Ground Zero
What follows are a selection of columns and longer articles, written during the first weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Many were reported from the scene of the 9/11 attacks – a massive rubble pile known as “Ground Zero.” Information was difficult to confirm. Communications were haphazard. Indeed, the initial columns were written long-hand on a legal pad, then dictated over a telephone to a clerk at the news desk in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Amid the Death and Darkness, a Touch of Goodness and Light
September 12, 2001
As the tugboat backed away from the Jersey City dock, the cop turned to the man in black.
"Father, would you lead us in prayer?" he asked.
Father Kevin Carter, chaplain to the Jersey City Police Department, looked at the cop. His mouth was covered with a surgical mask and his shirt was caked with gray dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center.
Behind them, smoke poured from the pile of brown rubble - all that was left of the Twin Towers that had once overlooked Manhattan and Jersey City like a giant tuning fork of sparkling glass and shining steel.
Carter, who served at Catholic parishes in Hillsdale and Wyckoff before moving to Jersey City, blessed himself. Then he looked at the dozen or so cops on the tugboat, all volunteers, who were crossing the Hudson to help with rescue efforts.
"A great evil has been brought on us today," said Father Carter, pausing a moment to collect his words. "Bring some goodness. Bring some life."
Tuesday should have been a day to take a long, sun-washed stroll in the park. Instead, it was a day of unquenchable sadness.
"You know what today is?" said Matt Tansey, thinking of the date and all emergency calls. "It's 9-1-1."
Tansey, a 27-year-old New York City firefighter, said he hoisted an elderly man on his back, carried him from the 19th floor to the sixth floor of one of the towers, then shimmied down a steel beam to a pile of debris that was as high as the fourth floor.
"I said, `Get on my back,'" said Tansey, talking about the rescue, adding that he never did get the name of the man he saved.
As Tansey spoke, he looked back across the Hudson.
"I need a cigarette," he murmured.
A few feet away, David Dolny, 49, of Monsey, N.Y., thought of his 18-year-old daughter, who had recently left to study in Israel.
"There is no end to it once it starts" said Dolny, thinking of the terrorism that had suddenly descended on the United States.
Nearby, a cop looked across the Hudson at gray and brown smoke endlessly billowing skyward.
"You can't sugarcoat it," the cop said. "The world changed today."
"This country will never be safe again," said Jersey City police Sgt. Ed Shinnick, who lives in Midland Park. "The World Trade Center was like an icon. And now it's gone."
At Exchange Place in Jersey City, where nurses and doctors set up an outdoor triage center, many onlookers seemed numb to what was happening.
But the generous work of survival went on. Volunteers tore curtains and towels into rags, then dipped them into water buckets and passed them out to survivors as they walked off docking ferry boats.
"This will give us a new identity," said Patti Munzer, who had escaped from on a ferry boat across the Hudson. "This is a line in the sand."
The scene was different in lower Manhattan, where the streets seemed serenely quiet.
As you walked toward the rubble of the World Trade Center, a gray talc-like powder covered everything - the pavement, bicycles chained to fences, cars, park benches, fire hydrants.
Tens of thousands of pieces of paper rested atop a half-inch layer of the gray powder - all that remained of the trade center offices, and the lives of its workers.
Windows were popping at 7 World Trade Center. A fire burned wildly on the 10th floor, like coals on a grill.
Walking on a deserted West Side Highway, a cop muttered: "I feel like the 1950s, when they marched troops into the A-bomb blasts."
A block away on Greenwich Street, residents rode Trek and Cannondale bicycles down the deserted street. Minutes later, they were followed by three flatbed trucks.
On them were stacks of empty coffins.
A few onlookers pointed cameras and snapped pictures for scrapbooks yet to come. Most just stood in silence.
The scene defied words, even feelings.
Trebor Lloyd, a 50-year-old attorney who lives in an apartment building near Greenwich Street, looked at the plumes of smoke and offered this epithet for this confusing day:
"The part that really scares me is that we don't know when it's going to end."
The Scene: A Search for Bodies, a Search for Friends
September 13, 2001
Jim Czarny bore the square-jawed, thousand-yard gaze of a man on a mission.
It was Wednesday, barely 7 a.m., five blocks from the burning remains of what was once the World Trade Center.
Czarny, a New York City firefighter, strutted toward the rubble, his heavy boots scraping the pavement and stirring the gray dust that covered the landscape like snow.
Czarny's job was simple yet emotionally complicated: He was digging for the remains of his friends.
When a fiery disaster befalls us, firefighters often face the most daunting of fates. They must fight fires, often running into the throes of catastrophe. If, in doing so, a building collapses on them, those who follow must fight the grief over buddies they have lost.
"I can't put it into words right now," said Czarny. "I'm trying to operate without thinking."
Here, at ground zero of the World Trade Center disaster, the loss of life was particularly catastrophic for firefighters. Estimates Wednesday were that 200 to 300 of them were still missing.
Five of them were from Jim Czarny's 25-member unit.
Firefighters often speak a coded language, of sorts, with small numbers - Ladder 7, Engine Company 3, Ladder Company 10, - those of their firefighting units.
On Wednesday, they tried mightily not to think of the big numbers they were hearing.
"We're struggling," was all one firefighter could say as he walked with Czarny's group toward the smoky pile of steel and stone.
"When you lose 300 guys, what can you say?" asked another. "You lose one and the city's in mourning. But 300?"
"Emotionally, it's numbing," said firefighter Bill Fancis. "You don't know what to feel."
At least five 25-member units had been wiped out. Another unit was still searching for five of its own. Yet another was looking for four.
The numbers may seem small against the thousands of casualties in the attacks. Still, each death is especially painful among firefighters because of the close bonds that many of them share - sometimes across geographic and gender boundaries.
"It's like losing a member of the family," said Tracey Schultz, a female firefighter who drove from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., to help search the rubble.
"I'm missing three guys from my truck," said New York City firefighter Joe Hardy.
New York Fire Lt. Ed McCaffrey who turned 56 on Tuesday, did not lose any firefighters from his Bronx-based unit. But his former unit, based in Manhattan, was reportedly wiped out.
"I broke them in," said McCaffrey, explaining how he trained the former unit. "I was at their picnic two weeks ago. Now they're gone."
McCaffrey paused, his eyes filling with tears.
"But we'll work through it," said McCaffrey. "We'll be digging today."
On Wednesday, as this suddenly quiet city tried to comprehend what had happened, the search for bodies took on a macabre tone. Firefighters and other emergency workers described finding arms, legs, and torsos in the rubble.
Miraculously, they also found several firefighters and police officers still alive.
"Everybody started to applaud when we brought one guy out," said Jason Cadoff, a Boston firefighter who volunteered to help.
But such applause was rare, even for firefighting units who somehow managed to escape death.
Five blocks from ground zero, the three-story, gray building housing Ladder Company 1, built in 1905, is New York City's oldest working firehouse. When the World Trade Center fell, Ladder Company 1 considered itself one of the city's luckiest units: No one was lost.
On Wednesday, the flag at Ladder Company 1 flew at half-staff for those colleagues from other firehouses who were still missing.
"I don't know how I'm here," said John McConnachie.
McConnachie was a block away when the World Trade Center fell. He said he dived under a car and was enveloped in smoke and dust.
"It was pitch black for five minutes," he said.
As he considered his brush with death, McConnachie fell silent for a moment.
"I was lucky, I guess," said McConnachie. "There are a lot of lucky guys."
A few blocks away on Varick Street, firefighters at a firehouse that appears in the first "Ghostbusters" tried to come to terms with the loss of one of their colleagues.
"I'm trying to prepare myself for the worst," said firefighter Kurt Bugge.
Back at McConnachie's firehouse, he and others worked to console their battalion chief, whose brother was among the missing firefighters. At the same time, they tried to appreciate small gifts - three pink roses that survived the dust storm in a park, or the stream of residents from the neighborhood who dropped by the firehouse to offer groceries or a place to sleep.
"We dodged this one," said firefighter Steve Rogers, as he leaned against the doorway of Ladder Company 1.
Meanwhile, McConachie shook his head and stared off into the distance.
"It's like it didn't happen," he said. "Once we get the time to think, then we'll understand."
* * *
Endless Reminders of Lives Disrupted
September 14, 2001
Bathed in the gleaming sunlight of another morning after, the sheer magnitude of twisted steel and stone that once was the World Trade Center can appear almost too overpowering to take in.
And yet, to walk amid the rubble and try to grasp the tragedy is to realize that this is a story of ordinary people and tiny pieces of life that might otherwise go unnoticed.
On Chambers Street, a green apple sat on the sidewalk, covered with the gray dust that blanketed the landscape like snow.
Was the apple left behind by someone fleeing Tuesday's flood of smoke and fire? Was it tossed there by rescue workers, then smothered in dust churned up by passing emergency trucks?
In this week of so many altered lives, even something as inconsequential as a discarded piece of fruit could make you wonder about the story behind it.
Bicycles were still chained to fences. A baby stroller still sat upright near a deserted playground. A coffee cup remained on a table in a darkened Starbucks.
Just blocks from the trade center, Daniel Fanelli gazed down at the rubble from the sun-washed roof of his 40-story apartment building and recalled a small piece of luck that now seems so overwhelming.
Most days, the 42-year-old commodities broker is at his desk at the trade center by 8:45 a.m., working the phones and gazing into a computer screen. But at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday, when the first of two hijacked jets smashed into the Twin Towers, Fanelli was home.
"I slept late," he said. "I'm a Giants fan, and the night before I stayed up watching `Monday Night Football.'"
Fanelli pulled at the brim of his Giants cap and studied the scene below. After a few seconds, the silence was broken by an American F-16 jet fighter, its roar seeming to tear at the cloudless dome of blue sky.
Fanelli looked up, then back at the rubble and the dust-covered streets of his Tribeca neighborhood. He recalled the roar of that first hijacked jet, and the enormity that such a small decision such as oversleeping could have on his life.
"I still have friends we haven't heard from," said Fanelli, shaking his head in disbelief. "It's mind-boggling to think of the devastation."
In coffee shops, in living rooms, and on street corners, the talk of devastation has framed itself in such personal reflections. If you didn't know someone who worked in the trade center, then you probably knew someone involved in the rescue effort.
In a Greenwich Village drug store, a middle-aged woman dug through a bin of men's underwear. "I have all these guys staying at my apartment, and they need clean underwear," she explained.
The women stopped and smiled, then explained that her houseguests were police detectives working on the probe who had no time to return to their own homes for clean clothes or to shop themselves.
"They all want boxers," she said. "They're picky."
At a police barricade 10 blocks from the trade center, Francisco Melendez paused at a corner and leaned against a building.
A messenger, Melendez, 29, squeezed the handlebars of his mountain bike and looked south to where the Twin Towers once dominated the Lower Manhattan skyline. He remembered how much he loved to watch the sun reflect off the glass and steel icons. Then he thought of a young woman he met there only last week.
"I was making a delivery," said Melendez. "She was a receptionist."
He had flirted with her that day.
"I remember her telling me, `Have a nice day,'" Melendez said. "The last thing I told her was, `Not without you.'"
His voice trailed off as Melendez pushed his bicycle helmet back on his head, adjusted the strap of his messenger's bag, and again squeezed the handlebars.
"I was thinking of going back and seeing her," he said. "I wonder what happened to her."
If ever there was a question that linked so many people this week, perhaps that was it: What happened to her, or him, or them?
A woman who called herself Aunt Paulie walked slowly along Greenwich Street, clasping her hands in prayer.
Behind her, thin plumes of gray smoke still rose from the rubble. Aunt Paulie brought her hands to her lips, then stopped and closed her eyes.
"I have a niece that I haven't located," she said, her eyes still shut.
Aunt Paulie, who lives in Manhattan, explained that her 34-year-old niece lives in Irvington and works at the trade center. No one had heard anything from her since Tuesday.
"It's absolutely horrible. So many people," she said. "Some people may not be able to pick up and move on after this."
Aunt Paulie opened her eyes and walked up the block, sobbing.
Hours later, another woman, her face downcast and creased in worry, walked up to the open door of a nearby firehouse.
An advertising account executive, Jane Geraghty explained that she lived near the World Trade Center but had been barred by police from returning to her apartment.
That posed a pressing problem: She had been planning to be married this Saturday - in France.
"Everything is at the apartment," said Geraghty, 31. "My wedding gown, the rings, plane tickets, my passport."
A firefighter, tired from days of battling his own grief over lost comrades and the fatigue of digging through rubble, said he doubted the police would let Geraghty into her apartment, even to fetch her gown.
"But go ahead," he told her, his voice tinged in sarcasm. "Tell them your sob story."
Geraghty smiled at the remarks - and how inconsequential her request suddenly seemed.
"I figured I'd ask," she said. "Anyway, the gown and rings and passport are only stuff. I've got my fiance. He's all right."
Towers' Collapse Left an Emptiness in His Soul
September 15, 2001
There's a hole in the Manhattan skyline - and a hole in Miguel DeJesus' heart.
The Twin Towers were not just tall buildings that seemed to kiss the clouds. For some, like Miguel DeJesus, they were icons that symbolized the opportunity and grandeur that America offered.
And now, they're gone.
"I saw those buildings every day," said DeJesus, who sells used cars on a patch of Jersey City pavement called Grand Street. "They were the first thing I looked at each morning. Now we don't see them anymore."
To understand the profound sadness in those words and how the World Trade Center collapse can rip such a gaping emotional hole, you need to know something about 47-year-old Miguel DeJesus - namely, that he was only 14 when he came to this city of immigrants from a Puerto Rican town called Salinas.
And one more thing: The tallest building in Salinas was "maybe three stories," DeJesus recalled. "Maybe now there is one a little bigger."
Certainly, there was nothing even remotely close to the 110-story glass and steel pillars across the Hudson.
As icons, the towers served as backdrop for countless snapshots. Families, friends, and everyday tourists came to the Jersey City waterfront to be photographed in front of them, often in the orange glow of a sunset, when the Twin Towers took on a jewel-like look.
DeJesus came to marvel.
Such sentiments may seem corny. DeJesus readily concedes that. But if you were a kid from Puerto Rico, you found the same sort of inspiration in the towers that earlier generations of immigrants found in the Statue of Liberty.
"I was amazed at what this country could do," DeJesus said. "When I arrived here and saw those buildings, I felt I came to another world."
It was 1968 when DeJesus first set foot in Jersey City. From his family's new home he remembers gazing across the Hudson River with fascination as the two icons rose above everything else. The Twin Towers would not be completed and open to tenants until 1973, but DeJesus wanted to get closer.
"My brother took me across the Hudson to see the foundation," said DeJesus. "I never saw anything like that in Puerto Rico."
DeJesus smiles now as he recalls that day trip with his brother more than three decades ago, and how he still finds such sentimentality in the moment.
But then his smile disappears.
His thoughts turn to Tuesday morning, an otherwise pristine, sunny day, hardly a time for tragedy. A friend, listening to the radio, dashed frantically into the office of the used car dealership with news that a plane had crashed into one of the towers.
"I came out and I saw all that smoke," said DeJesus. "And then, we saw a [second] plane go right into the other tower. And then we saw the buildings collapse."
DeJesus' voice falls off. He turns his head and looks east on Grand Street, his gaze moving step by step, block to block, across various landmarks - to St. Peter's Preparatory School, to the restored brownstones snapped up by well-to-do yuppies, to the gleaming new office buildings of Exchange Place, to the site of the old Colgate-Palmolive factory - all the way to the river and the hole in the lower Manhattan skyline where the Twin Towers stood.
In a sad way, the scene is akin to one of those group photographs in which someone has cut out a face. But this is no joke.
Miguel DeJesus' face seems to sag. His eyes retreat, and he looks at the ground at his feet.
"We didn't hear anything," said DeJesus, thinking back to that surreal moment Tuesday morning when the towers crumbled. He pauses again, then corrects himself. Yes, there was a sound he remembers. Yes, definitely, DeJesus says. "Everybody was crying."
The Unfolding Drama We Wish Were Only a Movie
September 16, 2001
IN THAT FIRST HORRIFIC HOUR, as the orange flames burst from the punctured skin of World Trade Center skyscrapers and into the Tiffany blue sky, we saw it as Hollywood-style special effects.
"It looked like a scene from a movie," said Frank Mastropaolo, a 42-year-old office manager who lives only a few blocks from where the twin towers once stood in lower Manhattan. Said Patti Munzer, who also lives near the Trade Center: "It was like 'The Towering Inferno.'" The movie version.
And so it went. As I spoke to scores of survivors in those early hours of Tuesday's Trade Center tragedy - first at an outdoor medical center on the Jersey City waterfront, then in Manhattan after I crossed the Hudson by tugboat - what struck me was how many survivors first compared their real-life terror to the full-color, high-explosive fiction produced for the silver screen.
Surprised? Don't be.
"This was," said one man, "our summer blockbuster." The man, his otherwise impeccable blue suit covered in gray dust, escaped the Trade Center catastrophe by running down a Manhattan street, then jumping on a boat across the Hudson River to Jersey City. In evoking Hollywood, he seemed to be reaching for a touch of sarcasm, perhaps trying to coax a small joke from an otherwise grim day.
But his sentiments say much about our previously sheltered lives.
When it comes to war and terrorism, our frame of reference is more often "Die Hard" and the Rambo movies - not the real thing. We even have a glib description for this sort of film. We call them "escapist."
For years, as the Middle East, Asia, and even parts of Europe routinely coped with the new kind of warfare called terrorism, we "escaped" to movies that featured gangs of swarthy men who commandeered commercial jetliners or battled squads of muscular members of the Delta Force.
The mayhem usually lasted only two or three hours - on the screen, of course. And, while the body count was usually large and plenty of rockets glared red and bombs burst in the air, the good guys usually won.
When the theater lights came back on and we walked outside, we went back to our "normal" lives.
All that changed last Tuesday.
Never again will we be able to watch Hollywood's big-budget, escapist, blockbuster without remembering that on Sept. 11, 2001, real terror struck and real people died on an otherwise "normal" day in New York City.
The big news? That day, it was baseball - that is, before two hijacked planes struck the Trade Center, another smashed into the Pentagon just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., and a fourth plowed into a Pennsylvania farm field.
The night before, Roger Clemens of the Yankees had been scheduled to pitch against the Boston Red Sox. Clemens was hoping to win his 20th game of the season, and achieve what would be a record-setting 20-1 record.
Heavy rains postponed Clemens' date with baseball history - but not by much. He would merely pitch Tuesday night against the Chicago White Sox. History could wait.
But then, the twin towers fell and all Major League Baseball games were canceled for the week. Clemens is still waiting for that 20th victory, which seems so minor right now compared to what happened since.
Tuesday's attack on the twin towers was more than just an act of war. Suddenly, America's frame of reference changed.
For most of us, the sort of sneak-attack terrorism that took place at the World Trade Center usually happened somewhere else. Except for the 1941 Japanese bombing of the Pearl Harbor naval base and nearby U.S. military installations in Hawaii, America has escaped the bombs and missiles that exploded in other parts of the world. But even Ha-waii, then a U.S. territory and not yet a state, seemed distant, separated from the U.S. mainland by several thousand miles of ocean. What's more, when America marched off to a real war in the last 100 years, it was somewhere else - in Europe, on islands in the South Pacific, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Grenada, in Lebanon, in Panama, in Kuwait, in Somalia, in the Balkans.
Far, far away.
At home, war was usually the stuff we watched on the TV news or in the movies. We endured the 9-to-5 battles in our offices, then "escaped" by renting the latest shoot-em-up, starring some square-jawed hunk.
Yes, America endured the bombs produced by the Weather Underground in the late 1960s and early 1970s - to name just one of several radical groups of that tumultuous time. And yes, we had Oklahoma City in 1995 and the bombing of the federal building there.
But the attack on the World Trade Center, with a death toll that could reach or even exceed 5,000, seemed to bring the terror of war home in a way that no other domestic tragedy ever has.
Suddenly, we all seemed vulnerable - anywhere, anyplace, anytime. It was hardly surprising that in offices that day, all across the region, telephone message machines filled with calls from relatives and friends asking a simple question that took on a far more profound meaning than it usually does: "Are you OK?" As the afternoon shadows lengthened that first day, I found myself on Chambers Street, a block from the northernmost perimeter of the Trade Center complex. I was alone except for a New York City firefighter covered in dust.
"Are you OK?" I asked.
"Yes," said Lt. Mickey Kross of Engine Company 16.
Kross's nose was caked with dried blood - the real stuff. His hands shook slightly - the real shakes. On his firefighter's helmet, he had a purple button that said, "Don't Panic."
He smiled at the irony of the button's message when I mentioned it. Kross then told me he had been on the fifth floor of one of the towers as it collapsed hours earlier, and had somehow managed to crawl out.
He did not know how he escaped. Nor could he account for what he had been doing for the last few hours other than just wandering and trying to avoid the influx of emergency vehicles.
He remembered that "everything went dark" in the tower. He also remembered what ran through his mind at that terrifying moment when death seemed so imminent.
"My first thought," said Kross, "was I hope it doesn't hurt too much."
Kross headed toward a group of police officers who had walked up, murmuring that he "needed a cigarette."
I started to walk away, then heard a series of pop-pop-pops. I turned toward a 47-story building hovering a block away - another office tower in the Trade Center complex that would collapse a few hours later. Orange flames licked the windows. The building let out what seemed like an exasperated grown.
I picked up my pace, and headed for safety. But as I turned another corner, putting some distance between me and the real fires of a really damaged building, I came upon another reality of this real war.
Here, on a street that was home to small restaurants, boutiques, and million-dollar apartments, three flat-bed trucks rolled to a stop.
No movie could ever capture the real sadness of that moment. Then again, no movie would probably bother.
There were no bombs or bullets.
The trucks carried coffins.
Rookie, Retiree Join in Firefighters' Effort
September 17, 2001
'Kid' and 'Chief' Worked Hand in Hand
One was a rookie at his first fire, the other a grandfather who hung up his chief's hat three years ago.
Tony and Larry - definitely an odd couple.
As they ran together toward the dust and rubble on Tuesday, they had no radio, no firetruck, no oxygen tanks, no time for formal introductions. But their story - how they united to shoulder a small piece of the fight against a massive disaster - reveals much about the quiet heroism of the day.
The battle to save lives after two hijacked jets destroyed the World Trade Center was not one of Hollywoodesque, rally-the-troops heroics. For Tony and Larry - and countless others like them - it was a series of random acts of bravery by small cadres of emergency workers who improvised when events and equipment didn't cooperate.
Until Sunday, Antonios Benetatos and Lawrence Byrnes didn't know each other's full names.
"He called me kid," said Benetatos.
"He just said `chief,'" said Byrnes.
Benetatos, 22 and single, lives in the Bronx with his divorced mother, a Presbyterian minister. He set aside studies at Hunter and Westchester Community colleges to become a firefighter, but until Tuesday hadn't yet aimed a hose at a real flame much less tried to save someone from a high-rise.
Byrnes, 66, a father of six and grandfather of nine, retired from the New York City Fire Department in 1998 after 42 years on the job. He lives with his wife and a basset hound named Mickey in Valley Stream, Long Island. One grandson is only a year younger than Benetatos.
What both men had in common last Tuesday was the same firehouse - a three-story, 96-year-old limestone edifice on Duane Street, five blocks north of the Trade Center.
Byrnes had been battalion chief there when he retired. His specialty: high-rise fires.
"That was my neighborhood," he said, his voice laced with pride. "I knew the buildings."
Byrnes slept late that morning. A few hours earlier, he and his wife stepped off a jet at John F. Kennedy International Airport from a European vacation.
"Then I heard the radio," Byrnes said.
At the Duane Street firehouse, Benetatos also remembers the radio crackling. He had just begun 14 weeks of probationary training there and was about to head home after his eight-hour shift when the first of two hijacked jets smashed into the twin towers just before 9 a.m.
"Everything went berserk," he said, sitting outside the firehouse Sunday morning.
Both firetrucks assigned to the station - a pumper and a ladder truck - were out checking reports of gas leaks. They sped to the scene after the attack began.
Back at the firehouse, Benetatos was monitoring the radio and TV when a second hijacked jet struck the other tower. Moments later, a man he had never seen before dashed through the firehouse door.
It was Larry Byrnes.
"When I heard the news, I jumped in my wife's car," Byrnes recalled from his home Sunday.
Usually, the 24-mile trek from Valley Stream to Duane Street takes about 40 minutes, he said. On Tuesday, Byrnes got behind a speeding police car. "Made it in 18 minutes," he said.
Benetatos couldn't find an oxygen tank or portable radio - only an extra fire suit left behind by other firefighters.
Byrnes, meanwhile, had no protective helmet or coat or boots.
"I wore sneakers," he said, laughing at how he must have looked.
Byrnes said he grabbed a white dress uniform cap that firefighters save for parades and funerals. "I figured if I wore that the guys would know I was a chief and I could organize them," he said.
Then Byrnes turned to Benetatos.
"Stick with me, kid," he remembers telling the rookie.
"He just told me to stay by his side," Benetatos recalled. "And I did."
The two ran east on Duane, then south on Broadway. They sprinted by an Odd Job closeouts store, four Postal Service boxes, a jewelry store, a health-food shop, a Starbucks, City Hall, and the Woolworth Building.
Benetatos noticed a man, heavily bandaged on his right shoulder, holding his right arm in an odd way. "His arm was severed," said Benetatos.
A firefighter came toward them.
"He said he felt like he was having a heart attack," Byrnes said.
The two put the firefighter in an ambulance, and Byrnes grabbed the man's portable radio. "Now I could at least make calls," he said.
A black cloud smothered them - the second tower had collapsed.
"You couldn't breathe," said Benetatos.
The two pressed themselves against a building, then made their way into a firehouse on Liberty Street. The empty garage bay was already covered with three feet of debris, Byrnes said. But that didn't matter.
Together, both men set up a command post and triage center. "Then I started gathering groups of men and sending them out," Byrnes said.
One of those he dispatched was Benetatos.
"I sent him out with a lieutenant and told him to watch out for the kid," Byrnes said.
Benetatos spent the afternoon pulling firefighters from the debris and escorting office workers to safety or just telling them to walk north to the Brooklyn Bridge. At one point, the smoke cleared and he looked into a hole he estimated to be four stories deep. He was afraid to head in.
"It was too smoky," he said.
The next day, Benetatos returned. In the clearer light, he saw pieces of fire suits in the bottom of the hole, perhaps left behind by missing firefighters. "I wished I had gone in," he said.
As Benetatos spoke, his eyes welled up.
"Those were the real heroes," he said. "Please make sure you say that."
Benetatos and Byrnes never had a chance to talk about their accidental partnership. They passed in the firehouse late Tuesday, but Byrnes didn't recognize the rookie - and by the time the younger man had a free moment, the retired chief had gone.
Benetatos has returned to the firehouse each day, joining other firefighters to pick through the debris in search of bodies - or pieces of bodies.
"I became a firefighter so I could help people," the rookie said. "I wish I could do more."
Larry Byrnes, taken to Bellevue Hospital on Tuesday night to have his eyes washed out, was just getting his voice and eyesight back on Sunday.
"Old firefighters don't really retire - we just go away for awhile," he said. "I came back because those were my buildings."
Going Back on a Voyage of Poignant Rediscovery
September 18, 2001
Gene Callaghan looked into the orange-gold dawn of the first day of America's new life and swallowed hard.
Monday was Callaghan's first day back at an office only three blocks from the pile of charred steel and broken concrete that was once the World Trade Center. Standing on a sunwashed deck of a Hudson River ferry, he confessed to feeling nervous - but he was absolutely certain he wanted to return.
"We have to go back. We have to get started," Callaghan said. "We have to show the world what we're made of."
In those terse, pep-talk-like sentences, the 51-year-old insurance broker from Pompton Plains could have been speaking for millions across the tri-state area - indeed, perhaps all Americans.
"We got the wind knocked out of us," he said, "but we didn't get knocked out."
After a week of wall-to-wall television, frantic phone calls, and clumsy attempts to find Afghanistan on a map, New Yorkers and their commuting brethren in New Jersey and Connecticut got off the mat and back to business.
In Washington, President Bush talked of bringing back terrorists "dead or alive." At stadiums across America, Major League Baseball games resumed, but with tighter security than ever before. Closer to home, the stock exchange reopened - and suffered the biggest one-day point drop in history.
To be sure, it was a day of tangled emotions.
Michael Everett, who narrates tours for the Weehawken-based New York Waterways ferry service, said he is trying to rewrite his script.
"Intellectually, I know the towers are gone," said Everett, 54, of Hackensack. "But spiritually, they're still there."
"I still can't take it all in," added Paulette Smith, wearing a surgical mask to block toxic fumes as she walked up Wall Street to her paralegal's job.
Smith normally rides the PATH train from her Hoboken apartment. On Monday, she took a ferry. "I just couldn't go underground," she said.
Locally, it was a day of glacial-speed traffic, of camouflage-clad soldiers on Wall Street corners, of silent, pained glances toward the empty space in the Manhattan skyline.
It was also another day when stores sold thousands of American flags that seemed to be hung from everywhere and everything.
New York Waterways gave a flag to each passenger. One man, clad in an impeccable, crease-free brown suit, brought his own - draping it around his neck like a scarf.
Some spoke with the same quiet resolve as Gene Callaghan. Others, explaining how they couldn't concentrate on work, told of a deep sense of sorrow they just couldn't seem to shake. Still others conceded they harbored a persistent fear that the sort of attack that pulverized the trade center could happen again.
From the Weehawken waterfront, the orange dawn peeked over Manhattan's skyline and majestically climbed the azure sky's canopy. It seemed like another Indian summer day - much like last Tuesday, when two hijacked jets struck the Twin Towers, another hit the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and a fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
The Voyager ferry eased into the Hudson River chop just after 7:30 a.m., and set a course for lower Manhattan. Across the way, the sunlight took on an eeriness as it filtered through the gray-purple smoke still rising from the Twin Towers' rubble.
"I'm not scared," said Jennifer Gorsky, 25, of Westfield, who was bound for Wall Street and her job as a marketing analyst. But, gazing at the trade center smoke, she confessed: "I didn't sleep too much last night."
Carl Zipperle, 52, of Tenafly also looked toward lower Manhattan.
"I consider myself lucky," he said.
Zipperle just happened to be late for work last Tuesday - and was probably saved as a result.
"Normally, I would be on the trade center plaza when the planes struck," said Zipperle, a technology manager and video engineer for an investment bank.
Monday was his first trip back to work - though he wasn't sure where, because his office was in a building damaged by falling debris.
"You live your life day by day," Zipperle said. "Then you have something like this come around, and you realize your life can be totally disrupted."
In a nearby seat, Byron Soto, 29, said he had been trying all week not to look at the spot in the skyline where the trade center used to loom over the harbor. This was no easy task; his Guttenberg apartment overlooks Manhattan and his office at a bond-rating agency faced one of the towers.
Now, on the Voyager, Soto took his first look since last Tuesday.
"It fills me with so much sadness," he said. "The towers meant a lot to us. Just look: Where are my two landmarks? It's like a hole in the skyline. There's something missing. It feels like you're violated."
The Voyager cruised around the tip of Manhattan, past the dock for the Staten Island ferry.
Diane Vanderlinden, 33, of Old Tappan crinkled her nose.
"That same smell of burning wires," she said of the pungent smoke, blowing now across the harbor. "I almost had another panic attack. That smell brought me back to last Tuesday."
The Voyager docked. And Vanderlinden and the others walked off the gangplank and into their Wall Street worlds, trying to resume their lives - at the usual brisk Manhattan pace.
One passenger lagged behind, though.
Rita Rosenberg, 60, of Cliffside Park stood on the dock and looked up.
"It's our symbol," she said. "It's a symbol of America, of our influence, our everything."
Rosenberg wiped away tears. Then she walked to her job.
In her hand, she carried an American flag.
A Wall of Thanks for 11 Missing Heroes
September 19, 2001
Kids say it best.
The youngest among us sense something very bad happened last week at the big buildings in lower Manhattan that once seemed to climb as high as the clouds. And when children took pencils and crayons to explore their feelings in these last, somber days, they spoke for all of us.
"Dear fire fighters, My name is Emily. I am 7 years old. Thank you for saving people, risking your life for others, putting out the fire, and helping us when we're scared."
You can find Emily's note, scribbled in pencil on wide-lined paper, taped to the wall of a firehouse at 66th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. You'll find dozens of others too, along with almost 100 candles, a 3-foot-high stack of flowers, and the photos of 11 firefighters.
The missing 11.
The firehouse, one floor below a cafeteria that serves students from The Juilliard School and the School of American Ballet, is home to two firetrucks - Ladder 40 and Engine 35 - and 50 New York City firefighters. The Upper West Side neighborhood they protect is home to the Metropolitan Opera, Tavern on the Green, the Dakota apartments where John Lennon was murdered, the television studio where "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" is taped, and the hotel where Babe Ruth once lived, to name just a few landmarks.
When two hijacked jets smashed into the World Trade Center towers Sept. 11 at around 9 a.m., the red firehouse doors opened. The log shows that five firefighters jumped on Engine 35 at 9:08 a.m. and sped to the burning Twin Towers. Six minutes later, six firefighters left on the ladder truck.
None returned.
Indeed, while Engine 35 and Ladder 40 were recovered from the debris of the collapsed towers and brought back to the firehouse, there was no trace of the 11 firefighters. "We think they ran into a tower, but no one is sure," said one firefighter.
Today, the photos of the missing 11 - the Fire Department refuses to classify them as dead - look down on the sidewalk, surrounded by the words of children.
One girl who wrote a note, Michaela, is only 4. But her words, while laced with the fractured grammar and poor spelling of a child just learning to express herself, nonetheless encapsulate the human cost when terrorism snuffs out the innocent - especially those who protect us.
"Dear fire fighters," writes Michaela, "I hope any other firemen doesn't die until they grow old and die of old age. I hope not any other person in that city dies from this fire."
On the sidewalk, Amy and Jamie left a candle that "celebrates the warmth of your heart, the light of your soul." Taped to a fence, a letter from Nico tells firefighters that "you have been so brave." Nearby, Alaina left this note: "Thank you for saving people's lives."
"I feel very sad and scared," wrote 8-year-old Daniel. "But I'm glad that the police and firefighters are helping people who are trapped or injured."
Ms. Doherty's fourth grade at a nearby elementary school signed a poster. The Center School painted an American flag in watercolors on a 4- by 5-foot piece of paper. A first-grade class in Needham, Mass., sent a poster-sized note thanking "police and fire people" and explaining how the ripples from the World Trade Center hurt them, too.
"Noah's friend's mom was in the airplane that crashed into the trade center," the first-graders wrote. "We feel very sad."
Luis Soto drew a picture of the Twin Towers and his shorter apartment building. The towers are engulfed in flames, but Soto's building is not.
“Thank you for saving our world," he writes.
One girl drew a picture of herself in a purple dress - "Me" - next to a tall firefighter - "Hero." Another girl, Allie, drew a picture of herself in a red dress with her arms open to give a hug. "Thank you so much for all your help saving our country," she wrote.
A boy named Quentin gave a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to Police Officer Brian O'Neill, who is assigned to guard the display. O'Neill now keeps Quentin's "thank you" note in his hat.
"That really touched me," he said, unfolding the note and reading it again. "The sandwich was OK, too."
Still another girl named Laura left a small gift. "I'm donating socks," she wrote in a note taped to the firehouse door.
"Amazing, huh?" said Firefighter Jeffrey Mark, as he stood before the array of notes, flowers, and pictures Tuesday.
Like many in the firehouse, Mark has developed a personal attachment to the wall of notes and pictures. "I've read every one of them," he said. "One kid gave me a flower. I keep the flower in my locker."
As he spoke, an elderly woman grabbed his arm.
"How are you?" the woman asked.
Nearby, a man asked another firefighter how he could make a donation to a memorial fund for the families of lost firefighters. By a firehouse door, a woman smiled shyly and placed a bouquet of carnations on a table, then patted it gently. As she walked away, a man left a bouquet of mums, then closed his eyes and prayed silently.
But while they are grateful for the adults' attention, firefighters say the children's words and pictures sustain them in a special way.
"Firefighters have always had a special relationship with the kids," said Jim Gorton, who retired last year after two decades at the firehouse on 66th and Amsterdam but came back to help his colleagues. "Many schools come here on field trips. And a lot of us are just big kids ourselves."
Around noon, Suzy Patterson, a controller at a Citibank office near the Twin Towers, stopped by with her 5-year-old twins, Emma and Ian.
She said she tried to shelter the twins from news that about 300 firefighters were missing, including 11 from the local firehouse where Ian once got to sit in the ladder truck. But students in the twins' kindergarten class told them.
On Tuesday, Emma and Ian left a bouquet of white mums at the firehouse and a brief note that surely speaks for an entire nation:
"God bless you."
** Update: In the weeks after this column was written, the fire fighters at the Lincoln Center fire house discovered that another of their fellow fighters who was not assigned to work that day also perished. That brought the death toll from the fire house to 12 fire fighters – one of the highest losses at a single firehouse in New York City.
They Came, They Saw, They Photographed
September 23, 2001
In New York
You could say Leo Mach got tired of watching TV.
Then again, he also had time to kill, not to mention a get-off-the-sofa, hit-the-highway need to see the ruins of the World Trade Center.
"I saw it on TV, but I had to see it firsthand," said Mach.
Like a tourist.
Who cares if 800 miles stood between Mach's Chicago home and lower Manhattan? Mach, 33 and an insurance claims adjuster, had a rented car, plenty of coffee, and two buddies with the sort of all-night, pedal-to-the-metal mindset that surely would make Jack Kerouac proud.
"We left Chicago at 7 p.m. on Friday," said Mach, standing on the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street on Saturday. "We got here at 8 this morning. We'll leave tonight."
Your basic weekend jaunt.
To be sure, we are a nation willing to go long distances - an hour for dinner, two hours to the office, maybe five hours just to walk in the woods. But in these video days, we seem to be a nation that craves photo ops, too.
As streets around the pulverized concrete and steel mountain of rubble of the trade center opened up Saturday, tourists poured in with enough video and camera equipment to outfit a year's worth of National Geographic expeditions - or a class field trip or two.
Bruce McAllan, 41, took a side trip on the way home to Virginia from a roofing job in Brewster, N.Y. "I just wanted to see it, just to believe it, just to smell it," he said, holding a pocket camera.
Dolores Tango, 52, took the train to Manhattan from her home in Roselle Park, where she works as a secretary in the municipal public-works office.
"My heart is breaking," she said. "I came to see what those horrible people did to our country. I didn't feel the impact of Pearl Harbor until I went there, too."
Of the disposable camera she carried, Tango said she wanted snapshots to show to her godchild along with newspaper clippings she is saving - "just like my mother did for me with Pearl Harbor."
Phil Clarke, 56, an investment banker, stood by a doughnut shop, and recorded his thoughts with a hand-held digital voice recorder: "All the shops and spaces are covered with dust."
"It may be a little ghoulish," he confessed, clicking off the recorder. "But it's important for history. I think it's important for my children and grandchildren to record this."
He gazed across Broadway and down Dey Street - toward a pile of steel girders, twisted and bent like licorice. "Mind-boggling," said Clarke. "To think that 6,000 people are lost there. . . ."
His voice trailed off. On the doughnut shop was this sign: "You are looking at hallowed ground. Respect those around you. Please give it the dignity it deserves."
Down the block, outside a bakery and overlooking St. Paul's Chapel, Leo Mach held his video camcorder aloft - this to shoot over the heads of other tourists, now four-deep at a fence. "I feel guilty taking pictures in one way," he said. "I don't know if it's acceptable."
"Sometimes pictures say more than you can say," reasoned Ella Hall, 52, a psychologist from Westchester County who brought her Canon with a telephoto lens. Added New York police Lt. Chuck Shevlin as he watched the crowd: "I guess we're all just curious at heart."
At Maiden Lane and Broadway, a clump of 50 tourists pushed against a fence to take in the surreal - and much-photographed - 12-story-high skeletal piece of the Twin Towers standing behind three-pronged steel girders thrust into the ground like giant pitch forks after falling from the upper floors.
"Oh my God," gasped a woman, clasping a man's hand.
"Oh my God," echoed West Point sophomore John Paul Lecedre, 19, of Camarillo, Calif.
Bob Germano, 54, of Montville rode a bicycle through Manhattan with his wife, 52-year-old Naomi, after parking their car in Weehawken and taking a cross-Hudson ferry. "I'm just coming to pay my respects," he said. "This is a mass funeral."
Said Naomi: "It looks like the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome."
The one sound you didn't hear was laughter. Indeed, as tourist sites go, this seemed on par with John F. Kennedy's grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
Some onlookers cried openly. Some placed a hand over their mouths. Some just stood in silence.
Seeing the fork-like girders and massive, charred skeleton for the first time, Jeremy Maus, 29, and Ken Bennett, 31, who drove from Maine on Saturday morning with a carload of gloves and socks for workers volunteering at the ruins, broke into a somber rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."
"See the flag? There, beyond the smoke?" said Maus, pointing to a swatch of red, white, and blue atop a girder. "We saw that and decided to sing."
He looked again at the flag.
"Plus, my wife is over there videotaping us."
Maus and Bennett performed an encore minutes later. A camera crew from Korean television rushed up and captured the moment.
American Resolve
September 23, 2001
THE soldier sat ramrod straight in the turret of a camouflaged Humvee, his hands gripping the handles of a .50-caliber machine gun. A September morning sun warmed the air. The locals wore shorts and T-shirts. The soldier wore gloves and a military combat helmet.
As the Humvee slowly rolled through Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood one recent morning, a few blocks from the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center, residents stopped and stared in silence. Here, in a neighborhood of million-dollar lofts, antiques shops, and tiny restaurants with inflated prices, came a stark reminder that the world had suddenly changed when two hijacked jets tore into the glass and steel skin of the 110-story twin towers.
Then, a few people noticed something odd.
Despite this soldier's menacing, finger-on-the-trigger pose, his machine gun had no bullets. There was no ammo belt hooked to the .50-caliber's chamber. Indeed, there wasn't even an ammo box in sight. This GI was no more lethal than a kid with a toy gun.
So what was his point? Was this soldier - a member of a local National Guard armored cavalry squadron - merely posturing? Just what was his message anyway? That day, the soldier caught the attention of a cluster of news photographers, who dutifully pointed their cameras and snapped away. (The cameras were loaded, by the way.) Not surprisingly, a New York tabloid, with a penchant for exaggeration, played the photo big - but without explaining that the machine gun had no ammo.
I thought of that scene as we rolled out our red, white, and blue resolve last week to do something about the brazen terrorist attacks on the Trade Center and Pentagon. Are we serious? Or are we just posing? So far, the big security change at airports is the elimination of curbside check-ins. Oh, my. Surely, terrorists everywhere must be shaking in fear.
Even in those tense days after the Sept. 11 hijackings of two jets that struck the Trade Center, one that hit the Pentagon, and another that went down in a Pennsylvania farm field, authorities discovered that some airports were not even bothering to check what caterers delivered to jetliners. Is that a bomb? A salad? Who knew? For some odd reason, authorities still have yet to make a firm decision on whether we need someone more attentive and skilled than low-wage, poorly trained civilian guards monitoring baggage-checking machines at airports. Airlines and federal authorities can't even agree on such basic security proposals as matching bags to passengers - proposed, by the way, after the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988.
Airlines say it would cost an extra $300 million-a-year to match bags to passengers. Federal authorities dispute this, claiming in one study that bag-matching would increase ticket prices by a mere 40 cents and delay passengers an average of only seven minutes. Why can't we figure out who's right?
Even worse, we still can't agree on whether to assign armed sky marshals on all flights. What are we waiting for? Another hijacking? The U.S. Department of Transportation tested airport security and discovered more holes than a honeycomb. Undercover agents lacking proper IDs easily infiltrated "secure" areas and sometimes boarded planes without even an "excuse me" from a security guard.
By the way, that study took place in 1999. It made headlines, but little was done in the last three years. Aviation security officials have focused most of their attention on preventing bombs from being smuggled aboard airplanes. They never imagined hijackers might sneak aboard with something so low-tech as a box cutter. And even as Islamic suicide bombers blow themselves up in Israeli shopping malls and restaurants, American security experts never seemed to imagine that a suicide hijacker might take over a plane. Why not?
Federal immigration officials, meanwhile, now talk of keeping a better eye on foreign visitors, some of whom might be terrorists. Oh really? Our immigration bureaucracy can't even gear itself up to perform such basic tasks as monitoring students who stay in America after their visas expire. How do they ever expect to catch terrorists? But rest easy, dear citizens, America's discount T-shirt industry responded quickly to this latest crisis.
Barely a week after the Trade Center disaster, sidewalks in Manhattan's financial district - only a block or two from the rubble - had new displays to cash in on the emerging patriotism. On corner-after-corner, vendors had traded in their displays of $10 watches and $5 sunglasses for stacks of T-shirts, freshly printed with American flags, the twin towers, and such patriotic slogans as "United We Stand" and "Attack on America."
As for that soldier with the .50-caliber machine gun, he broke his gung-ho stare that morning after a few discerning folks on the sidewalk called out, "Where are your bullets?" The soldier glared back. After an embarrassed pause, he reached down into the Humvee, and emerged with a steel box.
"You want ammo?" he yelled, holding the box aloft. "Here's your ammo." Then he put the box back inside the Humvee, and resumed his pose, his hands still gripping the unloaded machine gun.
It made a great picture.
Workers Still Hold Hope for Life
September 25, 2001
Amid the Smell of Death at 'the Pit' Ground Zero
The rotting smell squeezes your eyes, poisons your tongue, twists your nose, worms through your hair - then settles in that corner of your emotional memory that never lets you forget.
The smell of death.
The pit.
Ground zero.
To truly understand the mangled destruction - and mass murder - of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, you need to see and smell this place the rescue workers now call "the pit."
Imagine a debris pile of Godzilla-like proportions - five stories high and seven stories below ground, stretching over a moonscape four blocks long by three blocks wide. Even two weeks after the tragedy, workers have barely begun to delve into the estimated 120 million tons of rubble.
Imagine steel girders and pipes tangled like knotted hair. Or a police car crushed so mightily that its chassis has squished out from under its body, like a bug under your shoe. Or fires boiling from deep caverns. Or a flagpole broken off one building and thrust into the skin of another - 50 yards away.
Then, imagine the stench of thousands of victims, their bodies trapped when each of the 110-story trade center towers crumbled. Authorities say more than a million body parts may eventually be recovered here.
"Smell that?" said Port Authority police Lt. Brian Tierney, as the wind shifted and the acrid odor swept over. "There it is again."
Tierney, who lives in Teaneck and is normally assigned to the Port Authority police contingent at the George Washington Bridge, now commands teams of Port Authority police officers who comb the rubble of the trade center in search of any sign of victims, including 37 Port Authority cops.
The cops and firefighters who come here each day for 12-hour shifts still call this a "rescue operation" - an important verbal distinction because it implies that someone might still be alive.
Indeed, Port Authority police search teams, who go into the pit with shovels, two pairs of gloves each, pickaxes, helmets, flashlights, goggles, and mountain-climbing harnesses and ropes, will eagerly tell you they still believe they might find survivors even 14 days after the Twin Towers toppled - even 13 days after the last survivors were pulled from the pit.
"I try not to count the days," said Port Authority Officer Vincent Zappulla Jr. of Harrington Park. Added his colleague, Bill Connors, his knees covered with sand from crawling in the pit: "Our friends are in there."
But then, the wind shifts and the smell of death passes over - and reality invades optimism.
"That awful smell," said Tierney, his voice falling off, as he rubbed his nose to ward off the smell. "You never forget it."
The work here is sweaty, filthy, often bloody, and occasionally menacing.
Imagine dozens of rescue workers in red, blue, yellow, and white hard hats climbing over rubble that has no rhyme or reason in the way it has fallen. Conjure stacks of plastic buckets to haul away photos and wallets and body parts. Envision side streets still smothered in gray dust, with special "wash stations" on sidewalks that once were home to outdoor cafes. Picture grim-faced workers walking by a poster in a corner phone booth of the smiling sex doctor, Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
At the top of a pile - hovering over the crater-like pit - girders as long as freight cars stick this way and that, like a gargantuan pincushion. Looming nearby is a grid-like piece of concrete and steel that's the last remnant of the skin of the south tower. It rises more than 12 stories, but looks as fragile now as a paper doll cutout.
Atop the grid, ironworkers attached an American flag, its gentle to-and-fro a marked contrast to the cacophony below of men looking for life and machines trying to remove that which ended it.
"The bizarre part is the attempts at normalcy," said Tierney. "You'll be here, looking at the rubble, and then you'll see a guy walking by eating a hot dog and drinking a soda."
When they aren't dodging loose rubble that might cover deep caverns licked by fires still smoldering below, rescue teams must look out for the tractor-grappler cranes that lift debris onto dump trucks.
"You try to find an ironworker that's operating a crane," said Port Authority Officer Tibor Toth of East Brunswick. "You try to get a relationship so we can work together. He pulls off some steel, then we go down and dig."
Many rescue workers' hands are cut - this from sifting by hand for bodies through mounds of pulverized concrete laced with razor-like shards of steel. Officer Harvey Jarratt of Perth Amboy rolled up his sleeve to display a 5-inch gash.
Others tell of all manner of rocks or pieces of steel piping that routinely clunk off their plastic hard hats as they crawl under shifting rubble or explore tunnels. Port Authority Police Sgt. Antonio Scannella even fractured his left kneecap trying to run with other workers from a wall that suddenly caved in.
"I got caught in the stampede," he said.
A window frame lies next to a foot-thick steel girder. Wires grow from the gray dirt like dandelions. Ten floors of a building sit in a stack, separated by more pipes, wires, and pulverized concrete.
"Like a piece of lasagna," said Port Authority Officer Ed McQuade of Jackson.
What you don't find is evidence of the thousands of offices that once called the trade center home. No intact phones. No computers that aren't broken. No desks or chairs.
When it comes, success is measured in the smallest of ways.
On Monday, success for the Port Authority teams meant finding a missing officer's memo book in the trunk of a crushed car.
"It meant a lot for me to read it," said Scannella, rubbing a hand over his aching knee. "And then it made me feel very sad."
Aside from the memo book and a few other items, the car was empty, with no sign of the missing officer.
Scannella turned to look at the pit. A plume of white smoke curled from a mound of twisted steel and broken wall.
"We still have many more places to look," said Scannella.
He picked up a bottle of Gatorade, took a sip, then bit into a granola bar.
Then headed back to the pit.
Bad News Made Worse with Errors
September 27, 2001
A Day of Unclear Messages From the Mayor of America
On the sun-washed morning after his city went to the polls to begin selecting his successor, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani walked into a room and promptly made political news.
He said nothing.
"I know people appropriately are interested in politics and statements about the primary," Giuliani declared to a morning briefing at his command center on a well-guarded Hudson River pier. "If I'm going to say anything about politics, I'll say it later."
So began a day of mystery in the life and times of Rudy Giuliani.
Dropping coy hints and ambivalent answers, the man nicknamed "America's Mayor" has found a way to keep the political spotlight on himself without appearing unseemly, creepy, or downright self-absorbed - not yet, anyway.
Only days ago, Giuliani, a lame duck in the last months of his administration, was widely praised for the way he walked steadfastly through the World Trade Center crisis.
The man seemed to be everywhere, comforting families of victims, directing rescue operations, commanding security forces. More than the president himself, Giuliani seemed to come up with the right words - firm, tender, clear. Even enemies like Al Sharpton said nice things about him.
But Wednesday we saw a glimpse of the old Rudy.
In that somber window of time since Sept. 11, Giuliani has talked about his city in the wake of a terrorist attack that left more than 6,300 people missing in the rubble of two skyscrapers. Wednesday, he was talking about himself.
Should he stay as mayor? Should he go? Can he cut a deal? Can he do this without leaving any political rubble?
Yes, he said last week, he appreciates the poll numbers and the suggestions from others that he remain on the job. But he supports the law that would require him to leave City Hall on Dec. 31 after two consecutive terms as mayor. Now he seems to be talking differently.
In an interview with CBS's Dan Rather, scheduled for broadcast Wednesday night, Giuliani said he is "open to the idea" of staying on as mayor.
And so the mystery grows.
Any day now, it may reach the sort of soap-operatic proportions that Giuliani achieved when he flirted with a U.S. Senate campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton or when he trotted out his new girlfriend, moved out of Gracie Mansion, and openly discussed his marriage breakup. If the man's own history says anything, it tells us he is capable of turning a simple mayoral swan song into political opera of epic proportions with grand choruses and numerous spear carriers.
On Wednesday morning, we had our first hint that America's Mayor may be losing his noble touch and returning to the opera-pol we all know.
Here was Giuliani, telling us that "single rider" cars would be banned below 62nd Street in Manhattan and from all tunnels, most bridges. The ban, he said, would run from 6 a.m. until midnight. Period.
This was definitely a big announcement, affecting millions of people, not just in New York City, but in New Jersey, Connecticut, upstate New york, and Long Island. His voice was definitely firm, steadfast. Surely, America's Mayor had his facts right.
He didn't.
By afternoon, here was Giuliani correcting himself: Single-rider cars were just fine anywhere in Manhattan. They would be banned only from tunnels into Manhattan and most bridges except for the George Washington Bridge. As for the 6 a.m. to midnight ban, well, it was only 6 a.m. to noon - just on the tunnels and bridges. Still later, the ban at the Lincoln Tunnel was put off until Friday.
Oh.
What happened? Was America's Mayor still hearing the "Rudy-Rudy-Rudy" chants at Yankee Stadium the night before? Was he sidetracked by all the talk about him extending his term in office?
Giuliani did not explain how he botched the traffic report. But he did give a hint on how he had spent his day. Clearly, this was evidence that America's Mayor had definitely become the Mayor of Mystery.
As the sun set Wednesday, here was Giuliani telling us that he was trying to contact the remaining New York mayoral candidates - Republican Michael Bloomberg and Democrats Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer - to discuss a plan to "maintain the unity that exists in the city."
Well, what's the plan?
He won't say.
"I want to do something," Giuliani said, "that unifies this city."
Well, what?
The Mayor of Mystery explained that "coming out of this crisis" of the World Trade Center, his city should "get used to living in a different way" with "politicians who think outside the box."
This idea, he said, "came to me last night - that I should think that way also." He added, "I think it's a lot better if we conduct our politics differently."
Funny thing: All this thinking just happens to coincide with a lot of phone calls by Giuliani aides to politicians and others, asking if they would support a proposal to keep Giuliani in office after Dec. 31.
Coincidence? The Mayor of Mystery won't say. But Giuliani does tell us that he "doesn't want a job" and that this plan of unity "has nothing to do with me."
But will he try to overturn the law that would force him from office on New Year's Eve?
"That's a possibility," was all he would say.
With that, he walked out, mystery intact. But before he left for the evening, he gave us this piece of ambivalent insight:
"Let's see if we can come up with a unified approach."
Considering how he spent his day, you had to wonder if Rudy Giuliani was talking about the traffic or himself.
For Some, Death Comes Only in Black and White
September 28, 2001
Now comes the hard part, this walk across the traffic roar on Manhattan's West Street, past the "Need A Prayer?" signs at the table of Christian counselors, past the cameras and the posters of the missing, through the door, and across blue carpet to the desks with the lawyers who make death official and legal.
It was just after noon Thursday when Ana Rosario took that walk with her three daughters, to this place where you come when you surrender hope and ask for a death certificate for someone missing in the World Trade Center attack.
Her husband, Isidro Hidalgo, 47, a kitchen assistant at Windows on the World restaurant, never came home after two hijacked jets reduced the World Trade Center's 110-story twin towers to rubble.
"The day of the attack, at 5:30 in the morning," said Rosario. "That was the last time I saw him."
Seventeen days ago.
Rosario cries as she says this. She bows her head, and gently dabs her eyes with the palm of her hand.
As hard as the last 17 days have been, this new journey for death certificates - which began this week for families of about 6,300 victims - takes this horrific tragedy to a deeper, sadder level.
In those first few days after the towers fell, families believed loved ones might be rescued from the debris pile that extended five stories above ground, seven below. But only a handful of survivors were pulled from the rubble in the first 24 hours, none since then.
Then, the families just wanted a body to bury. But with only some 300 bodies recovered and fewer than two-thirds of them identified, families are faced with having nothing except a piece of paper that declares that a husband or wife or son or daughter is gone.
Ana Rosario, who lives in Manhattan, has been here before - and, in the first week, to a family center in the National Guard Armory on Manhattan's East Side.
Early on, she says she dutifully met the clerks who took information that might help identify her husband or his body. She told them about the birthmark on the left side of his face. She gave them his dental records.
But her husband's body has not been found.
When the clerks told her they were assembling DNA evidence to identify what eventually may turn out to be a million body parts, Ana Rosario brought her husband's toothbrush.
On Thursday, she came for a death certificate. She bore an envelope of documents to prove that she was Isidro Hidalgo's wife - a copy of her marriage license, bills, a birth certificate.
She wore a black suit.
For those who watch from the sidelines, it is impossible to fully understand what this experience must be like - to kiss someone goodbye in the morning, then watch on TV as buildings collapse in black clouds, then try to accept death but without a body.
And yet, it is impossible not to feel uplifted by the nobility of so many families as they walk through each awful step of this tragedy.
Rafael Anigua of Queens came to the family center on behalf of his brother and a 13-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl, who must grow up without their mother, Lorraine, who worked in a securities firm at the trade center.
As he crossed West Street to head home, Anigua sipped coffee in a paper cup, his face frozen in the gaze of a man who has not slept well.
Yes, he said in a low voice, he applied for a formal death certificate for his brother's wife. Yes, he said, he did this so the children could receive insurance benefits. Yes, he felt terrible.
"We were hoping to have her body," said Anigua. "We still hope they find something. But two weeks is a long time. We're pretty sure they've done all they could."
He apologized and walked away. Minutes later, Carol and Sylvia Bengochea approached.
Their mother, Maria, a maintenance worker at the trade center, is missing. But this is the first time Carol, 15, or Sylvia, 21, have found time to come to the family center.
Each is a mother. Carol brings her 8-month-old daughter; Sylvia, her 2-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son.
"The night of the attack," says Sylvia, "our mother was supposed to take us food shopping. We still hope she is alive."
Across the street, police quietly check cars with more family members - a red Jeep with a man and a woman, a taxi that brings a lone woman in black, a Union County sheriff's van with a middle-aged couple.
Volunteers are everywhere. A woman passes by with a prancing white poodle - there to help lighten the mood. A man with a briefcase walks by - another volunteer.
A sad-eyed little girl, perhaps only 7, in a purple shirt and carrying a pink rose in a glass vase approaches two middle-aged women. Ed Fagan, a lawyer from Short Hills, strolls toward her with his own volunteer dog, a 10-month-old mutt named Hannah that he obtained through an animal shelter in Madison.
The girl stops, hands her rose to one of the women, then pets Hannah - and smiles. After a few minutes, the girl goes inside.
"Each day it's new faces," says Fagan, who took time from his law practice to volunteer with Hannah. "The numbers are daunting."
Families sign in at a central desk. From there, they choose from a long menu of services - grief counseling, Social Security advice, child care, food, immigration problems, phone banks. There are volunteers to help translate some 60 languages and volunteers to help keep track of volunteers.
But while the effort to help surely is noteworthy and comforting, there is still that void that no volunteer can ever fill. "It's getting worse inside," says Fagan.
Still waiting to go inside, Ana Rosario thinks again of the husband she last saw before dawn on Sept. 11.
"We were married 20 years," she says. "We came from Santo Domingo. Before he went to work at Windows on the World two years ago, he worked in a grocery store."
Rosario looks up, and her eyes follow the asphalt driveway that leads into a pier that is usually home to cruise ships but has been converted into a "family center." Her daughters - 6-year-old Diana, 11-year-old Darieli, and 18-year-old Angela - wait beside a 50-foot-long array of plywood boards that hold hundreds of posters of those missing in the trade center attack.
Rosario pulls a snapshot of her husband from a stack of photographs she carries and shows it to a stranger.
"This is him, right there," she says, her finger pointing to a man with a mustache.
"This is his friend," she adds pointing to a man in a white hat.
The men are smiling, holding glasses in their hands, celebrating.
Ana Rosario starts to cry again and looks at her daughters.
"This is very sad," she says.
She turns away, then heads into the building to sign the papers that officially end her husband's life.
Trying to Make a Difference
September 30, 2001
THE COP raised his hand and stopped the trickle of walkers and cyclists on the sidewalk.
"Hang on. Can't go this way."
It was an otherwise sunny afternoon on Manhattan's west side - a perfect day for a bomb scare.
The cop pointed over his shoulder to several large trucks a few blocks away, surrounded now by police cars with their lights flashing. "Couple of trucks seem suspicious," he explained. "We just want to check them out. Shouldn't take long."
Ten minutes later, life as we know it resumed. No bombs.
In the 19 days since two hijacked jets smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, certainly our routines have changed, perhaps permanently. But have we?
Say hello to Rich and Shonna Doran. In their story, you might hear something comforting - that our world may now be different, thanks to tightened security and our own fears, but the essential goodness of ordinary people is still with us, strong as ever.
The day of the bomb scare, the Dorans happened to be leaving the special help center for families of Trade Center victims, set up in a West Side pier.
"We came to volunteer," said Rich.
What you need to know about the Dorans is that both work for the Fire Department in Toledo, Ohio - Rich, as a firefighter, and Shonna as a fire dispatcher. You also should know that they are both avid hikers. Last week, as part of a long-scheduled vacation, they planned to go hiking in southern Ohio. "Nice country down there," said Rich.
When the Dorans heard that the twin towers had been destroyed, they canceled their vacation plans and came to New York. And they began a different sort of hiking adventure.
The Dorans walked first to the Jacob Javits Center, where they signed in as volunteers. From there, they walked to the Family Center.
At both stops, the Dorans were told that all was well, that there were plenty of volunteers. But rather than feel sorry for themselves, they set another goal. The day after I met them, they were planning to drop by New York firehouses to see if firefighters needed help in any way - even just to talk.
The Dorans are just one example of the thousands of volunteers who descended on New York - indeed, the entire area - after the Trade Center disaster. But in a fundamental way, they typify a spirit that seemed common to many.
"We told them," said Rich, "we would do anything they wanted."
Shonna nodded. "Whatever they want," she said.
"We'll even shovel horse manure," said Rich. "We don't care."
The same day the Dorans went to the Family Center, an elderly woman approached. She explained she once worked as a clerk for New York's municipal government. "I know how to do paperwork," she said. "I'll do anything they want."
She was followed by Martha Asante, 51, a member of the Trade Center's janitorial staff. She survived the terrorist attack and is without a job now. She came to volunteer.
And so it went. Chefs at exclusive Manhattan restaurants donated meals to rescue workers, massage therapists gave free back-rubs. Hardware stores gave gloves, hard hats, and shovels. Electronic stores sent computers.
But the giving and volunteerism was not limited to adults - or New York. On this side of the Hudson, three high school students turned $90 worth of red, white, and blue ribbons into lapel pins, which they sold at Hackensack and Hasbrouck Heights high schools and raised $1,200 for disaster relief.
In Wyckoff, a 13-year-old girl organized a bake sale with her friends and raised $425 for the Red Cross. In Ringwood, eight children set up a sidewalk lemonade-and-snack stand and raised $210. Those are a mere trickle of the deluge of grass-roots offerings of help.
In these fearsome days, it's all too tempting to keep track of all the outward changes to our routines - the length of traffic jams, the number of police check points, the fact that we can't carry backpacks into Yankee Stadium. It's easy to forget how much our inner values remain steady - especially that when disaster strikes, all sorts of people step forward to help.
On the same afternoon a bomb scare stopped traffic on Manhattan's West Street for 10 minutes, Rich and Shonna Doran vowed to keep asking if anyone needs a volunteer. They would do this all week, they said - the length of their vacation.
Were they frustrated?
No said Rich. "We're not going to make a big difference," he explained. "We're just two people. But they need to know we care."
The Ribbons, My Friend, Are Blowing in the Wind
October 2, 2001
Where Has Union Square's Memorial Gone?
The poem, neatly typed on white paper, fluttered in the chilly wind, attached to a fence with red, white, and blue ribbons tied in a bow.
By noon Monday, the poem was gone, cut down by scissors-wielding workers on behalf of a city trying to return to normal life.
This quiet attempt to clean up Manhattan's Union Square will not make the evening news in these tense days after the World Trade Center attack. But the removal of the poem - about a woman who watched the Twin Towers fall - says something about the messiness of grieving and how little patience some have for it.
Only hours after two jets hijacked by terrorists destroyed the 110-story towers, Union Square on 14th Street became an impromptu memorial to the dead and missing. There was no plan, no organizational meeting, no committee.
It just happened.
Someone brought a votive candle. Then more candles came, hundreds of them, flickering like fireflies. Then posters of the missing - thousands of smiling faces, hopeful and alive, left by loved ones desperate for hope's uncertain threads.
Then flowers. Then small mementos. Then flags. Then scrolls of butcher paper that wrapped the wire fences and were covered with all manner of ways to say "God bless."
Within a day or two, the memorials had taken over a section of Union Square the size of a football field. Posters of some 6,000 missing people covered almost every inch of fencing. Floral bouquets climbed the 10-foot-high granite pedestal that held the statue of George Washington - which, in turn, held an American flag, duct-taped to George's right sleeve.
The grass behind the statue and the plaza in front became home for more flowers and candles, arranged in circles and rows. Knots of people gathered for conversation, debates, prayers. Others strummed guitars, beat drums, delivered speeches - or just watched.
Not anymore.
Over the weekend, normalcy returned to Union Square. The city's Parks Department dispatched crews to clear away the remaining flowers, candles, posters, and flags. The crews left behind this sign, attached with plastic wires to fences:
"Papers and artwork are being removed and preserved by the Parks Department for archival purposes."
The sign went on to suggest that "in place of burning a candle or leaving flowers, please consider making a donation" to a relief fund or planting a tree. It ended by thanking park patrons "for your cooperation and understanding as we restore the plantings, lawn, and plaza."
Ah, restoration. Nice concept. But where did all the grief go?
Brad Stonberg, 39 and a former stock trader, wondered just that as he strolled through the square on Monday morning carrying a bouquet of flowers.
A satchel slung over his shoulder, Stonberg stopped by the statue of Washington and looked around. A few pieces of tape that once held posters of the missing still clung to a fence - like autumn leaves that refuse to fall to the ground. Duct tape that had held an American flag still wrapped Washington's right forearm, which pointed southward, toward the trade center site. The plaza's stones still wore stains from candle wax. A dozen or so potted mums sat at the statue's base, arranged in the shape of a cross.
Such were the remains of the days of memorials.
Stonberg shook his head.
"I guess it was time," he said. "I don't know. Life seems to go on. It saddens me that there are no more memorials."
Stonberg lost a friend in the trade center attack - New York Firefighter Vincent Kane, who rushed to the towers from a firehouse on the Upper East Side and never came back.
"We had dinner three days before," Stonberg recalled. "Then he was gone."
In the days after the trade center tragedy, Union Square became an altar of sorts, where people like Brad Stonberg could deliver their sentiments, their memories, their unsettledness. Said Stonberg: "I needed it."
Was the scene ridiculous at times? Of course.
Washington's horse still bore the pink-tinted remains of a peace symbol the size of a pizza painted on its right rear flank. You can still read faint outlines of such messages as "NYC wants peace" and "Love, Love, Love" chalked on the statue's base.
But the square was home to genuine sentiment, too.
Sy Seltzer, 58, a former electronics salesman, remembers a Fire Department flag and a chair someone had left with a firefighter's helmet on its seat. Samantha Deane, 25, a screenwriter, was struck at how a local artist created 8-foot-high replicas of the Twin Towers - one made from tiny license plates with names, another from chicken wire.
Deane said mourners wrote prayers on scraps of paper and filled the chicken wire tower. "It was an incredible amount of outpouring of emotion," she said. "Now there is no format for expression."
Jeffrey Goldenson, 25, who was raised in Princeton and now lives in Brooklyn, said the quick removal of the memorials is "symptomatic of the attention span of people" - short, accustomed to quick changes.
Across the square, Brad Stonberg took in its tree-shaded walkways. He shook his head again and smiled.
"It's unbelievable," he said, "how this was transformed from Union Square to a place with all the memorials, then back to Union Square in just a few weeks."
But there was still the matter of the last poem, attached to the fence with red, white, and blue ribbons. On the ground, someone had left eight white roses. Titled "Coffee at the Comfort Diner," the poem told of the towers falling in "a glittering September sky flooded with confetti" and with sun reflecting off "points of shattered glass."
A Parks Department worker snipped the ribbons, then turned to a passer-by.
"Here," she said, holding out the paper, "you can have this if you want."
She left the roses.
Mourning the Officers 'Left Behind'
October 4, 2001
A Police Captain Begins to Confront Enormity of What He Witnessed
Each day, he comes to this dusty place called "ground zero" to watch the men in hard hats drive the cranes that tear into the tangle of steel and concrete.
Anthony Whitaker, a Port Authority police captain from Fort Lee, still wonders what to do about another kind of debris in his heart.
"I'm here. I'm alive. But I'm numb," says Whitaker.
Cops and firefighters will tell you they have different ways of sorting out their feelings when tragedy sweeps into their lives. Some turn to prayer. Some to booze. Some to spouses. Some to their colleagues' shoulders. Some to their own lonely silence.
But what do you do when 37 Port Authority cops never come out of the rubble of two 110-story skyscrapers? Who do you turn to when you're the guy in charge that day?
"That first week, the mechanics of just doing my job took up my time," Whitaker says. "Now it's starting to have an impact."
He rubs tears from his eyes. Minutes pass before his voice returns.
What you should know about Anthony Whitaker is that on Sept. 11 he was the officer in command of the Port Authority police at the World Trade Center. He was one of the first high-ranking cops with the presence of mind to order office workers evacuated.
Evacuation was no small thing. Besides the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center included five other buildings, a subway station, and an underground mall with about three dozen stores.
Whitaker called out his order on a radio only minutes before the second hijacked jetliner bore down. Port Authority Police Sgt. Alan Devona radioed a similar command from a fire control station in a tower lobby.
Such quick thinking, which went against a reported loudspeaker announcement by building managers telling workers to stay put, likely played a key role in saving thousands of lives. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani estimates that 25,000 people were ushered to safety by cops, firefighters, and rescue workers before the towers collapsed. Some 5,500 people are still missing or dead.
But Whitaker shakes his head at the notion that he saved lives. He looks down uncomfortably when a lieutenant, Michael Brogan, walks up and praises him for not sending all cops into the buildings, but placing them in spots around the complex. "He saved a lot of lives," Brogan says. "He really did act quickly."
No, says Whitaker. He won't talk about the ones who were saved. What he remembers are the Port Authority cops he sent into the complex. The ones who never came out.
"The police officers I left behind," he says.
It's been more than three weeks since the World Trade Center attack. If there is a change at ground zero, apart from the abandonment of hope, it's in the emotions of the many cops and firefighters who come here each day.
Like Whitaker, many are only now confronting the deep sadness of what they witnessed.
"I think I have memory overload," Whitaker says.
The Port Authority police assign teams of counselors to the cops who come to ground zero to help search for bodies. This week, the teams are busier than ever, says Port Authority Lt. Brian Tierney, who organizes the search teams and counselors.
Anthony Whitaker concedes he is just beginning to confront his memories, sometimes in awkward ways.
He tried to write to his youngest son - he is divorced and the father of three daughters and two sons - but had to stop after a paragraph. "I started to write about the orange ball of fire," he says. "I couldn't do it."
The other night, asleep in his Fort Lee home, he awoke with a jolt from a dream in which a friend was in danger. It was 4:30 a.m., but he picked up the phone anyway. His friend was just fine.
"But that's what it's been like," he says.
Whitaker, at 56, has built up plenty of emotional calluses. Brooklyn-raised, he dropped out of high school but got his diploma by going back at night. He worked 10 years as a cutter in the garment district, went to college, then decided to become a cop. He is now the highest ranking African-American on the Port Authority force. On Nov. 1, he celebrates 30 years wearing a badge.
But age, experience, and the mental toughness that comes from breaking color barriers matter little now.
Whitaker picks up a poster with pictures of each of the 37 missing Port Authority cops.
"I know every one of them," he says, tracing a finger across the poster. "They're not just pictures. They're still alive to me."
It's not quite noon Wednesday. Whitaker is in his white captain's shirt, his brass buttons shined. In a few hours, he will go to Paramus for a memorial service for Officer Bruce Reynolds.
"Look around," says Whitaker, sweeping a hand toward the door of the gymnasium of Manhattan Community College. With their command post offices destroyed, the cops use the gym as a temporary headquarters. "All of this is wiped out, along with friends lost. Now you're on a bucket brigade looking for pieces of bodies."
His voice trails off, then picks up.
"We're orphans," he says.
He tries to recall the morning of Sept. 11. Even though he is a captain, Whitaker liked to spend 30 minutes or so each morning on guard in the shopping mall concourse below the Twin Towers. His spot was just outside the windows to Banana Republic.
"I call it my image post," he says, smiling. "It's important for people to see police officers."
He remembers hearing a loud noise - "like a train," he says. He glanced toward the lobby of the north tower and an orange fireball swept through. Whitaker ducked to his left - "my mo-jo move," he says. He took a few steps, then dived into the doorway of a freight elevator.
Minutes later, he met up with three cops - Donald Foreman, Walter McNeil, and Nathaniel Webb. They went to the south tower. He ran into another officer, Bruce Reynolds. Reynolds was tending to a woman with burns. Later, he spoke to yet another, Clinton Davis, in the concourse.
Then Whitaker was summoned by a chief. And then the buildings fell. He never saw the other officers again.
"They all disappeared," he says.
Anthony Whitaker traces his finger over the men's photos and rubs his knuckles into his eyes.
"Day turned into night," he says. "Everything got black."
Strange Times, Strange Ideas
October 7, 2001
ONE AFTERNOON last week, a man waiting for a Jersey-bound bus in midtown Manhattan turned to a woman he had never met and struck up a conversation.
The terrorist strike on the World Trade Center 26 days ago was definitely on this man's mind - so much so that he announced that he was prepared for the next one.
He already had a gas mask, he said.
The woman nodded. She did not seem surprised. She conceded that she, too, had a gas mask. In fact, her entire family had them - gifts from her father.
Clearly we are a changed people, living in a nation profoundly changed after two hijacked jets smashed into the Trade Center's twin towers on Sept. 11.
If we commute to New York City, maybe we're rising earlier to beat the 6 a.m. deadline banning cars with fewer than two people from the Lincoln Tunnel. Maybe we're now taking a bus or ferry to cross the Hudson. Or maybe we're even organizing a car pool and actually engaging in human contact during our commute rather than sitting alone in traffic and listening to Imus.
We're buying fewer plane tickets. And if we fly, we arrive at the airport two hours earlier and without as much carry-on luggage.
We politely put up with check-points on Manhattan street corners, some manned by soldiers. We attend fewer Broadway plays, patronize fewer restaurants.
But some of us may be going to extremes.
Army surplus stores say gas masks are hot sellers. The same goes for special kits that purify water. There was even a radio report last week suggesting that a recent upsurge in sales of pantsuits and flat shoes to women may be due to a fear that high heels and dresses don't allow for a fast dash from the office during a calamity.
Druggists, meanwhile, say some customers now are asking for bottles of a prescription antibiotic called "ciprofloxacin hydrochloride" - this to combat the anthrax virus.
Anthrax? A decade ago, it was the name of a heavy-metal rock band. Now anthrax is discussed on the nightly news as a lethal bacteria that could be spread by "bioterrorists."
So we're a little jumpy.
Every member of Congress now has a gas mask - even Rep. Gary Condit, the California Democrat who spent most of the summer ducking questions about his relationship with a 21-year-old female intern who vanished without a trace.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told CBS' "60 Minutes" last Sunday that the federal government was ready for a bio-chemical attack. By Wednesday, Thompson had second thoughts, and conceded that we had work to do. By Thursday, New Jersey's senators, Robert Torricelli and Jon Corzine, were holding a joint press conference in Trenton to push for a nationwide "Biological and Chemical Attack Preparedness Bill."
Not to be left behind, gun advocates are having their say, too.
A Hawthorne-based group, calling itself "Gun Owners of New Jersey," recently wrote to the state's gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Jim McGreevey and Republican Bret Schundler.
Personally, I found the letter's first line unusually touching for the gun crowd: "May this find you well." But they quickly sunk into their familiar self-righteousness tone.
"As you are very well aware," the letter went on, "it can take six months" to get a gun license. "As you also know, government has recently demonstrated its inability to protect us from terrorist attacks." What, the gun owners asked, would McGreevey and Schundler do "to enable law-abiding New Jersey residents to easily and quickly avail themselves of the first civil liberty, the right to defense of hearth, home, and self?"
Translation: How can we stock up on guns to fight terrorists without waiting until next April Fool's Day? For the record, McGreevey and Schundler have not come forward with a gun-toting version of FDR's chicken-in-every-pot plan for health and happiness. But you never know.
As for the rest of us, a recent survey found that 25 percent have trouble concentrating at work and 15 percent have trouble sleeping. Another 40 percent feel depressed.
Maybe a gas mask will set things right. Or something to ward off anthrax. Or maybe a new six-shooter. Or maybe just a new pair of flat shoes to escape in.
Strange times spark strange ideas.
Workers at Trade Center Site Stay Focused on Grim Task
October 8, 2001
No one cheered. No one clapped. No one sounded a horn.
When bombs fell on Afghanistan, workers at the rubble-strewn landscape where the World Trade Center once stood had something else to think about.
They just found a body.
Yes, they had revenge on their minds for the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers four weeks ago. And yes, they want their government to strike back decisively.
But when the task before you is to find the broken remains of about 5,500 victims in a mountain of jagged steel and pulverized concrete spread over 16 acres, it's hard to take time to analyze events on the other side of the planet.
"The work," said Port Authority Police Officer Emanuel Luongo, "keeps us focused."
It was just after noon when Luongo's rescue and recovery crew, picking through a mound of gnarled girders and twisted pipe, noticed a pair of men's shoes sticking out from under a concrete slab.
Inside the shoes were feet.
But that's all workers could discern. The slab was too heavy to move by hand, and calling in a crane to lift the slab wouldn't help either. The knot of girders, wires, pipes, and concrete underneath was too unstable.
"We were afraid the body might drop into a hole," said Luongo, 34, who grew up in Parsippany and now lives in Mount Olive.
So work stopped.
And then word spread throughout this spot now called ground zero that American and British forces were attacking a variety of targets in Afghanistan with bombers, carrier-based jet fighters, and submarine-launched cruise missiles.
Luongo said a few workers smiled and nodded - then kept digging.
Across ground zero, it was much the same. By the Salvation Army coffee stand or the fence being erected by construction workers or the temporary morgue or the chapel made of plywood, workers and volunteers checked radios or pagers that provide brief news bulletins. A few nudged colleagues or passed the news by calling across streets still covered with dust from the fallen towers.
"You can see I'm smiling," said a New York City police officer who stood with four other officers. Sitting nearby, Don Browne, a New York City Fire Department paramedic, added, "I just hope they get the people responsible for this."
But no one celebrated - no one had time.
"I guess you get so immersed with this job," said Port Authority Lt. Preston Fucci. "This becomes the priority."
It's not that Fucci and others here were not pleased to hear of the Afghanistan attacks. "I do want to see something done," said Fucci. "But they have their job to do. We're doing ours."
Such sentiments frame the mood at ground zero on most days. It was no different on Sunday.
One reason is the solemn, mournful nature of the work. Rescue crews arrive just as dawn breaks over Manhattan. They don kneepads, several pairs of gloves, hard hats, overalls, and boots. Then, with picks and shovels in hand and mountain-climbing rope over their shoulders, they head for the place some call "the pit."
They look for bodies, but too often find only pieces of bodies. Or they try to unearth the mundane pieces of lives that might identify someone - wallets, purses, cellphones, briefcases, wedding rings, desk photos.
The Rev. William Glennie, a Church of God minister and police chaplain who came here from Arizona to offer spiritual counseling, didn't hear about the U.S. and British attacks until late in the afternoon when he emerged from the rubble with a rescue crew.
"I'm for it," Glennie said of the bombing raids. "I think it's an appropriate action."
But Glennie, a former Arizona Highway Patrol officer, was also heartened that the U.S. and British military promised to deliver food and other supplies to refugees uprooted by Afghanistan's turmoil.
"I'm glad we're trying to do everything we can to feed the innocent," he said, looking toward the sky. "We need to do that."
Glennie stood on the steps of the Manhattan Community College gymnasium, which was converted into a rest area for rescue workers, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his yellow windbreaker to ward off the chill from a westerly breeze that swept off New York Harbor. Overhead, clouds bumped and pushed off each other as they floated across the Hudson.
On the other side of ground zero, near a temporary morgue, Brian Galligan, a construction foreman from Closter, was patching broken windows in a nearby building when he heard about the attacks. One of the workers in his crew called out, said Galligan, “They're bombing Afghanistan."
Galligan, 46, said he reached for a pager on his belt to confirm the news - then went back to inserting plywood into the broken windows. Now, standing by the morgue, he checked the pager again.
"Explosions in Kabul," it said. "Bin Laden speaks, calls U.S. terrorists."
Reading the pager over Galligan's shoulder, carpenter Anthony Musco laughed. "Bin Laden calls us terrorists? He's got some guts," said Musco.
Galligan looked toward the rubble of the trade center, then back to his pager. "I'm glad they're going in," he said of the squadrons of bombers and jets. "We needed to get those guys. I'm just a little worried the terrorists have other stuff planned."
As Galligan patched windows, Port Authority Police Officer Doris Caridi, a member of an emergency services squad, searched the roof of a damaged building for debris. Another officer's cellphone rang. It was his wife, telling him of the attacks on Afghanistan.
"He turned and said, `We're bombing Afghanistan,'" said Caridi, a 21-year police veteran. "We said, `That's good.' Then we went on with our search."
On the roof, Caridi found pieces of the fuselage of one of the hijacked jets that smashed into the towers. She found pieces of luggage, chunks of the towers, concrete that had been ground into sand-like powder.
And a pink teddy bear, about 6 inches high.
She placed the bear in a white bucket and carried it downstairs - then turned it over to another team that is assembling personal items found in the rubble.
"Someday a family member might recognize that bear. And it might be all that's left from a loved one," said Caridi. "That's good enough for me. That's my job."
She paused, brushed a strand of her blond hair over her ear, and thought of the news from Afghanistan.
"If everyone does their job," she said, "this will be over soon."
No Scarcity of Work for the Clergy
October 9, 2001
The hardest question is the one with no answer.
Why?
Rabbi Edgar Gluck, who escaped the Nazis as a boy and the smoke and fire of the World Trade Center four weeks ago, looks across ground zero and pulls on his gray beard the way older men do when they ponder life's mysteries.
He is 65, a grandfather, a veteran police chaplain who counseled families of victims after TWA Flight 800 crashed off Long Island in 1996. But nothing, he says, prepared him for the river of grief that still flows unhindered a month after two hijacked jets smashed into the Twin Towers.
"Here, on this site," he says, "it's the hardest."
There are all manner of jobs at this scarred landscape, but one of the most difficult is borne by clergy who come to help others search for meaning or an explanation for what happened and how to carry on with life. As U.S. and British forces attack terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan, the answers seem just as fleeting.
Gluck, the Orthodox Jewish rabbi to the Port Authority police as well as the New York State Police and the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, will tell you that he tries to comfort families who want to see where loved ones died, to bless bodies as they are carried from the rubble, to give thanks that he survived after rushing to the trade center on Sept. 11 with an ambulance crew and almost suffocating in the smoke.
But he will also tell you something else - that he has no good answer when someone asks why the towers fell, why some survived and others perished.
"You try to identify with people's pain," says Gluck, who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and was raised in the Bronx. "But to imagine this. . . ."
The rabbi's voice fades, swallowed by the cacophony of steel demolition cranes crunching steel rubble. His eyes walk the smoking debris field before him - past a welding truck and a knot of silent firefighters, to a mountain of pipes and girders that poke skyward like giant porcupine quills.
Minutes before, workers found a jawbone in the rubble. "Very frustrating," says Port Authority Police Officer Michael McGuinness, who clutches a red plastic bag that holds the body part.
The rabbi adjusts his black yarmulke under his white hard hat, then gazes over his shoulder toward a tan-colored tent behind a plywood fence - the temporary morgue where McGuinness delivers the bag.
"We are not equipped," the rabbi says, "to figure out what God has in mind."
In such a gruesome place, where so many victims are gathered in pieces and identification becomes a detective hunt through DNA samples and dental records, you don't necessarily expect to find anyone pondering the Almighty's elusive mysteries. But then, it makes perfect sense.
To explore ground zero is to confront life's darkest side - the brutal murder of innocent people in the name of religion. But to come here in the smoky aftermath is to see the best in people, too - how so many step forward to offer comfort when so many are hurting.
"I've found myself very angry at times," said the Rev. James Barkett, an Antiochian Orthodox priest who came from his church in West Palm Beach, Fla., to offer spiritual counsel. "You have to look beyond the rubble and the pile to see God. When all is said and done, we're going to have to deal with forgiveness."
Faith's comfort does not come in large miracles.
Rabbi Gluck will tell you that he finds strength in the workers who ask him to lead prayers before they venture into the rubble. Father Barkett says he is awed by the delicate handling of even the smallest of human remains.
Construction workers point to cross-shaped steel girders they pulled from the debris pile and placed atop a concrete stanchion that held a pedestrian bridge. Sister Johnice Rzadkiewicz, who took time away from running a soup kitchen for the poor in Buffalo, finds hope in the stoicism of cops and firefighters who still search for bodies. "They rebuild the spirit in people's lives," she says.
"No matter what religion you are, everyone is united," says the Rev. Nicholas Rafael, a Greek Orthodox priest from Newark.
But lurking on the edge of almost every conversation is the same question - why?
"We just don't have the answer," says Rafael.
"It doesn't make any sense," added the Rev. Elias Isla, a Catholic priest from Manhattan's Church of St. Jude.
Isla stands outside the temporary morgue. Inside a tent sit three stainless steel tables, empty. Beyond that, red bins hold some of the 5,000 body parts recovered from the rubble.
In the last hour, Isla blessed a finger that had been recovered. He says he has no idea whether it was from a man or a woman - or what faith that person followed.
Here, religious divisions that seem so large outside evaporate with the necessity of offering comfort.
"The attack had nothing to do with religion," Isla says. "But I really expect people are going to come close. We realize we are not alone."
At a non-denominational service at the site Sunday morning, the Muslim chaplain for the NYPD, Imam Izak Pasha, offered a prayer.
Now, on West Street, two Port Authority lieutenants, Donald Heffern and Mark Winslow, keep an eye on a recovery crew that combs the rubble. Besides the body parts, the crew finds pieces of the fuselage from one of the hijacked jets, and a wallet.
Heffern, who lives in Wayne, stares into a white plastic bucket that holds the wallet, covered in gray dust. He shakes his head.
"My wife says I've changed," says Winslow. "Everyone's changed. It's all changed."
Rabbi Gluck stares again into the remains of the south tower - the one that almost snuffed out his life a month ago. He does not understand why he survived and others died. But he is thankful anyway - for life and that this place did not shake his faith in God.
The rabbi closes his eyes, then prays in Hebrew.
"Blessed are you, O Lord of the universe, who has performed a miracle for me in this very place."
Academic Discussion of Attack Ignores Mass Murder
October 11, 2001
They packed the room with their somber sincerity, this group of bright graduate students and intense intellectuals who gathered over coffee, tea, and cookies to examine why terrorists blew up the World Trade Center 30 days ago.
Of course, no one used the T-word. This was a polite lot. No terrorist bashing here.
What took place among some 60 people who crammed a seminar room Wednesday at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs hardly qualifies as treason or even an apology for terrorism. But the "lunchtime talk" typifies a sad fact of life among some of America's best and brightest scholars now - that instead of expressing outrage over a mass murder by nihilistic terrorists, far too many seem content to just explain why it happened.
Imagine discussing a rape, a burglary, or any other murder this way: "Yes," dear victim, "before we talk about the crime, let's explore the roots behind it."
It seems goofy - stupefying even. But this is essentially what took place on Wednesday at one of America's best universities.
The title of the discussion offered a hint of what was to come: "America and Americans in the Minds of Arabs and Muslims." No mention of the trade center. Or the attack. Or the deaths.
Indeed, what is pathetically ironic about this discussion was how it danced around the basic facts - that four jetliners were hijacked by Muslim extremists, that two jets smashed into the Twin Towers, one hit the Pentagon, and another plowed into an empty field in Pennsylvania.
And that nearly 6,000 Americans died, all of them innocent.
Something was definitely missing. But at Columbia, no one mentioned what it was.
In the days after the trade center attack, the Rev. Jerry Falwell tried explaining why the catastrophe happened. Incredibly, Falwell cited gays and abortion as reasons why God "lifted" his protection of America and allowed terrorists to attack. He was harshly criticized - and rightly so.
At Columbia on Wednesday, no one seemed even remotely bothered by what was happening. Of course, the man doing the talking was much slicker than Falwell.
Say hello to Fawaz A. Gerges, professor and author. He's apparently a hot property. ABC snared him on Monday to interpret Osama Bin Laden's video. That same day, he held forth on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, explaining how the United States "needs to invest directly in Middle Eastern civil societies to improve governance."
Invest?
How about a murder trial first? And why can't Middle Eastern nations clean up their own act?
In leading the discussion, Gerges seemed quite pained as he explained how Arab intellectuals at a recent conclave he attended seemed to apologize for Muslim fundamentalists. He seemed equally pained that so many Arab nations are run by authoritarian thugs. No free press. No intellectual discourse. No women's rights.
Gerges was pained, all right. But not pained enough to say that the murders at the World Trade Center were wrong.
His is the "yes-but" style of commentary, employed now by others on the American left, such as Susan Sontag and Barbara Kingsolver: Yes, it's terrible that the trade towers fell, but we need to understand why it happened and what motivated it and how America ought to change.
"It's about time to think about engaging Muslims," said Gerges, adding that "it's essential to deconstruct this relationship."
He accuses America of pretty much ignoring Muslims and paying too much attention to Israel. He adds that American-supported sanctions against Iraq don't help, either.
None of this is new. But what might be grist for a general discussion of Middle East politics takes on a whole new meaning in light of the World Trade Center attack. If you want to talk about how much America might be disliked by Arabs, can't you admit that such dislike should never justify murder?
Gerges never said that. Nor did anyone else who took the floor. Not the elderly professor in the bow tie. Or the man with the beard. Or the woman with the backpack. It was as if murder was too messy for this crowd.
To be fair, one man did mention that more than 5,000 people died in the trade center attack. But that fact wasn't noted until almost 45 minutes into this gathering. Before that, the attack was referred to as "the incident" and "the crisis."
Some incident.
Some crisis.
Seeing N.Y. Through the Taliban's Eyes
October 14, 2001
THE MAN on the subway was talking life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He mentioned Thomas Jefferson, religious freedom, the "spirit of the First Amendment."
I wondered what the Taliban would think.
Not that I ask myself such a question every day. But when you gaze on the mind-boggling destruction of a place called Ground Zero, you have to wonder why anyone would do such a thing. How could an aide to the Taliban's favorite terrorist, Osama bin Laden, say it was "good thing" that fellow Muslims reduced the World Trade Center to rubble and killed some 5,000 people? And then, I caught the subway.
The man was speaking to a woman half his age. He encouraged her to go to school, to speak her mind, to do as she pleased. "You got something to say?" he said. "Feel free to say it." The woman nodded.
The Taliban would not approve. No sir.
If this were Afghanistan instead of Manhattan, the woman would be required to be covered, scalp to ankles, with only a slit for her eyes. She could not go to school or speak to a man who was not her husband - or have an opinion. Indeed, she could not even sit next to a man she did not "belong" to.
If she did, she could be executed. The Taliban says such rules are God's will. There is no debating this.
I got off at Times Square. I wondered what the Taliban would think of what lay before me.
I passed a bookstore that sold novels by Salmon Rushdie. A few years ago, Muslim fundamentalists wanted him executed. His crime: Writing a novel that cast doubt on Islam.
The Taliban wants him censored - or dead.
I passed a booth that offered half-price theater tickets to "Contact," (about dancers) "The Full Monty" (about male strippers), and "Proof" (about a woman with a mind). These would not pass Taliban censors either. I didn't even bother to think about "The Vagina Monologues" or "Naked Boys Singing."
But it didn't matter. On this day anyone could line up for the tickets - and not have to explain why or be ashamed of the choice.
I passed a billboard with a guy modeling tight underwear, another with a woman modeling a bikini, another advertising a new TV talk show hosted by a woman, another that announced "In God We Trust."
In Kabul, you can't mention any God but the Taliban's God. And forget billboards about underwear and bikinis and women's talk shows. They don't pass the Taliban test.
I passed the military recruiting station, where women as well as men can enlist. I passed a police station with male and female cops. I read the Times Square electronic news board. It reported on bombing by U.S. jets in Afghanistan. It also told the other side - that the Taliban still supported Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban does not allow the other side to tell its story. And forget about men and women together in the military or on the police force.
I glanced at the MTV studios. The Taliban does not even allow people to watch any television, much less MTV.
I passed Planet Hollywood and Galactic Circus and Virgin Records where the window advertised a CD that proclaimed in large letters: "Parental advisory: Explicit Content."
Under the Taliban, there is no explicit content warning, no parental advisory necessary. Parents don't need to make such choices. The Taliban does.
I passed a pizza restaurant - the same pizza chain that owns a restaurant in Jerusalem where a Muslim extremist suicide bomber blew himself up and killed innocent Jews - all in the name of his God. The Taliban did not condemn those murders or the suicide.
No sir. I passed a store that sold baseball caps for cops and firefighters who died in the terrorist act at the World Trade Center - the one act the Taliban declared to be "good."
I walked by a comedy club. Does the Taliban allow jokes? (What a joke.) I got back on the subway, and got off at Columbia University. In front of the main library, I found a table where three students passed out leaflets condemning U.S. bombing raids in Afghanistan.
Surely the Taliban would approve. But then, so does America. Here, we allow all points of view - even the Taliban's side.
It's the American way.
The Taliban hate us for it.
24 Hours at Ground Zero
October 14, 2001
Hundreds Toil at a Task Both Sacred and Hellish
It may now be the most talked about landscape in America - ground zero, where the World Trade
Center once stood. Once the home of gleaming towers that reached skyward, it is now a tortured
debris field, with massive steel girders cruelly twisted and tossed this way and that, amid tangles of wire,
steel rods, and pipes. Here, the fires that ignited almost five weeks ago still burn, But here also,
the grueling work of searching the rubble for some 5,000 victims of the Twin Towers attack continues
round-the-clock. Unless you are a volunteer, a crane operator, or a member of a search and rescue
team - on any given day 200 to 500 people labor there - few visit this spot for very long.
Beginning Thursday, one month after two hijacked jets crashed into the 110-story towers,
columnist Mike Kelly and senior photographer Carmine Galasso took in ground zero for 24 hours
straight, chronicling the emotional journey of the men and women who valiantly work to
account for all the missing.
As the harbor haze spars with a morning sun, some 200 men and women lock arms and look to the heavens.
It is 8:48 a.m., exactly 30 days to the minute since the first of two hijacked jets smashed into the World Trade Center. The only sounds are the ping of a hammer somewhere in a building and the measured cadence of a rabbi and a priest reciting the 23rd Psalm.
"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."
The men and women bow their heads for a half-minute, then turn and walk to their own valley of death amid the concrete canyons of lower Manhattan.
Ground zero.
There's an emotional poetry to this ashen landscape, where heartache is as much a constant companion as the smoke from fires that still burn. Among those who toil here, some call it a sacred place, some label it hellish - many see it as both. To understand what they mean, you cannot drop by for just a brief visit, the sort of walk-through that politicians and celebrities do.
Here, time evaporates, days melt. There is no darkness under the nighttime floodlights, little chance for silence amid the whir of electric generators and steely squeal of cranes.
Here, work counts. And the work is all about finding bodies.
"It's hallowed ground," says Port Authority police Sgt. John Gilburn. "You pray that you can find something so families can close this."
Shifts last 12 hours. But the excavation rolls on for 24, seven days a week, with no deadline - at least none that anyone wants to mention.
Those who come here insist they will keep up this pace until every grain of the million-ton pile of iron and concrete is examined for traces of more than 5,000 victims.
"Until we find them all," says a cop.
"Until we bring them home," adds a firefighter.
9:37 a.m.
Larry Mays, Port Authority cop and a man in mourning for 37 colleagues who perished in the towers' collapse, asks where God is.
Mornings are always a mix of expectancy, he says with a smile. What will the pile yield?
The day before, the rubble gave up the remains of a New York City firefighter - one of 348 lost here. Two days before that, workers dug out the body of Antonio Rodrigues - one of 37 Port Authority cops lost.
But such discoveries are rare. More often than not, rescue crews and families must settle for mere body parts, leading to a grim wish among those who labor amid the rubble.
"An intact corpse would make me happy," says Mays, 40, who lives in Waldwick. He winces at the harshness of his words.
Mays walks past the spot where the 110-story north tower once hovered over West Street. To his right, white smoke curls from a dark hole that drops 100 feet into a steely bed of wires, pipes, rods, and girders. To his left, a 30-foot, three-pronged girder sticks from the side of one of the World Financial Center's buildings like a pitchfork jammed into a barn wall.
The girder fell from the higher floors of the tower and jabbed into the granite skin of the sleek structure, about 150 feet up.
By the curb, sitting on a chair, New York City Firefighter Mike Miller stares at the ground littered with scraps of insulation and twisted wire. On a dirt mound sits an empty steel stretcher-like cage for carrying bodies. Nearby is a plastic bucket for sifting debris for body parts or personal items such as wallets or snapshots. A glove floats in the mud.
"I feel angry a lot," says Miller. "I can't believe it's been a month."
Mays listens, nods.
A former Bergen County sheriff's officer, Mays joined the Port Authority police eight years ago. He never really had much reason to doubt the Almighty, he says.
But then, the towers fell in a sun-blotting cloud on Sept. 11.
"My feelings about God were suffering at that point," he says. "Why would God allow this?"
Two weeks after the collapse, a crane lifted debris from a smaller trade center building that stood in the shadow of the north tower. A search crew entered and discovered three crosses in the charred wreckage, their inch-thick girders sheared off as if by design by larger beams that fell from the tower.
Construction workers pulled one of the crosses from the building and put it atop a concrete abutment.
"I thought maybe there is something more here," says Mays. "The devil might have gotten away with this one, but God is still here."
He points to a sign, spray-painted in orange on a fire-scarred door to the structure. "See what it says?"
"God's house."
The building is next on the list to be demolished.
10:30 a.m.
They search for the smallest of things - a woman's purse, a wedding ring, a wallet with baby pictures, a body part large enough for a DNA sample and identification.
Something for someone to keep or bury.
And yet, in this search for small blessings amid such destruction lies a fundamental sadness. Some pieces of this landscape survive, some do not.
But why? How do you explain why an electronic time-temperature sign remains intact in a building across from the trade center while windows there were smashed by falling debris?
A crew of Port Authority cops and Passaic County sheriff's officers trained in emergency rescues heads to the trade center's underground mall.
Down a stairwell, a clock at the Tourneau watch store is frozen at 9:58 a.m., a minute before the first tower fell. The store's windows are broken, its watches gone.
A steel girder pokes through a ceiling. Farther on, wires hang like strands of hair. A woman's purse sits on the floor. Receipts from a Coach store cover the floor.
Some of this world is strangely intact. A statue of Bugs Bunny still smiles from the Warner Bros. store, though Bugs is smothered in gray dust that gives everything the look of a fresh snowfall. A newsstand's Sept. 11 newspapers - also dust-covered - still await customers, along with displays of vitamins, magazines, and candy.
But nearby sit the signs of calamity - an overturned baby stroller, an office chair with no office, a brown teddy bear tossed carelessly, a crumpled red coat, keys, and a watch left on a shelf under a cash register.
"Smell the perfume?" asks Sheriff's Officer Don Cavallo.
The crew steps under a curtain of steel wires and into sunlight again.
What was once the ceiling is now the floor they walk on. And when the ceiling fell, it smashed a perfume store - and its dozens of scents.
A body-sniffing German shepherd named Loki whimpers. Too many smells at once. Nearby, an ironworker cuts a 4-foot-wide steel beam with an acetylene torch, its orange sparks floating like a meteor shower. A few feet away, another 4-foot-wide beam stands upright after plunging downward from above.
"We don't know how far it went down," says Cavallo.
Port Authority Police Officer Richard DePietro, who grew up in Fort Lee but now lives in Point Pleasant, gazes down into a 100-foot cavern where clouds of smoke float upward.
Behind him, sheriff's Sgt. Jim Hearney gazes a few seconds at a coat on the ground. "You find all sorts of odd things, and you try to think of why they are there," he says. "I found a briefcase with a ham sandwich inside. Did the person just drop it and run? Did he get away?"
The landscape does not give up answers easily.
The crew heads back inside, down a hallway, through a door, down a set of stairs - and another and another.
Four levels below, in total darkness, dust floats in beams cast by crew members' flashlights as they enter a delivery area.
Cavallo swings his flashlight to the right. A green van sits there, unscathed by the violence above, but for a window smashed by rescuers looking for victims in the immediate aftermath of the collapse. Hearney and another crew member, Lt. Anthony Manzo, point flashlights to the left - a white delivery truck. Next to the truck stands a stepladder.
Such discoveries underscore the sad irony at the core of the trade center tragedy and survival.
"We found another cavern with a car that wasn't scratched," said Port Authority Officer Michael Kuligoski. "Three feet away, we found a man crushed beneath a ceiling. Had he made it a few more feet, he would have been safe."
12:30 p.m.
Supplies for the workers seem to sit everywhere, a testament to someone's generosity. And if it's not here, a volunteer can usually fetch it.
All manner of crackers and energy bars cover a table. Cases of soda and water sit nearby, along with bags of mint candies, boxes of gloves, socks, and T-shirts.
A Pennsylvania boot company donated 1,000 pairs of heavy-duty footwear. Chilly Willy's and Cool Carl's, an ice-making company from Westchester County, N.Y., delivers up to 30 bags of ice each day - no charge. A tractor company gave dozens of all-terrain getabouts.
Hot meals are vital.
Local restaurants contribute dinners. But that's hardly enough. A Salvation Army tractor-trailer from Florida, outfitted with a kitchen, can cook 9,000 meals a day.
With so much dust and so many parched throats, water is perhaps the most popular drink, with coffee a close second at night.
Mike Simpson, 40, a Salvation Army worker from Yuma, Ariz., says he goes through eighteen 39-ounce cans of coffee a day. "And that doesn't include all the tea and hot chocolate," he says.
Besides the Salvation Army and the Red Cross - and their loyal cast of supporters - the trade center excavation has become a magnet for a whole new legion of volunteers and others offering help.
Tom McHale may be one of the most unusual.
By day, he works in Newark as a Port Authority police detective assigned to the Joint Terrorist Task Force - one of the groups currently running down leads in New Jersey about followers of Osama bin Laden.
After work, he exchanges his sport coat and tie for jeans and a hard hat and reverts to an old skill - one acquired before he became a police officer, husband, and father of four daughters.
"I may be the only cop who is also an ironworker," says McHale.
With the laser-beam gaze of an intense baseball pitcher, McHale, 40, concedes that he feels pulled in many directions.
"I'm torn between both places," he said of the task force in Newark and the trade center site in lower Manhattan. "I'm needed on the investigation. But I left guys here. I ran and left guys here."
The chain of events on Sept. 11 hardly portrays him as a coward. A Port Authority detective, he happened to be near the trade center, working on a two-decade-old investigation of the radical Black Liberation Army with New York City investigators.
When he heard that the first plane had struck the trade center, he sped there. After guiding workers to safety, he was ready to join a team of cops that went into the underground mall - near the Warner Bros. store and its Bugs Bunny statue, not far from a Borders bookstore where a poster by the door announces that former General Electric CEO Jack Welch will be there Sept. 11 to sign copies of his new book.
But his pager went off. It was his 19-year-old daughter calling. She was worried.
McHale stayed upstairs to call her back, while the other cops went down - and the first of the two towers fell.
"And then I ran," he says.
Not far, however. McHale helped set up a temporary morgue a block away, and then stayed to rescue cops, firefighters, and others from the debris after fires died down. His closest colleagues on the team that went into the underground mall all escaped.
"But one guy," says McHale, "is missing."
He concedes he didn't know the officer well. He pushes his hard hat back on his head.
Then he starts to cry.
4:22 p.m.
Emotions here come with all sorts of stories.
Andrew Infante, a Port Authority construction supervisor from Piscataway, sits in a tent down the block from ground zero and wipes away tears.
Of all the Port Authority officials here, he is one of the most crucial. He supplies tools to construction crews building temporary offices for Port Authority officials - from cops to engineers - left without work space when the trade center collapsed.
But Infante, 52, carries another burden. His 47-year-old brother, Anthony, a Port Authority police inspector from Chatham, rushed to the towers to help workers escape and never came out.
"He was the guy I played golf with," Andrew says. "I went to Yankee games with him."
He looks out the tent flap toward the smoking debris.
"There are 5,000 souls in there," he says. "What is really heart-wrenching for me is that no one was found alive after the second day. Five thousand people and not one family got good news. It just pulls me apart."
To channel his grief, Andrew helped build a 30-by-20-foot stage overlooking the site for families to come and meditate.
"It was," he says, "my labor of love."
Down a gentle slope from the stage, Officer Doris Caridi, a 21-year Port Authority police veteran, kneels down and rakes the debris with a gardener's hand cultivator. Around her are three dozen cops, firefighters, and others.
Caridi is one of the few policewomen trained in the specialized skills of emergency rescues. But she digs each day in the debris pile now, wearing a respirator to ward off potentially harmful fumes. She rises at 3 a.m. to get here by 6 a.m. from her home in Suffolk County.
"It's sacred ground," she says. "The dust on your uniform is sacred. This is an obligation. This is a duty."
She stands on the side, as 11 cranes lift ragged piles of pipe, girders, and wire. Fifteen minutes pass and the cranes pause - and Caridi and other rakers rush in.
Whole bodies are rare here. Mostly, she looks for pieces, or for personal items such as purses or wallets. The other day, she found a pink teddy bear.
So far today, she is coming up empty-handed.
Then, she notices a flat piece of gray material the size of a dinner plate - possibly a piece of a plane fuselage. She passes it to another police officer.
Nearby, workers find small bones.
But that's all. "We're hardly finding anything," says New York fire Lt. Jackie Sullivan, as he places the body parts in red plastic evidence bags for DNA sampling. "But if we can find something that brings a family a little closure, that's worth it."
Doris Caridi stares at the pile. The wind shifts and a telltale sweet-and-sour smell wafts by.
"You're looking at a giant grave," she says, pausing.
"Yep. It's frustrating. I just want to get all these people in there home."
11:20 p.m.
Denise Behrens spends the evening taking in soles - of boots.
With so much dust, some of it suspected to contain asbestos, site managers insist that everyone pass through "boot washers" when they leave.
On this night, Behrens, 28, a marketing and event planner by day for Reuters News Service, volunteers to squirt a hose at the bottoms of hundreds of boots.
"When the towers went down, I had to do something," she says. "I've never been more proud to be an American or a New Yorker. Despite everything that happened, it made us stronger."
2:20 a.m.
Joe Libretti got to bring his brother home.
Libretti works on a crew that runs a 200-foot crane. When his crane was brought to the trade center rubble, he could have sought work elsewhere - for good reason.
Libretti's brother, Danny, a firefighter, was missing in the pile.
A few days ago, Dan, 43, was pulled from the rubble, only 200 feet from Joe's crane.
After making sure that his brother was taken care of, Joe, 44, went back to work.
"As an ironworker," he says, "I've seen a lot. But I've never seen what I see here. But you know something? You are happy to find something for someone. You know somebody will have some peace."
Port Authority police Sgt. Frank Giaramita puts it another way: "The dead have become the living. If you find anything, it's like you find a live body."
So far, fewer than 10 percent of those lost in the trade center attack have been found and identified.
Dan Libretti's funeral is scheduled for this week, and Joe's friends tell him he shouldn't feel obligated to come to work afterward.
Joe refuses.
"I started it," he says. "And just because I found my brother doesn't mean I should walk away."
Joe still keeps a cigar attached to his hard hat - for his brother to smoke.
You could also say Willie Quinlan refused to walk away.
Willie, 54, helped build the Twin Towers in the early 1970s. Now, he works with Joe Libretti in removing the debris.
"It's such a disaster," he says.
Quinlan stands on a muddy patch of ground where debris has been scooped up. Above him, bathed in white floodlights, a seven-story section of the outer skin of one of the towers reaches into the darkness, like a cathedral without a roof. Higher still, a crescent moon rises.
"I can't explain how I feel about it," he says. "It took so long to build it, so little time to bring down."
3:10 a.m.
Just off West Street, three Port Authority cops sip coffee at a kitchen set up by the New Jersey State PBA and manned on this night by Plainsboro police officers.
The air smells of hot dogs - from a gas grill that burns all night. Someone mentions that the Yankees lost to the A's. The cops nod, sleepily.
Then a radio pops to life - FBI agents are being summoned. Workers picking up debris think they have found a "black box" - the cockpit voice or flight data recorder from one of the hijacked planes.
FBI agents check. No black box this night. Just debris.
4:35 a.m.
Jeff Noel, 40, a Salvation Army worker from Ontario, Canada, had never visited New York City, much less seen the World Trade Center towers. But he came to work in a kitchen anyway.
Inside a tent, volunteers set out trays of scrambled eggs and hash browns on a table. Outside, Noel places a plastic liner in a trash can.
Trucks roll by, carrying tangles of steel and other debris, and Noel thinks of the spirit he sees in the eyes of the cops, firefighters, and others who come each day for a bite to eat.
"You've got the worst of the worst head-to-head with the best of the best," says Noel. "And the worst is losing."
He remembers the previous morning, and the silent gathering of workers, the locking of arms, and the reading of the 23rd Psalm with such lines as "the Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want."
"Awesome," he says.
6:49 a.m.
Two dozen Port Authority cops gather for morning muster in a new home - a prefabricated building on a basketball court a block from the debris pile.
A sergeant quickly reads assignments for each man, sending some to a nearby command post, some to a temporary morgue, others to checkpoints on nearby corners.
Then Lt. Michael Brogan asks to speak.
He reminds the cops that a month has passed since the towers fell.
"We're at war," he says. "Like it or not, we're at war. We're bombing the Afghans, and they don't like it. One of the first casualties were our brothers and sisters."
Outside, beyond a fence and a line of trucks waiting to haul away debris, white smoke rises.
The pile still burns.
Bronze Sphere Is a Ray of Hope Amid the Ruins
October 18, 2001
They found the bronze ball on a nest of ground zero girders, draped in dust, dented, wrapped in the tentacles of pipes and wires that were once offices.
A survivor.
Maybe a small piece of hope, too.
Few things escaped the fiery avalanche of steel and concrete when the World Trade Center's Twin Towers fell five weeks ago. But workers have recovered an eight-foot-wide spherical sculpture that sat amid the rubble, an unlikely beach ball in a steely bramble.
With some 5,000 people killed when the Twin Towers fell, the fate of a bronze globe that evoked neither angst nor awe in its previous life might not seem important.
But Sept. 11 changed everything. The towers' destruction was so overwhelming, so incomprehensible, even the smallest items recovered from the debris in recognizable form take on new meaning.
So it is with "The Sphere." Created by German sculptor Fritz Koenig, it had stood in the middle of World Trade Center Plaza since 1971. Andrew Infante, a construction supervisor with the Port Authority, calls the rescue of the globe from the wreckage "inspiring."
To fully understand why, you need to know what Infante lost in that rubble. When two hijacked jetliners struck the towers Sept. 11, Infante's brother, Anthony, a Port Authority police inspector, ran inside to help guide office workers to safety.
Anthony Infante, 47 and a resident of Chatham, never came out. As Andrew Infante, 52, of Piscataway, goes to work each day - to reassemble Port Authority offices at ground zero - finding solace has seemed as difficult as putting out the fires that still burn beneath a million tons of rubble.
But then, workers found the Sphere.
"For people at the Port Authority," said Infante, "that represented our history, our lore. To see that now is a sense of survival for the rest of us."
A gift.
Few desks at the Twin Towers survived - or even pieces of desks. The same goes for phones, chairs, signs, bookcases, pens, pencils, paper clips, water coolers, file cabinets, pictures, flower vases, rugs, lamps - all the pieces that go into an office building. As for the people who worked there, of the estimated 5,000 listed as missing, fewer than 500 bodies have been recovered, despite 37 days of round-the-clock digging by hundreds of police officers and firefighters. What's left are body parts, more than 5,000 so far, carefully labeled for possible DNA matching.
Such is the power of destruction when 110-story skyscrapers fall, each acre-sized floor crashing onto the one below.
Which makes the survival of Koenig's "Sphere" all the more remarkable.
The Twin Towers were as much art gallery as office space. Indeed, when the Port Authority drew up plans in the 1960s for what were then the world's tallest buildings, 1 percent of the $800 million construction cost was earmarked for buying public art.
Besides Koenig's Sphere, the Trade Center was home to works by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Auguste Rodin, Joan Miro, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Masayuki Nagare, and James Rosati. The plaza also featured a circular memorial to the 1993 terrorist bombing by sculptor Elyn Zimmerman.
Of the major works, worth an estimated $100 million, the only pieces known to have survived so far are Koenig's Sphere and a smaller sculpture by J. Seward Johnson of a businessman peering into his briefcase.
This week, a crane lifted the bronze ball from the rubble and moved it to a vacant spot near Liberty and Church streets - part of the 16-acre ground zero landscape that had already been cleared.
The top of the sphere was dented, perhaps by a falling girder, and its rotating base was crushed. Other than that, it's intact, says Steven Basic, a Port Authority construction supervisor who examined it.
There are no plans for a new home right now. "They might use it as a monument or a memorial," Basic said.
For now, the Sphere still sits near the remains of the plaza it called home for three decades. In the world of ground zero, where gifts are few, that's enough.
Portrait of the Departed
October 21, 2001
ON AN OTHERWISE uneventful day last week in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, a judge signed a series of documents. With this routine flick of the hand and a squiggle of ink on paper, the process of tallying up the dead from the World Trade Center attack took another step.
The papers were death certificates, especially pushed through the legal maze for victims still missing almost six weeks after two hijacked jetliners smashed into the twin towers. Their bodies may never be recovered.
The judge signed 121 certificates. The average age of the victims: 40.
In many ways, this group of 121 people represented the larger list of more than 5,000 victims - most of whom are still listed as missing in the 16 acres of rubble where the 110-story towers stood. And what they represented is worth noting.
For the most part, the 121 victims were neither young, nor old. Only 15 were under 30, only three over 60. The rest were somewhere in their 30s, 40s, or 50s - on the cusp of the middle years of life.
Perhaps we already sensed this tragic fact. Perhaps we had a feeling about these victims when we saw the smiling snap shots on the posters of the missing that covered walls of hospitals in those teary days after the twin towers fell. These were not kids. Nor were they seniors. They represented those years, when careers solidify and marriages take shape, when babies are born and homes are moved into - those years of a special kind of faith, hope, and love. The time when dreams are sculpted.
All cut short.
One of the most difficult tasks for journalists in these last six weeks has been to probe deeper than just the staggering statistics of the Trade Center tragedy. Yes, this was a horrible story of two gleaming skyscrapers being reduced to a million tons of steel twisted like spaghetti and concrete crushed like talc. And yes, there is the unrelentingly painful tally of 5,000 deaths - 5,000! But this is also a story of 5,000 individual lives, each of them different and yet alike in one, tragic fact - that most were killed at the half-way mark on the road of life.
If you followed the short profiles of victims in this newspaper, you learned about men and women who liked to fish and run marathons, who took acting lessons on the side, who coached youth sports. Some had overcome illnesses, some spoke multiple languages. Their hobbies ranged from cooking to golf - and most everything in between.
Many had college degrees and put in extra hours in the office. And yet, so many of their surviving friends and relatives remembered how they went to such great lengths to spend more time with their families.
In short, they seemed to be looking for that middle balance, somewhere between work and home - the challenge of the middle years. Children spoke of dads and moms who took great pains to sneak out of work for ball games and piano recitals. Older parents spoke of young men and women who ran errands for them, told jokes, or always brought a smile to a somber gathering.
And so it's hardly a surprise that we heard so often from so many surviving relatives a similar mantra - that "she was such a giving person" or that "he's a big, big family man."
No ethnic group dominates. Nor does any single piece of geography. The victims are like so many Americans - descended from people all over the globe, settled now all over the metropolitan area, mostly in middle-of-the-road enclaves, neither rich nor poor.
They came from Leonia and Wyckoff, from the Bronx and Staten Island, from Summit and Babylon, from Woodbridge and Old Bridge.
There was a Montoya, a McHugh, and a Maerz; a Gambino, a Goldstein, and a Gibley; a Chimbo, a Cleary, and a Cherry; a Smith, a Steen, and a Simon; a Kaplan, a Krukowski, and a Kane; an Iskandar, an Iken, and an Iskenderian. There was a Joseph and a Jane, a William and a Waleed, a Calvin and a Clive, a Jennifer and a Joanne, a Timothy and a Tu-Anh.
Middle America's melting pot.
Amid all the big numbers, especially that massively tragic body count, rounded off at 5,000, it's all too easy to forget that each of these victims was unique, trying to carve a special place in life.
And now, thanks to the work of a judge in New York's State Supreme Court, each will have an individual death certificate. What those certificates won't hint at, however, is one of the saddest aspects of this tragedy - that far too many lives were cut off, in the middle.
The sad part is that we'll never know what might have been.
No Shortage of Shrines, Teddy Bear or Otherwise
October 25, 2001
At ground zero, the teddy bears keep multiplying.
Not that this is such a bad thing.
In this place of fire and tears, all manner of teddy bears have been left by the stream of relatives and friends of the missing.
First a few dozen.
Then 100.
Now, some 300.
But the growing population of stuffed bears - first arrayed informally on three stone steps and now filling a 30-foot walkway and another 30-foot ledge on Liberty Street - highlights a question on the minds of many at ground zero:
What sort of shrine is best for this place where so many died?
Perhaps it's still too early to ask such a question. But with New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani planning a non-denominational memorial service Sunday for relatives of some 5,000 dead or missing people, the informal teddy bear shrine is certain to grow.
Police say the crowd at the service could easily exceed 10,000, with many visiting ground zero for the first time since two hijacked jetliners brought down the towers more than six weeks ago. If even 1,000 relatives bring stuffed animals or other keepsakes, where will they go?
And that's just the shrine to civilian workers.
A block away, overlooking the pile of steel and crushed concrete that still burns, sits another shrine - this one made of plywood and commemorating the 18 carpenters who perished when the towers collapsed. The carpenters say no other group honored them, so they built their own shrine.
Across Liberty Street from the teddy bears is an informal memorial to police and firefighters. This memorial presents its own set of sensitive questions about which department and law enforcement groups should be honored and how much space each should get.
If you think this is a small concern, consider a banner that hangs from a building a block away.
The 50-foot banner pays tribute to police and firefighters. While well-meaning, it's considered insulting by some. The banner cites the losses of the New York City Police Department (23 killed) and the New York City Fire Department (348 killed). It says nothing about the Port Authority police, who lost 37 officers, or the dead FBI agent, or the state Supreme Court's three dead guards.
"How do you think we felt when we saw that?" said a Port Authority cop, standing on West Street and gazing at the banner.
Such sensitivities came into play - and were dealt with - when police and firefighters were looking for a place to erect the informal shrine to dead colleagues. The site they chose was a permanent memorial to New York City police who had been killed on duty.
In this case, New York's Finest welcomed firefighters and Port Authority police to place photographs of their lost colleagues, along with flowers, in a stone grotto by a black granite wall that bears the names of some 400 NYPD officers, beginning with James Cahill, who died Sept. 28, 1854.
"It was basically straight from the heart," said Port Authority Sgt. Joseph King, one of the shrine's designers.
But King and others ask what will become of the shrine when the World Trade Center debris is cleared away.
"It would be nice if it stayed where it is," King said.
The same might be said of the teddy bears.
The bears, left by relatives of civilian workers, come with I-love-you notes and family photographs. Some wear sweaters, some wear T-shirts, some wear sweat shirts. A few come with paper hearts pinned to their chests.
All sit amid bouquets of mums, roses, carnations, and daisies - stacks of them, one atop the other. As you walk by and take in the sweet fragrance of so many flowers, you might even forget the acrid odor of fire and death that wafts from the debris only 200 feet away.
On Wednesday, brown and gray teddy bears flanked a handwritten note that said: "To all the special girls at Cantor Fitzgerald" - the brokerage firm where about 700 people died. A pink carnation rested on the note.
By a white teddy bear sat a poster telling you that Virginia "Beth" Fox was "missing." The poster, which said Fox worked on the 98th floor of the north tower, featured a color snapshot of her smiling and standing by a bush of red roses.
Elsewhere, there were purple bears, pink bears, green bears. There was a wedding photo of Michelle Goldstein with this inscription: "daughter, wife, sister." On the stone wall, someone used brown masking tape to attach a snapshot of Dianne Snyder. In pencil on the tape was this epitaph: "mother, sister, wife."
Farther on, poised atop the ledge like furry Humpty Dumptys, sat six brown-gray teddy bears, their faces frozen in happy grins. In a pile of mums sat a black-and-white photo of a young man. "I'm free," was all it said. A few feet away, surrounded by mums and roses, was a poster with a color photo of Craig Staub and this stunning footnote: "Expecting his first child."
And so it went, bear after bear, sentiment after sentiment, each expressing an individual message.
On Wednesday, dozens of relatives walked by in silence, many lingering to read the hundreds of notes. Behind a chain-link fence, three workers raked leaves and set up three canopies in a 50-by-50-foot park - more space for more shrines.
"It's for the relatives to come on Sunday," a cop said.
It won't be enough.
Some Ghouls Don't Wait for Halloween
October 30, 2001
Ground zero is many things, from a mass grave to the setting for countless random acts of heroism.
And now, it seems, a magnet for thieves.
Only a day after two hijacked jetliners reduced the Twin Towers to smoking piles of twisted steel, police say, thieves managed to sneak into the World Trade Center's underground mall and loot the plush Tourneau shop of some $1.3 million in watches and jewelry and $2,000 in cash.
So far, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has charged four people with the Tourneau thefts, including a retired corrections officer and an unemployed security guard who reportedly gained access to the site by wearing a firefighter's jacket he took from an abandoned rescue truck.
But gold watches, diamonds, and cold cash are mere trinkets compared with the treasure trove cops are worried about.
This includes a Brinks truck still buried in the rubble with a reported $14 million in cash; records and evidence stored by a variety of federal agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency; and a huge vault with some $250 million in gold and silver bullion.
Finding the elusive Brinks truck has been difficult - akin, some say, to locating a single roller skate in a junkyard. Besides the CIA, authorities have been quietly retrieving records and evidence - including drugs and weapons - collected by the Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Customs Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
The vault, however, is another story.
Authorities say they located the bullion-filed vault early on, but they have also detected attempts by someone to gain entrance to it.
Who is trying to break into the vault is anybody's guess. "Something turned up on video," said an official who declined to elaborate.
Other than knowing that someone is trying to get into the vault, authorities are stumped. They're taking a variety of precautions, including stepped-up security on the entire site and particularly near the vault, which is located under the rubble of 4 World Trade Center, just off Liberty and Church Streets.
The vault is hard to miss - it's three stories tall - and belongs to the Canadian-based Scotia Mocatta Depository Corp., the bullion and metals division of the Bank of Nova Scotia.
For almost a month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, bank officials declined to comment about the vault or its bullion, which includes almost 400,000 ounces of gold and about 29.9 million ounces of silver. About half the bullion belongs to the bank. The other half was being held for businesses and individuals who purchased the gold and silver as an investment.
After several Canadian newspapers carried stories on the bullion, bank officials sat down with a variety of ground zero officials.
According to one account, the bank was asked how long it might take to remove the gold and silver. The answer: several weeks, even if two trucks were loaded each day with bullion.
Law enforcement agencies reportedly told the bank that they want the job done in a single, 24-hour time period - but not until they had a safe place to store the bullion and easier access to the vault.
Bank officials are said to be negotiating with the fortress-like Federal Reserve Bank, several blocks away, to store the recovered bullion. Meanwhile, ground zero engineers think they might have to design a special causeway into the rubble, which would allow trucks to pull up to the vault and cart away the bullion.
This is no easy task. Not only do fires still burn at ground zero seven weeks after the terrorist attacks, but engineers worry about cave-ins as cranes carve at the debris pile.
The story of how authorities are trying to safeguard the bullion is just one illustration of how ground zero has not only attracted well-meaning volunteers and rescue workers, but those with much darker agendas.
Besides the looting of the Tourneau shop, police came face-to-face with an organized crime plot to steal 250 tons of scrap metal and resell it.
The plot unraveled after police nabbed six truck drivers carting away debris to two sites in New Jersey and another in Long Island - sites said to be run by mob-connected figures. A grand jury investigation is continuing.
Yet another murky plot emerged only last week.
Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, First Equity Enterprises announced that all its employees escaped from the firm's 15th floor offices in the South Tower. But now, federal Postal Service inspectors and federal prosecutors are looking into whether the disappearance of several First Equity executives in the aftermath of the attacks may be linked to the disappearance of some $105 million from the firm.
Like the other investigations, the First Equity probe may take time to resolve, in part because the ground zero debris pile needs to be fully explored.
In the end, these various plots may require cops to come up with a whole new category of crimes - theft after terrorism.
* * *
Fear and Hoaxing
October 28, 2001
IF THE TIMES shape us and make us who we are, consider what happened last week: A man walked into discount stores in Wayne and Hackensack that specialize in selling bulk items. By all accounts, he seemed like just another Jersey guy in search of a bargain.
As other shoppers picked out cases of spaghetti sauce, laundry detergent, and toilet paper, the man headed for the candy department. Between the two stores, he bought $15,000 worth of the sweet stuff.
Before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the recent spate of anthrax-tainted letters, this candy man's purchase would probably spark more chuckles than concern. But these are different times.
When the man paid for the candy in cash, store managers got suspicious and called police. Was this guy a terrorist, planning to inject the candy with poison just in time for Halloween? Nothing the man said indicated he planned anything so devious. It turns out he wanted to re-sell the candy as part of his business.
But the cops brought him in anyway, making sure that all of the candy was accounted for. And when he turned out to be a foreign national, immigration authorities detained him.
The incident is just one of dozens that have emerged in recent days as America embraces a new sense of caution about the dangers that may lurk in something so ordinary as a Snickers Bar - or the morning mail. But along with this concern comes this question: What sort of nation are we turning into?
Two days after the candy caught the eye of cops, a Trenton-to-Manhattan commuter train was evacuated and all other train traffic held up 45 minutes after a man reportedly made a comment about a bomb. No bomb was found.
In New York City, a subway line was shut down for an hour when a passenger thought some white powder might be anthrax. It turned out to be powdered sugar.
In just the first two weeks of October, the FBI received more than 2,300 reports of suspected anthrax. Thankfully, the vast majority turned out to be unfounded. But far too many also turned out to be hoaxes.
In Cliffside Park, a municipal public works employee was suspended for a week without pay after he tried to play a practical joke by leaving an envelope laced with harmless baby powder in a co-worker's locker. In Connecticut, a man was arrested after his anthrax hoax resulted in the evacuation of a state office building for two days. In Cincinnati, a man was charged with "inducing panic" after he put an envelope with white powder on a boss' desk.
Given the number of real threats and the unreal number of hoaxes, it's hardly surprising that almost every newspaper and magazine has published articles that tell readers how to cope amid so much fear.
Even People magazine, which normally devotes itself to Madonna sightings or keeping track of the latest "sexiest man alive," served up eight pages of advice on "calming our fears." My favorite line: "In a suddenly scarier world, don't get worried sick." Gee, thanks.
Of course, it doesn't help to learn that gas masks are now stored just off the floor of the House of Representatives or that Donald Trump is reportedly shopping for a personal parachute. But at what point can we draw a line between prudent caution and unfounded, unrequited, tummy-aching fear? Suddenly, there seem to be no rules.
The pilot of a commercial jetliner recently refused to take off after hearing that a passenger switched seats too many times. A woman office worker phoned police about powder on her computer keyboard. The powder was from a cookie she ate.
Sadly, a casualty of this fearsome atmosphere may be the holiday of Halloween. The governor of Arkansas suggested that Halloween be scaled back because "we can't handle the panic that comes when a parent encounters a broken Pixy Stick in a sack and thinks it is anthrax." And with the Internet awash in e-mail rumors about a possible terrorist attack on Halloween, many malls are cutting back on otherwise safe Halloween festivities for children.
Meanwhile at home, what do the rest of us do when the doorbell rings on Halloween night? This year, "trick or treat" takes on a whole new meaning.
Sadly what we might miss is a fundamental gift from an otherwise odd little celebration. Scary or not, Halloween is the only holiday when we welcome strangers to our doors.
Let's hope we keep the door open.
New York City Firefighters Upset with Giuliani
November 6, 2001
Early on, they hung the photos of the missing men outside the firehouse on South Street.
There was an Olsen, an Allen, an Anaya, a Villanueva, a Barry, a Larsen - in all, 14 men, swallowed by the trade center rubble.
If you go to the South Street firehouse today and study the 14 black-and-white portraits, you'll understand why the men and women who still stand watch there want the mayor of this impassioned city to keep ground zero open to them and their need to find the remains of their comrades.
Only one of the 14 has been found. Eight weeks after the Twin Towers toppled in sooty clouds dark enough to blot sunlight, 13 men are still lost.
And that's just from this firehouse on South Street.
When the towers fell, 343 New York City firefighters never came out. As of Monday, the remains of only 91 had been recovered.
Somehow New York's Mayor Rudy Giuliani doesn't seem to understand what these numbers mean. Even sadder, the mayor, who had gone to great lengths to demonstrate his loyalty to a baseball team battling for a trophy, seems to have forgotten what loyalty means among the men and women who battle to save lives.
When the mayor ordered the Fire Department to cut back on rescue crews at ground zero, he wasn't issuing just another manpower order. At the South Street firehouse - not to mention firehouses across New York City - he ripped into a tradition.
"We always bring our own out," says a firefighter.
"That's the bottom line," says another. "It's family. We may not be related, but it's family for us."
Police share similar feelings about family bonds broken by massive losses. The Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack killed 23 New York City cops and 37 Port Authority officers. But with firefighters, the bonding seems broader, extending to thousands of colleagues who work in close-knit firehouses across the city.
And that's why as many as 150 firefighters could be found volunteering at ground zero to sift through rubble. The mayor wants the number reduced to 25 firefighters, with equal numbers of New York and Port Authority police.
He cited the need for more safety as demolition crews compete with rescue crews for ground zero turf. But last Friday firefighters organized a protest march that turned into a scuffle at ground zero with police.
When the dust settled, 14 firefighters had been arrested, all on misdemeanors. But no matter. At ground zero, something deeper had been tarnished.
Monday morning on South Street, with the intercom bleating out another "signal 4-5" - the Fire Department's traditional memorial for the dead - you heard one word again and again:
"Family."
Just now, the voice comes from Robert Barros, a 27-year-old rookie firefighter at South Street, but it may as well be that of a 30-year veteran.
"I understand what the mayor wants," said Barros. "But you have to understand something else: At this firehouse, the men are looking for people they know at ground zero. Just like a family, it's a sense of closeness."
And closure, too.
It's an overused word perhaps. But to firefighters - and their families - the need to find a body or just remains that can be identified and placed in a coffin is deeply meaningful.
A body allows a family to hold a funeral - not just a memorial service. And a funeral, say firefighters, is the first step toward moving on.
"We've had six memorials, but it doesn't change a thing for the family," said one of South Street's captains, Rochelle Jones. "The next morning, they're still waiting for a phone call that a body has been found. It's bad enough that they lost a loved one. Without a body, the majority can't say goodbye."
Jones sits now in a room just up the stairs from pumper and ladder trucks. The room is filled with the tools of a livelihood that requires immense physical stamina. To her right - two cycling machines. Across the room - a treadmill and a Stairmaster.
She looks up and meets the gaze of a fellow captain, Tim McKinney.
"We must have 10 lockers here still filled with stuff from guys who are missing," says Jones.
McKinney nods.
"We can't clean them out," Jones explains.
McKinney nods again, then thinks what the mood will be if more bodies are discovered. He thinks back to last week when the body of Lt. Joseph Leavey, 46, was found - the only one found among the 14 missing from South Street.
"There's a sense of relief," said McKinney, "then a sense of grief."
Adds Jones: "When we found Joe Leavey, that put a whole new depth to the loss."
"He's not just missing," said McKinney. "It really did happen."
Like many here, he can't bring himself to say "dead."
Outside now, with the sun washing over a display of flowers, candles, and children's letters taped to the firehouse wall, Firefighter Zack Fletcher, 37, remembers the words of his twin brother and fellow firefighter, Andre, who is still missing.
The morning the hijacked jetliners smashed into the trade center, Zack called Andre on a cellular phone. It was a short conversation, with Andre, a member of an elite rescue squad based in Staten Island, telling his brother to be safe.
But what Zack remembers most were Andre's last words: "I'll see you down there."
After the smoke cleared, Zack went back to ground zero. He found a firefighter's coat with his brother's name inscribed on it, but later learned the coat had been used by another firefighter Sept. 11. Andre wore another coat he owned.
Neither that coat - nor anything else of his brother - has ever been found.
"My parents and I talk about it almost every night," said Zack. "That's what keeps me going. That's why we need to go back."
The Airport Security 'Deal'
November 9, 2001
THE FOLLOWING is brought to you courtesy of your government, which wants you all to know that it cares deeply about your safety when you fly the unfriendly skies. "I got the best deal I can." Deal? Yes, deal. This is what airport security has come down to.
The "best deal" sentiments come from the chairman of the House transportation committee, Rep. Don Young, a Republican from Alaska. But Young's words echo those of far too many federal officials right now.
America has endured the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, not to mention dozens of security lapses since then at airports, but we're still not serious about how we protect jetliners.
Two weeks ago, a guy with seven knives, a can of pepper spray, and a stun gun slipped through screeners. Last week, a chef brought a meat cleaver on a plane. Before that, a man sneaked aboard with a pistol.
And that's just the tip of the security iceberg. We don't know what sort of explosives are transported because less than 5 percent of checked baggage is inspected for bombs.
Yes, we've assigned all sorts of camouflage-clad weekend warriors to walk around our airports with M-16 rifles. But does anyone feel safer?
Nothing against the National Guard, but these part-time soldiers are not trained for the full-time task of discerning whether the guy over there with the Osama bin Laden whiskers and carrying the red backpack is really a potential terrorist or just another college kid home for the weekend.
Who's kidding whom? Last week's compromise by the House and Senate should worry us all. At issue was not whether America's airports need more security, but who was in charge.
The Senate wanted the federal government to take over and hire screeners at all airports - not unlike the way that Customs agents are supervised. The House, fearing more bureaucracy, wanted private firms to handle the job.
How clueless. This is not some odd appropriations bill, aimed at putting more civil servants to work in some project in the district of a fat-cat legislator. This is a matter of national defense. But the same House Republicans who balk at trimming the fat in multi-million-dollar pork barrel bills won't put up the money to attract qualified security guards at airports.
They seem quite satisfied with private firms that pay workers less than fast food restaurants and see no problem with turnover rates so high that few guards last more than six months on the job.
At Newark Airport, the turnover rate runs as high as 300 percent - with the average worker leaving after four months. Some guards have criminal records. How comforting.
In a recent study of Newark's terminals, the U.S. Secret Service discovered "glaring security lapses." These included such basics as not having enough guards at busy checkpoints, not thoroughly searching passengers who set off alarms at metal detectors, and not keeping a close eye on people or vehicles that traverse the tarmac and have access to planes.
In an article by The Record's Mitchel Maddux that summarized the study, the Secret Service found that even newly hired guards were allowed to roam into restricted areas, and former employees were not always asked to turn in their badges.
In addition, security decisions were made by a variety of institutions with far different goals and training: the Port Authority police, the Federal Aviation Administration, the airlines, and private security firms hired by airlines. In short - a prescription for the sort of disaster that took place on Sept. 11.
With this a scary backdrop, a special congressional conference committee sat down last week to iron out differences in the House and Senate versions of the airport security bill.
And that's where things got even scarier.
One spectacularly goofy compromise called for well-paid federal screeners to guard big airports and private, low-paying firms to keep watch at smaller places. Message to terrorists: Catch your next flight in small-town America. Luckily, common sense killed that idea.
What was adopted is hardly satisfying. Yes, the feds will take over airport security, but the arrangement isn't permanent - or immediate. It will take a year to train 28,000 federal screeners. Meanwhile, five airports can keep private guards in a trial program, and in three years private firms could be back guarding all airports.
Such is the "deal" that was orchestrated. So deal with it, America. And don't forget to have a happy, peaceful, anxiety-free Thanksgiving.