Profile, Airman Basic Amy Ting

[David]

Airman Basic Amy Ting
By Airman 1st Class Amanda Currier
37th Training Wing Public Affairs
LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (AFPN) ? After escaping from the New York World Trade Center Marriott hotel minutes before it collapsed last Sept. 11, a young woman decided to turn from actress to airman.

Many people?s lives were altered Sept. 11, and Amy Ting?s experience sparked her decision to step out of the spotlight and get in step with the Air Force. Now Amy Ting is Airman Basic Ting. After completing six weeks of mental and physical conditioning, she graduated Feb. 22 from Air Force basic military training here.

She is now at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, completing technical training for medical duty as a physical therapist.

Before becoming an actress, the 23-year-old had three years of college as a pre-med student at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Nevertheless, she decided to trade a major in biology for a major movie role. ?It?s not like you get acting jobs every day,? Ting said, ?especially a lead role.? She had gotten the lead role in ?Miss Wonton? at 21, after answering a newspaper ad requesting Asian actors.

Throughout high school she had participated in musical theater. ?It was fun, and I really started to like acting. When I got the lead role in ?Miss Wonton,? I didn?t want to pass up my chance,? she said. ?It was kind of scary, giving up school and going for an unstable career like acting. You never know when the next movie is going to come along. It might not.?

To fund her newfound acting career, she took a job as a desk clerk at the New York World Trade Center Marriott. Working mornings at the hotel allowed her to attend auditions in the evenings.

When ?Miss Wonton? made it big at the Sundance Film Festival and Switzerland?s Locarno International Film Festival, Ting went ?home? to Singapore to promote her movie. In the picture, she plays a young Asian immigrant who comes to the United States searching for the American dream.

?I went back to Singapore in August, and it was like I was Julia Roberts,? she said.

After getting bombarded by the paparazzi in Singapore, the young actress said she felt the publicity associated with an acting career was a bit too much for her. She decided to return to New York and try climbing the corporate ladder at Marriott.

Planning to discuss a management position with her boss, she went to the Marriott on Sept. 11 at around 8:30 a.m. She was expecting to answer some questions and take a short test. What happened instead changed her life forever.

?I was right in the middle of the lobby when suddenly at 8:45 a.m. I started to hear a thundering sound coming down from above,? she said. ?I thought someone had dropped some heavy equipment or something. People began to run into the Marriott lobby from tower one, and Marriott guests started rushing downstairs from the second floor.?

While most people fled, firefighters and police rushed into the lobby, and Ting stayed behind to help them. She made phone calls to summon additional help and brought water to thirsty firefighters.

Then a firefighter came running in from tower one yelling for everyone to evacuate. Ting said she did not run two steps before the hotel collapsed when the World Trade Center came tumbling down on top of it. Ting and a few others were blown into a corner of the building that had been reinforced after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. They survived.

?During the few seconds that I was blown through the air, there was total darkness,? she said. ?All I could hear was debris falling. It was so scary because I thought I was going to die.?

Desperately looking for a way out of the rubble, a firefighter in the small group of survivors spotted blinking lights on a crushed fire truck outside. The group followed the lights and climbed over a mountain of debris to safety.

?After Sept. 11, my perspective on life changed,? Ting said. ?I have always wanted to help people, so I decided to go back to pursuing the medical field. I asked myself, ?What is the most honorable company to work for???

That's when she decided to work for the U.S. government. One day while walking through Times Square, Ting passed by an Air Force recruiting office and stopped in to see what it was all about.

?The more I learned about the Air Force, the more I wanted to be a part of it,? she said.

Now when people ask where she works, she can proudly say the United States Air Force.