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So terribly sad the guilt this innocent man has borne.

On Sept. 11, He Checked Hijackers Onto Flight 77. It's Haunted Him Ever Since

Listen to the audio:
[npr.org]hijackers-onto-flight-77-its-haunted-him-ever-since

On Sept. 11, 2001, two men arrived at the ticket counter late for American Airlines Flight 77 out of Dulles International Airport. This was before the days of the Transportation Security Administration, when airport security was quite different from what it is today. At the time, the man working at the counter, Vaughn Allex, followed procedure and checked them through.

Those two men were among the five hijackers who crashed that flight into the Pentagon — killing 189 people, including themselves.

"I didn't know what I had done," Allex recalls, on a recent visit with StoryCorps, in Potomac Falls, Va. He didn't find out until the next day what had happened. "I came to work and people wouldn't look at me in the eye." Officials handed him 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?' "

He had checked in a retiree's family on that flight. He had checked in a student group, their parents, their teachers.

"And they were gone. They were just all gone."

Once it became clear what had happened, Allex says people stopped talking to him. He began to think that he was to blame for everything that had happened on Sept. 11. That perhaps he could have changed it, if only he'd done something differently.

And for Vaughn, knowing that many around him were struggling with the greater grief of a lost loved one made attending support groups uncomfortable. "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?' "

What could he say to them? "Well, I checked in a couple of the hijackers and made sure they got on the flight."

Weeks and even months passed like this, when sometimes even a simple mention of Sept. 11 could trigger a brutal wave of guilt. Once, when a customer told him her husband had been killed on that day, what he misheard instead was, "You killed my husband on Sept. 11."

Allex says he's never been able to fully move past the memory. He says it remains with him always in some form or another. But with time, he has managed to start talking about it.

"I feel like in some ways I've — I really have come out of a shadow over the last 15 years," he says, "and I'm — I'm back in the light now."

Apunzelle 7 Sep 11
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4 comments

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0

He has no reason to feel guilt. The real guilt and blame belong to Cheney and maybe also W., as well as all those in the intelligence community who I have no doubt at least knew 9-11 was going to happen and let it happen, all so Cheney could have his war with Iraq and get their oil, as well as provide the excuse for the War On Terror, the Patriot Act, and other policies to take away our freedoms, civil liberties, and rights to dissent. An added bonus was that 9-11 allowed W. to suddenly rocket in popularity and stature as the country predictably rallied around him and he went from looking like a doofus to a Churchill-like statesman. I'm a pretty cynical person, but even I don't want to think the Cheney and some of his allies in the intelligence community were actively, instead of passively involved in the attack on that day, but either way, it was obvious the government was involved in the demolition and collapse of Building 7 at the World Trade Center, so they knew something was going to happen and were ready that day to work with it to serve their ends.

1

He did nothing wrong, had no way of knowing what was going to happen, and followed the rules and regulations established by American Airlines and the U.S. government. He shouldn't feel any guilt. If the terrorists had picked a different check-in line or different airline it almost certainly would have turned out exactly the same way.

2

What a terrible thing to carry around with you when there was no conceivable way of knowing what was going to happen. Like survivors guilt when a bomb goes off and you were not affected because you went to the bathroom, but your friends were killed.

2

There were 17 other Muslim terrorists and three other planes got hijacked. It wasn't his fault, the authorities were warned. There was a foiled plan 2 years earlier to take down Eiffel Tower 12/31/99 for Y2K. They should have been better prepared. Locking the barn door after they stole the horse.

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