<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history looking for those

<v Speaker 1>untold stories of amazing people who did amazing things and

<v Speaker 1>then got lost in the sands of time. You know,

<v Speaker 1>Hollywood gets things wrong all the time. A date here,

<v Speaker 1>a uniform there. Historians love to catch him at it.

<v Speaker 1>But back in two thousand and six, there was a

<v Speaker 1>major motion picture, a fifty million dollar Oliver Stone film

<v Speaker 1>about one of the most famous rescues in American history.

<v Speaker 1>And they got something wrong that nobody could have called.

<v Speaker 1>Not the director, not the studio, not the researchers who

<v Speaker 1>spent months on the details. They cast the wrong man,

<v Speaker 1>wrong face, wrong race, wrong everything. And here's the crazy part.

<v Speaker 1>It wasn't carelessness. It was because the man they were portraying,

<v Speaker 1>a man who helped save two of the last people

<v Speaker 1>pulled alive from the ruins of the World Trade Center,

<v Speaker 1>had just vanished for five years. Nobody in America knew

<v Speaker 1>his name. He knew it, of course, he just never

<v Speaker 1>told anyone, not reporters, not historians, not even his own kids.

<v Speaker 1>His name is Jason Thomas. And this is the story

<v Speaker 1>of the most famous anonymous man of nine to eleven.

<v Speaker 1>The morning of September eleventh, two thousand and one, Jason

<v Speaker 1>Thomas was twenty seven years old, and his timing could

<v Speaker 1>not have been stranger. He had just left active duty

<v Speaker 1>in the United States Marine Corps, not years earlier, not

<v Speaker 1>months earlier, two weeks earlier, in August of one, and

<v Speaker 1>that Tuesday morning, he was doing the most ordinary thing

<v Speaker 1>in the world. He was dropping his little girl off

<v Speaker 1>at his mom's house on Long Island. When he walked

<v Speaker 1>into the house, his mom pointed at the television. Planes

<v Speaker 1>had hit the World Trade Center. Now we all know

<v Speaker 1>what we did in that moment, because we all lived

<v Speaker 1>some version of it. We stood frozen in front of

<v Speaker 1>a screen. We made phone calls, We waited. Jason Thomas,

<v Speaker 1>he didn't do any of that. He left his bomb's house,

<v Speaker 1>went straight to his truck, where his marine utilities were

<v Speaker 1>still packed away, and he put his uniform back on.

<v Speaker 1>He'd tell people later there really wasn't much of a

<v Speaker 1>plan behind it. In his mind, it was simple math.

<v Speaker 1>Somebody needed help. It didn't matter who he had the training.

<v Speaker 1>His city was under attack. The uniform, as a practical matter,

<v Speaker 1>was just to get him through the roadblocks. So he

<v Speaker 1>sped toward Manhattan and he had just parked his truck

<v Speaker 1>when the North Tower came down. Now we've all seen

<v Speaker 1>that footage. Those towers fell, there were thousands of people

<v Speaker 1>running for their lives away from that boiling gray cloud.

<v Speaker 1>Jason Thomas didn't just run toward it, He ran into it.

<v Speaker 1>Jason spent hours on nine to eleven in the midst

<v Speaker 1>of that chaos, helping survivors move in debris, praying over

<v Speaker 1>the dead, and somewhere in the middle of that hell,

<v Speaker 1>he crossed paths with another man, also in Marine fatigues.

<v Speaker 1>His name was Staff Sergeant Dave Carnes, twenty years in

<v Speaker 1>the Corps, now on accountant in Connecticut, who had heard

<v Speaker 1>the news, gotten himself a regulation haircut, put on his uniform,

<v Speaker 1>and drove straight to ground zero. Two marines, total strangers,

<v Speaker 1>but they found each other in that smoke. Now, by

<v Speaker 1>that evening, the situation really had not changed all that much.

<v Speaker 1>It was still a nightmare, but now it was a

<v Speaker 1>nightmare in the dark. The pile was on fire, it

<v Speaker 1>was unstable, it was shifting. Official rescue operations were being

<v Speaker 1>pulled back. It was just too dangerous. When Thomas and

<v Speaker 1>Carnes tried to recruit help for a search of their

<v Speaker 1>own and nobody would join them, they made a decision

<v Speaker 1>that tells you everything you need to know about both

<v Speaker 1>of them. They basically said, we're doing this with or

<v Speaker 1>without your help. There are people in there who need help,

<v Speaker 1>and we are not giving up. So two marines, carrying

<v Speaker 1>nothing more than flashlights and an infantry man's shovel, climbed

<v Speaker 1>into a smoldering mountain of twisted steel, stepping around crevices

<v Speaker 1>and metal that was so hot it was literally glowing red.

<v Speaker 1>And as they walked, they called out into the dark,

<v Speaker 1>over and over, United States Marines, if you can hear

<v Speaker 1>us yell or tap. Think about what that must have

<v Speaker 1>sounded like rising off that pile as night fell over

<v Speaker 1>New York City. And then they got a response. There

<v Speaker 1>was a voice coming from deep below. Two Port Authority

<v Speaker 1>Police officers, John McLaughlan and will Yameno had been in

<v Speaker 1>the concourse between the towers when everything came down, and

<v Speaker 1>now they were pinned in a pit of concrete and steel,

<v Speaker 1>roughly twenty feet below the surface. They were alive, but barely.

<v Speaker 1>The officers begged the Marines not to leave, and Thomas

<v Speaker 1>gave an answer worthy of the uniform, buddy, I'm not

<v Speaker 1>going anywhere. We're coming to get you now. What followed

<v Speaker 1>took all night. A retired paramedic named Clark Sirika crawled

<v Speaker 1>down into that hole to treat yem and O while

<v Speaker 1>fires burned close enough to drive the rescuers out for air.

<v Speaker 1>Will yem and O spent thirteen hours in that pit

<v Speaker 1>before they pulled him free. John McLachlin was trapped for

<v Speaker 1>roughly nine hours. More twenty people twenty were pulled alive

<v Speaker 1>from the rubble of the World Trade Center. Yemino and

<v Speaker 1>maclachlin were numbers eighteen and nineteen. Jason Thomas stayed long

<v Speaker 1>enough to see yem and O come up and then

<v Speaker 1>running on fumes, he just slipped away. But he came

<v Speaker 1>back to ground zero every single day for two and

<v Speaker 1>a half weeks, digging, hauling, searching, And the only name

<v Speaker 1>he ever gave anyone was Sergeant Thomas. And then he

<v Speaker 1>went home and he closed the door on all of it.

<v Speaker 1>He didn't want to relive that day, so he didn't.

<v Speaker 1>He never told anyone what he had done. His five

<v Speaker 1>kids had no idea that there was a genuine hero

<v Speaker 1>living in their home. Now fast forward five years, Jason

<v Speaker 1>Thomas has moved his family to Columbus, Ohio, where he's

<v Speaker 1>now working as a security guard at the Ohio Supreme Court.

<v Speaker 1>Just a regular guidet work and a regular dad at home.

<v Speaker 1>But one evening in two thousand and six, He's sitting

<v Speaker 1>on his couch and a commercial comes on and it's

<v Speaker 1>a trailer for Oliver Stone's new movie World Trade Center,

<v Speaker 1>which was the story of MacLachlan and Yemino. And on

<v Speaker 1>his television, Jason Thomas watches two marines with flashlights climbing

<v Speaker 1>the pile searching for survivors, and he said out loud

<v Speaker 1>before he can stop himself, Hey, that's me. Now here's

<v Speaker 1>what he didn't know. The filmmakers had searched for the

<v Speaker 1>mystery marine for months, authorities had been wondering about him

<v Speaker 1>for years. Nobody could find him because he never came forward.

<v Speaker 1>So the producers did the best they could with what

<v Speaker 1>little info the record held, and they cast an actor

<v Speaker 1>named William Mappither in the role of Sergeant Thomas. William

<v Speaker 1>Mappither is white, Jason Thomas is black, so let that

<v Speaker 1>sink in for a second. A man performed one of

<v Speaker 1>the most celebrated rescuers of September eleventh, a rescue imported

<v Speaker 1>enough that Oliver Stone built a movie around it, and

<v Speaker 1>he was so thoroughly, so deliberately anonymous, that the movie

<v Speaker 1>got his race wrong. The producers later said, we had

<v Speaker 1>no idea. When Thomas finally came forward in August of

<v Speaker 1>two thousand and six, they authenticated his story. He got

<v Speaker 1>on the phone with will Yemino. It was the first

<v Speaker 1>time they had spoken since that night in the pile,

<v Speaker 1>and the two of them shared details that only they

<v Speaker 1>could have known. And what did Jason Thomas do with

<v Speaker 1>his newfound fame. He went back into uniform. He joined

<v Speaker 1>the Air Force Reserve as a medical technician, still serving,

<v Speaker 1>still quiet about it. Fame was sitting right there for

<v Speaker 1>the taking book, deals, interviews, a nation that wanted to

<v Speaker 1>thank him, and he walked past all of it for

<v Speaker 1>five years because to Jason Thomas, none of that mattered.

<v Speaker 1>He did it because his city needed him and he

<v Speaker 1>had the ability to help. He did it because it

<v Speaker 1>was just the right thing to do. That's Jason Thomas,

<v Speaker 1>and that is anonymous. America,