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‘9/11 Reunited’ Features Survivors & Heroes Who Saved Them

‘9/11 Reunited’ Features Survivors & Heroes Who Saved Them

Last updated on: August 20, 2026 at 9:57 pm by DeWayne Hamby

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‘9/11 Reunited’ Features Survivors & Heroes Who Saved Them 2026-08-20T21:57:36-04:00 DeWayne Hamby

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“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15:13.

9/11 Reunited artwork courtesy of National Geographic.

Twenty-five years ago, inside and outside of a burning second-story Pentagon office, Lt. Col. Marilyn Wills and Navy SEAL Cmdr. Craig Powell each came close to living that verse out literally. Trapped in a smoke-filled office with a group of colleagues on September 11, 2001, Wills had the chance to save herself first. She didn’t take it. Outside, in the wreckage, Powell was one of the strangers who stayed to catch the people jumping rather than get clear of the danger himself.

National Geographic’s new three-part documentary series “9/11 Reunited,” made in collaboration with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks, tells the story of that day through the people who found each other inside it. Survivors who once depended on strangers for their lives are brought back together on camera, many meeting for the first time since 2001, to ask questions they never got to ask or simply to say thank you. In an interview with Nate Powers, director Julian Jones, who also produced National Geographic’s Emmy-winning “9/11: One Day in America” for the 20th anniversary, explained why he returned to the subject once more.

“One of the reasons [participants] wanted to take part was out of a strong sense of duty to keep telling these stories, so that people don’t forget what happened, and the people that didn’t survive are remembered, and the people that turned up for each other are also remembered,” Jones said. Revisiting the subject, he added, felt less like a surprise than an inevitability. “In a career as a filmmaker, you’re never surprised where things take you.”

Finding these specific stories meant what Jones called “a lot of good old-fashioned research.” Some, like the story of a window washer who helped free a group of men from a stuck elevator in the North Tower, had surfaced in news coverage decades earlier. Jones and his team tracked down the people involved and spent months earning their trust before asking them to tell the rest of it on camera. “We just ask them to tell their story. You have to create a safe space where people feel comfortable to do that.” He credited his producers, who often built individual relationships with survivors over months of calls before the cameras even rolled.

That same restraint shaped the show’s original musical score, composed by Max de Wardener. “We’re not making a movie, we’re making a documentary series,” Jones said. “We don’t want the music to tell the audience how to feel. We want the stories and the participants to lead.” He called the direction he gave de Wardener simple: a light touch.

One of those participants is retired Navy SEAL Cmdr. Craig Powell. On September 11, 2001, only a few days into working at the Pentagon, he was dangerously close to where American Airlines Flight 77 struck. In the chaos afterward, he joined a small group outside a second-floor window where Wills was helping trapped colleagues escape. In an interview with Nate Powers, Powell described watching her refuse to save herself first. “Instead of elbowing a person and diving out herself, she made sure everybody else got out, then she got out,” he said. When she finally jumped from the second-story window, he caught her.

Powell is quick to redirect the credit. “She’s the one who gets the credit,” he said. “She was inside, I was outside. That’s where everything was happening, and I was just there to catch her.” After he handed her off to a fellow SEAL performing CPR, he didn’t know for years whether she had survived. Twenty-five years later, meeting her again on camera was meaningful for him. “It wasn’t necessary, but rewarding. I actually thank [National Geographic] and everybody else for doing it, because I realize I’m contributing something, but they’re giving me more. They’re filling in blanks. They’re helping me out, not me helping them out.”

Powell also lives with lasting health effects, including a cancer diagnosis, that periodically pull his mind back to that day. But he described the attacks as changing him in another way, too. “I became more human and less of a machine,” he said. Before 9/11, he could talk about his family without getting emotional. “After that, my emotions are connected.” Weeks after finishing treatment, he walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. “It was the greatest thing ever,” he said.

Jones sees that same instinct, the one that had Wills refusing to leave a burning room until everyone else was out, as the through-line of the whole series. “There is an instinct in us to help each other, and have this togetherness, regardless of anything else at all,” he said. “People do have an instinct to help and to show up for each other, and that was seen again and again and again instinctively on 9/11.”

Twenty-five years later, that instinct is still doing something. It carried a woman out of a burning building, and it’s carried two strangers back to each other on camera, still saying thank you for a debt neither one has stopped counting.

“9/11 Reunited” premieres August 21 on National Geographic and begins streaming August 22 on Disney+ and Hulu.

—Special contribution from Nate Powers.

Nate Powers is a filmmaker and founder of Contrast Collective, recognized with multiple awards for accomplishments in directing, editing, character design, and social impact. He conducts entertainment interviews with actors, directors, and creators as a personal passion alongside his filmmaking career.
Connect with him on social media @NatePowers.TV

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Nate Powers (@natepowers.tv)

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