'd be something that would trigger it.
I was checking in somebody and what she said was,
"My husband got killed on September 11th."
And what I heard was,
"You killed my husband on September 11th."
You know, you don't really move past it,
it's still always there in some form.
But now, you know, I'm able to talk about it.
I mean I feel like in some ways,
I've really have come out of a shadow
and I'm back in the light now.
["The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan" by Chris Zabriskie]