A CHRONICLE OF HORROR AND DREADED ANTICIPATION

He took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to God, but of earthly things, Father Mychal Judge loved the men of the New York Fire Department above all others.

Rushing to the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September as its towers were turning into a hell of falling concrete and smoke, Judge, the FDNY's chaplain, saw one of his brother firefighters lying amid the wreckage. Moments after he lowered himself to the dying man to deliver the Catholic faith's last rights, Judge (being carried in photo above) was struck and mortally wounded by falling wreckage. Firemen carried the 68-year-old's body over blood-slicked streets to the sanctuary of a nearby church, then to the firehouse.

In the rush of news coverage of a man-made disaster too destructive for most Americans to absorb, the story of the chaplain dying while tending to the dying was one of the first points of loss that nation's citizens could grasp. It was far from the last. And as the United States' grief and vulnerability turned into righteous war fever, the world awaited military retaliation against suspected terrorist bases that seems certain to spread violence and political instability to the Middle East.

THE VICTIMS

Whoever masterminded the devastation of 11 September, commentators presumed it was intended as punishment for US policy in the Middle East. If the terrorists wanted to show Americans how it felt to be under fire, they achieved astonishing success. In less than an hour and a half, two hijacked commercial jets toppled the World Trade Center, another bludgeoned the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Investigators suspect that two more hijackings were planned but foiled when all flights in and to the US were grounded.

It was death wrapped in death. The firefighter who was given last rites by Judge died when he was struck by a woman who had thrown herself from an upper story to escape the licking flames. Running alongside Judge was firefighter Mike Angelini, who survived the disaster only to learn that his father and brother, also firefighters, had not. Judge, Angelini's brother and father--they were just three of the 350 firefighters presumed lost in the tower disaster. They, in turn, were a fraction of the total missing and presumed dead--perhaps as many as 7,000 people, among them scores from Britain, Pakistan and India, as many as 100 from Canada, more than 20 each from Japan and Australia and perhaps as many as 20 Egyptians.

MINUTES TO CHAOS

Since 11 September, the attacks have dominated the US national psyche like nothing since the Vietnam War, giving rise to a patriotism not seen there since World War II.

It began as a normal workday morning in New York's financial district. At 8:45am New York time, 3:45pm Cairo time, an American Airlines jet crashed into the World Trade Center's north tower. Flight 11 was scheduled to fly from the nearby Atlantic coast city of Boston across the country to Los Angeles on the Pacific and so was loaded with jet fuel. All on board and, it appears, the entire staff of Cantor FitzGerald were killed within minutes of the crash. That would have been tragedy and shock enough. Rescue workers headed in.

As confused workers tumbled down stairwells to evacuate the north tower, onlookers were stunned to see another incoming jet minutes later. At 9:03am, the second plane hit the south tower. It was a different carrier (United Airlines 175) on the same route (Boston to Los Angeles) with the same devastating stockpile of jet fuel. With the crash of Flight 175, the disaster outpaced the city's ability to respond and the nation's ability to comprehend. In Florida at 9:30am, President George W. Bush called the crashes an "apparent terrorist attack."

Federal officials closed New York airports at 9:17am and grounded all flights throughout the US some 20 minutes later. Then another American Airlines passenger jet, Flight 77, dipped nearly to the ground and flew straight into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US military, outside Washington, DC.

Flight 77, too, had just left a nearby airport, in Washington, with enough fuel to make it to Los Angeles. As the plane plowed through the thick building to its central courtyard, 64 people aboard died. 126 Pentagon workers are missing and believed dead, including a three-star general.

For Americans accustomed to feeling safe and secure, the next few hours were surreal and terrifying. The White House was evacuated. The President left Florida, but federal officials would not say where he was headed. Leaders of Congress went into hiding. Television commentators stuttered and hesitated.

As the heat of the blazes warped the towers' structural supports, the symbols of America's economic might crumbled. At 10:05am, the second tower hit became the first to collapse. Smoke, dust and rubble hit the street even as tenants of the office buildings were descending the stairs. Richard Bodmer described fire engines covered with ashes and an empty ambulance with its engine running and no emergency workers in sight. He told the publication The Sporting News: "Before I could understand what I was seeing, we were moving the body of a policeman crushed to death by a piece of the building."

Television commentators, unable to believe what they were reporting, turned fearfully to the other Trade Center tower but were immediately distracted. At 10:10am, the gouged side of the Pentagon caved in. Almost simultaneously came the final element of the tragedy: Another United Airlines flight, bound from the New York City area to San Francisco, slammed into the woods 80 miles from Pittsburgh. The plane's cockpit voice recorder would later recount a desperate struggle as passengers apparently decided to rebel against hijackers, leading to a crash far from an intended target.

As government buildings were evacuated, the other Trade Center tower fell at 10:28am. A domino effect of falling stories compressed the buildings to stumps surrounded by 450,000 tons of rubble. Rescue became impossible and emergency workers died. A wall of smoke and dust rolled across Manhattan. "That's when people really started to panic," Charlie Stuard told Time magazine. "A bunch of us jumped over a rail, onto the pilings on the East River, ready to jump in."

By 11am, the United Nations headquarters in New York had been ordered evacuated, along with all federal buildings in Washington. Israel closed its embassies worldwide. By noon, California airports shut.

Only at 1:04pm did the country's leader reappear on television--from a military base in the southern state of Louisiana, adding to the impression that the government of the world's mightiest nation has gone underground. Bush's reassurance: "Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."

So stunned were spectators that it seemed almost a footnote when, at 4pm, a 47-story building near the tower caught fire, later collapsing. By then, news media had already quoted US officials naming the country's Public Enemy Number One: Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi dissident linked to past terrorism including the bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen.

MASSIVE MANHUNT

A caustic outpouring of grief quickly mixed with angry calls for retribution. In reaction to smaller terror attacks in the past, US officials have launched quick military strikes after offering little evidence. That was the case in 1998, when the US, blaming bin Laden for embassy bombings, struck sites in Afghanistan and Sudan, countries it said had helped him.

This time, US leaders sensed that their public would demand a more complete retaliation. But world leaders said they would support military strikes only with sufficient evidence. That prompted a US and international investigation of unprecedented scale.

"Americans are asking, 'How will we fight and win this war'," Bush told Congress and a television audience on 20 September. "We will direct every resource at our command--every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence and every necessary weapon of war--to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network."

The FBI named 19 it suspected were suicide hijackers on board the flights, including Mohammed Atta of Egypt. As authorities questioned hundreds, their names were invariably Arabic. That fueled pockets of racist violence against Arab-Americans, with countless assaults and, at press time, at least three murders believed to have been racially motivated.

Among those currently under suspicion:

* Ayub Ali-Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath were arrested 11 September on a train they boarded after their plane was grounded. Investigative sources said the men had box cutters like those reportedly used in the hijackings.

* Ahmed Hannan, Farouk Ali-Hamoud and Karim Koubriti, who said they were from Morocco and Algeria, were arrested 18 September in Detroit. They were charged with possessing false passports.

* Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Algerian, was arrested 17 September in the Midwestern state of Minnesota, where he asked to be trained how to steer--but not to land--a jumbo jet.

* Al-Bader Al-Hazmi, of Saudi Arabia, was arrested but not immediately charged on suspicion of helping the terrorists. Another Saudi, Khalid al Draibi, was held after allegedly claiming to be a US citizen, his lawyer said.

* Canadian authorities arrested Abdul Jabar Mohamed Al-Hadi, who was trying to fly into Chicago with an illegal passport and airline uniforms on the day of the attacks, the US Justice Department said. Germans were seeking two suspected conspirators: Ramzi Binalshibh of Yemen and Said Bahaji, a Moroccan-German. More than a dozen others were detained for questioning in Britain and France, 20 more in Yemen, and three in Peru.

But the terrorists' use of other people's identities led to unfounded accusations. Allegations tarnished an apparently innocent party in at least one case. The FBI initially said Waleed Alshehri helped crash a jet into the World Trade Center; then came word that he was alive in Morocco. Mistaken identity also tarred five Saudi men falsely listed as being aboard the fateful flights, that country's foreign minister said. And days after arresting Nabil Al-Marabh near Chicago for suspected links to bin Laden and an attempted millennial terrorist, US authorities said they were verifying his identity.

Arabs in America remained under heavy suspicion. The Associated Press reported that by 22 September, US terrorism investigators had used immigration violations as a basis to detain 80 people from Middle East countries including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Iran, Kuwait and Syria.

SHOCK WAVES

Grief was just the first of consequence of the attacks. When US financial markets reopened six days later, stocks sunk to striking lows, pulling down Asian markets. And Bush's declaration of a "war on terrorism" spread worries around the world. The US ordered bombers and fighter jets to bases in the Persian Gulf region while calling up 50,000 reserves. At press time, leaks from "senior administration sources" appeared to indicate US special operations personnel had already deployed to possible strike zones in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The most likely target was Afghanistan, long resented by the US for tolerating or encouraging bin Laden's presence there. With that country already too war-ruined to bomb, and with bin Laden too elusive to find, the US asked Pakistan to press the Afghans to produce bin Laden. Leading clerics in the ruling Taliban emphatically refused on 21 September. The world braced for the impact.

With suspected terrorist bases scattered around the region, US military strategists were also said to be pushing for strikes in other countries, including Lebanon's Bekaa valley. Some close to Bush, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, reportedly wanted to hit Iraq (among other targets) to hurt longtime US foe Saddam Hussein, even after Iraqi officials denied involvement. Secretary of State Colin Powell, meanwhile, appeared the voice of caution, apparently urging more selective strikes and the more robust use of non-military weapons like sanctions and diplomatic pressure.

But even as nations around the globe shower sympathy for the individuals killed on 11 September, their leaders are warning the US government not to strike without clear justification. Chinese President Jiang Zemin asked French and British leaders to tell Bush that any military action would need "irrefutable evidence and should aim at clear targets so as to avoid casualties to innocent people." Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, while a strong regional ally of Washington, urged restraint, asking that "countries not be punished" for the actions of "individuals."

If the rage bubbling in Internet chats and talk shows are anything to go by, it is doubtful that restraint will prevail. The Chicago-area Daily Herald reported that commentators and Internet users are convinced that an Associated Press photo of smoke pouring from the World Trade Center includes an image of the face of Satan. Singer Graham Nash, a member of the Crosby Stills & Nash band that denounced violence in the Woodstock era, likened bin Laden to Hitler and Afghanistan to Nazi Germany on the band's web site.

Then again, a new anti-war movement was forming. And Arab-American leaders were cheered by Bush's repeated condemnation of intolerance toward Arabs. "Bush is going to a mosque," Detroit anthropologist Nabil Abraham told The New York Times. "The tone is being set on top, and it is making a difference."

By Dan Bernard