9/11/01
I was at the #Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission reviewing police disciplinary records. We didn’t have cell phones connected to the Internet yet so I didn’t know anything was happening until the executive director came in and said, “You better go back to the newsroom.”
When I got there, the towers had already fallen and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newsroom was a hive of frenzied activity – people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I went up to George Stanley, an editor, and said, “Can I go to New York? Please send me to New York.” And he said, without hesitation, “Get in a car and go.” So I got in a car with a photographer, and we drove 17 hours to New York. The freeways to New York were vacant except for the first responders from all over the country, and the construction workers, all headed to New York. Vacant streets except for fire trucks and squad cars from all over America. About 100 miles out, we saw an electronic sign. “New York is closed,” it said.
The bridges were closed, the roads, the airports, everything. The city was a fortress, and the moat had been pulled up. We found one path train going into the city from New Jersey and dumped our car. We arrived in Manhattan by 8 a.m. on Sept. 12, 2001. The police had created a perimeter two miles out, but they waved a Boston Globe photographer and me through. I ended up four blocks from Ground Zero, standing in a press conference with famous anchors, and then spending the night in a firehouse, chronicling the rescue efforts as the firefighters went back and forth to dig. They were finding nothing, just dirt and rock. They had to bury living people now and then so the cadaver dogs wouldn’t get depressed.
These heroes were shell-shocked, rattled, traumatized beyond belief, salt of the earth and yet they continued to dig even as they welcomed me in. They took me in their fire truck near the disaster site and the remnants of the World Trade Center loomed like a monster movie close by. My thought was about the magnitude of the disaster site. How will they ever clean this up? Where do you even begin? They found two steel pillars that had naturally melded together to form a cross.
I went inside the World Trade Center once at age 12, and I remember looking down from Windows on the World, and thinking it was so high up that it seemed like I was looking down from a plane and the cars looked like little matchbox cars. People jumped from there.
The firefighters were finding body parts on the rooftops of nearby buildings. One firefighter was too traumatized to leave the firehouse again so he cooked and took care of everyone else. Two French documentarians were there, and they had been chronicling the firehouse when it happened. They captured footage of the jumpers and some of it later aired, the sound of it, which was horrible.
People brought an endless array of food, boots, clothing, an overflowing sea of donations that the firefighters didn’t need so they started giving it away. Sitting in the near dark, we listened as the radio crackled with news of another dead firefighter found. But really the firefighters were finding mostly dust. They did find some firefighters.
The name that came over the radio… years later, my daughter and I visited ground zero. It was now a gleaming white boned shopping mall with a fountain and memorial of names where the footprint had once been. She randomly snapped a bunch of photos and when I looked at them later, I noticed that, without realizing the significance, she had photographed that deceased firefighter’s name with a raindrop that looked like a tear. I later wrote about this and his family member contacted me. The story seemed to give him some comfort.
Then:
The buildings were a crematoria and the smell of death or burnt wire or some smell I can’t describe lingered on my reporters’ notebooks for months.
I didn’t take a single photo, which is really unfortunate and ridiculous as they would be history. But cell phones didn’t take photos back then and reporters didn’t either – there were photographers for that and two were there. And I remember thinking, “Would you take a picture of hell?”
The stories were horrific. The chaplain was killed at the scene and carried to the altar of a small nearby church that somehow survived and that George Washington once attended. It emerged unscathed.
The missing posters sprouted up all over the city for people who were dust. Their faces, smiling, youthful, stared from walls, subways and streetlights. This happened within hours as loved ones searched a city for people they would never find.
The knowledge now that many of these brave first responders were sealing their fate on that dig pile because the air was not safe and the government lied…. It’s heartbreaking. Slow motion mass murder. One was so rattled that he drove through a series of stoplights without realizing it.
The burnt out husks of cop cars and tiny pieces of paper flitting around… shoes and dust. So much dust. We had only flimsy masks. No one in the newsroom expressed any concern at all about what we were breathing. A reporter there now has fibrosis. But she also smoked so who knows.. tragic.
A Korean grocer let first responders take anything they wanted off his shelves for free.
A restaurant near ground zero opened and set all of its tables, I still remember the glasses and plates gleaming in the night, but they knew no one would come, as this was within the evacuation zone. They were just making a statement.
The grizzled cabbies gave people free rides and everywhere, were flags. They hang down from windows and were draped around the shoulders of construction workers and for the only time in my lifetime, the country felt peacefully unified and everyone helped everyone else, without agenda or fee.
Today we are the most divided.
It was a police state, with fighter planes zipping past overhead, police and fire trucks the only vehicles on the roads, and the endless sirens. Some of the fire trucks were completely flattened.
The cell towers were on the World Trade Center so I had to walk around for a half hour to get a signal and then I could call the newsroom and dictate my stories.
It was a nuclear holocaust, the Day After, a gaping wound.
We were never the same as a country. Our optimism was lost, and eventually our unity. Our security was shaken. Our innocence gone. 9/11 was cataclysmic. It affected everyone, and it changed our country forever. I remember the late 1980s as a time of shining optimism, the Cold War was ending, the Berlin Wall was coming down, the dollar was strong and we all knew we could get a job. I went to the former Yugoslavia and danced in a night club near the beach of the Adriatic Sea… Madonna’s Like a Prayer playing on the radio… that was 1989 and things felt carefree then.
Not after Sept. 11, 2001. Nor after Columbine and Sandy Hook and Iraq and Afghanistan.
The world post 9/11 was shaken, darker, less trusting and more conflictual. Government grew and its tentacles spread. Wars were fought, and men were broken. The media flipped from boosting government to questioning everything it did.
I developed a never shaken belief in the heroism of police and firefighters, those brave souls who ran toward the danger when most others ran away from it, who valiantly trudged back and forth to dig for bodies they would never find and deaths that would come years later from the dust… always the dust. It was everywhere, in the air, on the grass, on our faces and in our lungs. Ashes of the dead intermingled with the buildings and the planes. A graveyard that ended up inside of all of us. And that we carry with us.
Never forget.
Rest in peace to the dead.
And may we always bear witness to what happened there.
