DETROIT (WXYZ) — It’s been 25 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Many can remember where we were when the planes came in. And for many, it’s the day everything changed.
This is especially true for local commercial photographer Brad Ziegler, who might have been one of the last people on top of the World Trade Center.
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Ziegler has documented the lives of hundreds of World War II veterans in remarkable, raw detail through his photographs. But it started with 9/11.
While the connection might not make sense at first, Ziegler took me back to that day and his remarkable story.
“I was there on the 10th at 3:30 in the afternoon. That was our call time. And usually, we’d have two or three of them back to back, and I was putting my gear — sorry, I’m going to get emotional. I was putting my gear together on the 11th when the first plane hit,” Ziegler recalled.
Ziegler was working as an aspiring fashion photographer in New York City in 2001. He had been doing photo shoots on the observation deck of the World Trade Center on Sept. 10. The next morning, he watched on live TV as the planes tore through the twin towers.
“I could look out my window or go to the front step of my apartment and see where the smoke was, when it eventually started heavily smoking,” he said. “For me, that meant look how close I was to it — on top of the fact that I was supposed to be there in the afternoon.”
Ziegler recalls seeing the raw moments in person and on television.
“Seeing that explosion penetrate the building will never leave my mind, watching a rain of glass,” he said. “The other one that sticks in my mind, I think like anybody, there was no delay on the feed that I remember on the 'Today' show… that was the most horrific thing I’d ever seen.”
In the days following the attack, he went back into Manhattan.
“What I remember vividly is coming up the stairs at Lexington on the subway and seeing black ash floating through the air and looking down the street and there was not a car on the road,” Ziegler said. “It was a ghost town.”
He says it would take him 20 years before he would finally be able to go back to Ground Zero.
“There was no work in New York for months,” Ziegler said. “And it changed the trajectory of the path of my life. It ultimately is what brought me here to Michigan.”
Ziegler’s career pivoted from fashion to photographing campaign-style images of rugged beauty. Ziegler explained to me that the HBO series “Band of Brothers” also came out in September of 2001, and it brought to the forefront the history of World War II veterans.
“And for some reason, it struck me. And I though wow, it would be really amazing to go and photograph some of these guys. They have such incredible stories.”
It made him want to put together a portrait series one day about World War II veterans.
“I witnessed my generation’s Pearl Harbor. The best way I knew how to pay that back to their generation was to document them and photograph and donate my time and make sure their stories are told, so we could learn the lesson,” Ziegler said.
After hearing a veteran on the radio in Michigan one day, Ziegler had the idea to get four World War II veterans on a working B-17 bomber and document their stories. Willow Run Airport and the Yankee Air Museum got the pilots and picked up the tab. Ziegler took the pictures. Hour Magazine printed the story.
“We spent the day going through all of their stories,” he said. “We landed. They all hugged me and told me it was better than the day they came home from the war. I remained friends with them up until they passed.”
Ziegler spent the next five years with Honor Flight Michigan taking pictures of hundreds of veterans as they got the chance to fly to Washington to experience — in person — the memorials honoring their service.
He says he often got to ask the veterans how the generations that came after could pay them back and he distinctly remembers one veteran’s answer.
“And that’s when he said ‘learn the lesson.’ I said ‘OK.’ A couple more times, I had other vets say something very similar. And finally, I wish I could remember his name, but he was sitting up front and he was leaning and I said OK, now I gotta ask: what’s the lesson?’ And he just smirked at me and he said ‘that’s for you to figure out.’”
Ziegler what the lesson means for him.
“For me, that lesson is to make sure that we don’t repeat that history, to make sure that younger generations are prepared and to always, always remember September 11th.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder from the events of 9/11, even though he wasn’t on the ground when the towers came down. But he says traumatic events don’t need to just be negative — they can project people into something else,just like 9/11 did in his life.
