Attack victim released

Associated Press

NEW YORK – A young securities broker who was enveloped in a fireball on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center said Tuesday that he remembers thinking, “Please, God, just make it quick.”

Despite burns covering a third of his body, from his ankles to his face, and pain so severe he wouldn’t let his co-workers touch him, Manu Dhingra, 27, survived the hellish experience in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. On Tuesday he became the first victim released from the New York Weill Cornell Burn Center.

Wearing a Yankee cap and a New York Firefighters Foundation shirt – plus wraps on his arms and heavy lotion on his face and hands – Dhingra said he could not explain “why I have a second chance” when thousands of others did not.

“I just can’t let it go to waste,” he vowed at a news conference at the hospital. “Life can’t be normal.”

Dhingra, who was born in India, said he had just emerged from the elevator in the World Trade Center’s north tower for a day of trading at Andover Brokerage when “I was just covered in a ball of fire.”

Then he realized that he was alive and that “there’s nobody going to come up to the 83rd floor,” so he began walking down despite the searing pain.

Two co-workers helped him, clearing the way as they descended the numbing flights of stairs and occasionally fetching water for his rapidly dehydrating body.

Their greatest help, he said, was in deceiving him about the trip down. Once, when he wanted to rest, they told him to keep going because there were just 10 floors left. He found out later they were on the 61st floor.

“I owe a lot to them for lying to me,” Dhingra said.

Somehow, he completed the march down and was bundled into an ambulance. He did not know the twin towers had collapsed until he was safely in the hospital, he said.