We got right up from the table, left the dance, and went home to pack.
We have such a large team now that I wasn’t positive they’d have a spot for me. Steve left the dance and drove the two and a half hours to Boardman, where he lives. He found out he needed two doctors, two nurses, two paramedics, a team leader, a logistics officer, and an administrative officer to round out his team.
Then Steve called me up and said, “I can’t use you as an EMT, but I need an administrative officer. You’re it.” Our regular AO was in Maryland, and I could fill in during a pinch.
The ball was Saturday night, and Steve called me at about two o’clock in the morning on Sunday. We left that Monday morning, the fifth of November, on Delta Air Lines. We landed in LaGuardia Airport.
Getting on the plane was difficult for some of the team members. Some of them were pretty nervous about the previous hijackings. I only found myself anxious during the take-off and landing; I was fine once we were in the air.
The Ground Zero cross, which stands more than twenty feet high, is shown here atop its previous pedestal at the site of the World Trade Center.
Normally we wear uniforms on the plane, but this time we were told by our team leader that DMAT didn’t want people in uniforms on the aircraft.
I’d been fairly quiet, into myself during most of the flight. I was sitting next to three women. I heard them talking as we flew in over New York City. They asked me what I did, and I told them I was coming to help with recovery and to provide medical care for the workers. They were very excited about that.
I asked them, “What do you do?”
They said, “We work for Martha Stewart. We’re her aides.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I love Martha Stewart.” I was looking out the plane’s window and, since I figured these ladies lived in New York, I asked them to start pointing out the buildings.
They pointed out the Empire State Building. Then we saw lights and smoke—you could see it real clear from the plane, and one of the girls said, “That’s it. That’s Ground Zero.”
One of the girls suddenly had a hard time talking. She turned her face away from me.
We landed and entered the airport. Most of us were carrying enormous hiking backpacks, since we’d often been deployed to places where there was no running water, no bathrooms, no anything. We’d found out at the last minute that we’d be staying at a hotel, but we still brought the bags. Normally, I carry cooking utensils. Salt and pepper. Dehydrated meals that you can buy in camping stores—the kind you can make by tearing open the packet and adding water or clicking to heat. But I took all that out.
The Ground Zero cross was relocated off the World Trade Center site to make way for new construction. It now stands on the side of St. Peter’s Church facing the WTC on Church Street, where it looms over passersby.
We waited in line for a van that picked us up and took us to the Sheraton New Yorker.
That van ride? I thought I was going to die. It was the worst driving I’d ever seen, my first taste of New York traffic. Our driver was from Maryland—some kind of volunteer. He’d been here since day two, picking people up and dropping them off at the airport, shuttling them back and forth between the hotel and Ground Zero. I guess he’d learned a lot about driving in Manhattan, and fast. He drove as badly as I thought New York cabbies were supposed to.
We went over two or three of those concrete lane dividers, and the wrong way down one-way streets. I had a middle seat in the front of the van with nothing to hold on to. I was literally grabbing the bottom of the seat. My knuckles turned white.
I wasn’t expecting to stay at one of the nicer hotels in New York, either. The first night we were there, Mayor Giuliani was holding some sort of event. I remember having my pack on as we walked up the stairs … glancing up and seeing all these video cameras and photographers lined up behind red velvet ropes, their flashbulbs going off.
I guess they were there to take pictures of celebrities, but when they saw us, I guess they felt it was some kind of photo opportunity. Flash, flash, flash!
I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t understand how anyone would have any interest whatsoever in taking our pictures. The way I saw it, I was there to do relief work. I felt that the moment wasn’t about pictures of me, it was about the policemen, the firemen, the rescue workers who had been there since day one. They were doing the work, not me.
FEMA had commandeered the whole top floor of the Sheraton. That evening, they sat us down in a room and debriefed us for fifteen minutes. We were told to turn out in uniform in the hotel lobby the next morning at seven o’clock. Our first shift would start at eight. They didn’t tell us what we’d be doing or what we’d see, but we had a rough idea. We figured we’d be running a medical tent down at the site. And we’d already talked to Helen, who’d been here for some time; she’d told us a little about her experiences.
We knew we’d be caring for construction workers and firefighters. We knew that the medical teams were mostly handling foreign bodies in the eyes, respiratory problems, lacerations, things like that. As administrative officer, I would keep track of the team members’ hours, get everyone’s social security number correct, handle paycheck administration, that sort of thing.
Essentially, we weren’t told much at the briefing. Just when and where to meet, plus hospitality things like where we could do our laundry, where to get food, and so on.
We also had our ID pictures taken. We were told we’d need to have two cards with us at all times in order to get through the Ground Zero security checkpoints. We wore them on lanyards around our necks. The first card was from the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management. The second was our National Disaster Medical Systems ID issued by FEMA; it had a logo of the Trade Towers in the background, and an American flag. At the bottom it said, “September 11,” and listed our team designation as Oregon 2 DMAT.
After the debriefing, we got a fifteen-minute break. Then they took us down for a quick tour of Ground Zero.
We rode over to the site in the van. Again, I pulled that middle front seat. I was looking forward through the windshield. The first things I saw as we sped down the West Side Highway were the cranes and smoke.
We went through a few security checkpoints. Then, to my left, I saw a building with computers hanging out the windows by their cords. I don’t know why that was, although it’s not an odd thing to have happen during a fire. Maybe the firefighters had gone in spraying water and blown the equipment right out the window. Or the wind kicked up by the blast had done it. I didn’t know. This was nearly two months after the disaster, so who can say? But the building was charred on the outside. All the windows and most of the wall structures were gone; you could look right inside and see the offices. Everything was so burned, it was hard to tell what was what.
Then I saw the Cross.70 It was sticking out of the ground down in the Pit, perched on a mound of debris about three stories high. You’ve seen this on the news, these two beams, brown, rust-colored, one horizontal and one vertical. They were riveted together in the perfect shape of a cross. I would guess it was probably twelve feet high from the ground to the crosspiece, with maybe another six feet above that to the top. There was a firefighter’s jacket hanging off one of the spars.
Personally? I took the Cross as a sign that God was there. In fact, I got a little teary-eyed when I saw it. But then I came to the realization that I didn’t have a right to cry. Ground Zero wasn’t my turf. It hadn’t been my family and friends who’d perished. The tragedy hadn’t happened in my town, my state. I had no right to grieve as the other people did.
Right next to the Cross was a small makeshift building where all the firefighters were stationed. You could see them walking across the dirt road to and from the site, sitting along the road in their heavy uniforms, sometimes wearing their helmets, sometimes holding them in their hands. They looked like soldiers, come in off a battlefield. Dirty. Exhausted. Changed. Some of them would nod their heads and wave as we went by.
After passing the Cross, we continued on down the West Side Highway until we came to our tent. Our assignment had us relieving two teams: Seattle, King County DMAT 1, and another from Oklahoma, I think. Our medical tent was positioned under the walkway that used to connect 1 World Financial Center to the Marriott Hotel. But the bridge had collapsed. All that was left was the stubble of the walkway jutting out from the building. We entrusted ourselves to the firemen, who told us that this was the safest place from falling debris.
When I say “our tent,” I should clarify: we actually had three. The first tent was our treatment center. The one behind that held our medical supplies, and the tent closest to 1 World Financial served as our command tent. There was one doctor, one nurse, and one paramedic assigned to each tent.
We got out of the van and got hit by the smell. Later on, I’d find that the intensity of the odor depended on the wind; sometimes you’d smell nothing, and sometimes it was very bad. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t so much the smell of death and decay. By the time we got there, it was more like the odor of ground cement and sulfur and burning rubble. But it definitely stunk. A couple days after we arrived, we were issued heavy industrial respirators to assist our breathing.
Inside the command tent I found two team leaders, two logistics officers, and two administrative officers—one from each of the two teams we were replacing. They were downgrading the site; our one team would replace two. When we arrived, there were twenty people working the site in two teams, ten and ten. After the downgrade, the ten from my team would provide the care that twenty people had offered before us.
I assumed the downgrade happened because the site wasn’t as busy, medically speaking, as it had been in previous weeks. And we knew that sometime in the near future, DMAT would pull their tents out completely. But for the moment, we were needed.
We didn’t bring our own medical equipment. Everything was provided for us, from gauze to defibrillators. We had a full mini-ER, like a MASH unit, running in each tent. We had a huge Ryder truck stocked with pharmaceuticals. Our team pharmacist kept track of everything we dispensed, from narcotics to ibuprofen.
I had to learn the administrative system each day as I went along. The paperwork, the computer system, tracking information … we had laptops in our tents connected to the city, the mayor’s office, and our own command center at the Sheraton. Everyone needed to know how many people we treated, who we treated, what we had treated them for, whether or not they were transported to a hospital, whether or not they were transported by paramedics or had walked in on their own, what medications they had been given—everything needed to be tracked. That was also part of my job.
I did take a moment here and there to meander over to the treatment tents so I could get an idea of what was going on. Normally I work as an EMT, so, of course, I had curiosities.
For me, if there was anything difficult about being at Ground Zero, it’s that I wasn’t able to really treat anyone. Instead, I helped the team leader arrange to clean the outhouses that hadn’t been emptied by the Sanitation Department when the site was closed on Veteran’s Day. I guess you could say I was needed for different purposes.
So, after our orientation of Ground Zero, most of us were pretty tired. We went back to the hotel and spent $30 on one meal at TGI Fridays. Welcome to New York.
At seven the next morning, we reported to the lobby. By eight o’clock, the teams we were relieving had left, and we were on our own to take care of everything.
I was in the command tent when I first saw them pull a fireman’s body out of the Pit.
The paramedics used to park their ambulances next to our tent; they’d come in all the time and chit-chat with us. While I was talking with one of them, another guy came in and said, “They just found another one.”
The paramedic I was with said, “All right, let’s go.”
He walked out. I wanted to go, too, so I talked to my team leader and told him where I was at with my job. He gave me permission to go on outside. One of our paramedics, Christie Wells, wanted to go, too. She and I walked down the ramp that led to the site, down into the Pit with its thirty-story cranes.
An ambulance had already backed in, with its rear doors open toward the Trade Center. The ambulance had its lights on. People lined up along either side of the ramp. There were stairs going down into the Pit—someone had shored them into the ground—and there were people at the top of the stairwell, plus paramedics, firefighters, construction workers, and a fireman with “Chaplain” written across his helmet. There were several Red Cross volunteers. Everyone was waiting for the remains.
We all waited—no more than ten or fifteen minutes, but it seemed like a long time. They knew this body belonged to a firefighter because they had found a jacket.
When the procession finally passed by me, I saw firefighters carrying a Stokes basket, which is a metal mesh basket used to extricate bodies from wherever they’re found, beneath a cliff or under some rubble. The basket was draped with a white sheet. The firefighters stopped at the top of the stairs and draped an American flag over the body. The priest said a few words I couldn’t hear, a prayer of some sort, I guess. All activity had stopped in the Pit.
When the priest finished, I saw people make the sign of the cross. Then everyone stood at attention. Someone told us to salute. They got the basket into position and put the body in the ambulance. Then they gave the basket to the paramedics. A couple of firefighters got in the ambulance and closed the doors. The sirens were turned on, and they drove from the site heading north along the West Side Highway.
There was a point where someone said it was okay for us to take our hands down from the salute.
When the ambulance was gone and people started to disperse, Christie and I walked back toward our tent. I didn’t run, but I walked really fast because it was all I could do to keep my tears from flowing.
I got into the tent, I took a deep breath, and immediately started crying. I’d wanted to wait until I was hiding because I still didn’t feel I had the right to cry.
The two-month anniversary of September 11 was also President’s Day and my son’s birthday. He had a dinosaur birthday cake at the same time Hillary Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, and Governor Pataki signed my helmet.
I met the President of the United States; he talked to me while walking by. He was shaking everyone’s hand, and he reached out and shook mine. We were wearing different uniforms than everyone else, and he noticed that.
He said, “Who do you work for and where are you from?”
I said, “I’m from Oregon DMAT.”
He said, “That’s a long way to come. Thank you for coming. We appreciate you.”
I’ll bet he had no idea that, by saying that, he would make me so happy. I live in a town of 13,000 people. I’m just a small-town girl who never thought I’d meet the President of the United States, let alone hear I was appreciated by him. I shook his hand, and in two seconds he made me feel like I’d made a difference.
The next day, an aircraft crashed out in the Rockaways.71 It was a tough time—to stand at Ground Zero and hear the calls for the airplane downed. To see everything stop. They evacuated the Pit. I could hear what sounded like every siren in New York wailing out toward Queens. I remember what an eerie feeling it was, and I thought, this must be just a tiny taste of what it must have been like for some of those other firefighters and paramedics on the eleventh.
We went back to the hotel, back to the Living Room Area, as I called it. They had put out about fifty recliners in an old ballroom with a couple of big screen TVs, and we sat down in them. Everyone was silent, glued to the television, watching it all happen, trying to figure out why it had happened again.
I remember looking in the eyes of some of the rescue workers and seeing them relive what had happened before. Some seemed fearful, while
others seemed full of utter disbelief. It was one of the only times in my life that I was truly scared.
I bought four T-shirts, one for each of my children. All the guys and women that I worked with signed them. Their signatures say everything from, “Thank you for letting your Mom come,” to “Always remember that she is a hero.” To this day, I can’t pick up those T- shirts without crying.
It helps me to remember that other people actually thought I helped. Other people thought of me as a hero. But I never did anything heroic. I don’t feel like a hero; I’m not a hero. I don’t even feel like I should be in this book. But that’s what these inscriptions say. Hero.
I wasn’t home two months when my son’s teacher asked me to come visit his class. I went. I took the helmet and the T-shirt that I’d made for Brandon. There must have been twenty to twenty-five children in this classroom, and they glued themselves to me. They wanted autographs, they wanted to touch my helmet, they looked at all the pictures, over and over and over again. What a great feeling to go to your child’s classroom and have all his friends think that you’re a hero.
I’ve been enjoying the kids a lot more lately. Mostly because, between my divorce and my trip to New York … well, it was an enlightening experience in a lot of ways. It made me realize something I’d heard a lot before but never paid much attention to: life is short, and only a few things are important enough to focus on. Unfortunately, we don’t always do this. We focus on things that aren’t really important at all.
I don’t want to be thirty years down the road now, saying, “Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that?”
Tower Stories Page 31