"I’M NOT SURE WHY I WENT BACK.

"The morning of the twelfth I heard a homily at Mass imploring Christians not to yield to the pain and evil but to overcome adversity with faith. That message stuck with me."

Magazine
Winter/Spring 2002

End Notes
Ground Zero: A Journal


by Vincent Druding ’99
Reprinted from the journal First Things


September 11 was to be my first day of work at a new job in downtown Manhattan. Though New York was still very new to me, it was immediately obvious that something was terribly wrong. As I climbed the stairs of the subway just a few blocks from the World Trade Center, there was a palpable feeling of panic in the air as people stared, horrified, into the sky. I followed their gaze upward and I instantly understood. Smoke and fire were gushing from a gaping hole in the smooth, silvery surface of the right-hand tower.

I asked someone nearby if he knew what had happened, and he said it was a bomb. Another man walked over and declared, “No, it was a plane, a plane flew right into the building...” Then an enormous explosion drowned out his words. Above our heads, an orange fireball swallowed the top of the second tower, as clouds of paper filled the sky above us. Hundreds of people began scattering. I ran across the street to the Municipal Building and up to a shrieking woman who stammered through her sobs that she had seen a large blue and white plane slam into the building. We stared slack-jawed as sections of the building’s metallic facade fell in chunks to the ground. It took a few moments until we realized that some of those falling pieces were not metal at all, but rather human beings leaping eighty or more stories to their deaths—right before our eyes. All I could think to do was make the sign of the cross.

As I stood there in disbelief, a man next to me with a massaging pager said that the Pentagon had just been hit. I grabbed at his pager to read it for myself. Then came the confusion and rumors on the street: “The Capitol’s been attacked!” “The State Department has been bombed!” “The Supreme Court is in flames!” “Camp David is burning!” “A plane is on its way to the White House!”

During all this, the fire trucks had been racing past on their way to the Towers. I must have seen twelve of them rush past our corner. In the coming hours and days, I often wondered how many of the men on those trucks died just minutes later.

Soon the NYPD asked us to evacuate the area. It was only a minute after we began to walk uptown and away from the Towers that the sound of several claps of thunder began to rip through the air just over my shoulder. I turned around and saw with my own eyes a sight of pure horror, as the left-hand tower began to collapse into a massive white cloud. Our walk quickly became a run, and then a stampede.

Eventually, as we got farther away from the cataclysm, our pace slowed back down. I caught my breath, trying to absorb what I had just witnessed, when an olive-skinned man with a mustache and briefcase walking to my right began to intone: “You see what happens! All the Palestinians want is a place to call home, a small piece of land. We continue to fund the Israelis, we supply them with money and weapons, we support the persecution of a people for decades, and you see what happens! It should not have come to this. It didn’t have to come to this! They have had enough, and you see how they respond—they’ve got our attention now.”

Letting him push on without me, I paused with several hundred others at the Manhattan Bridge to watch the lone burning tower. We had outrun the smoke and dust unscathed, but now thousands of others followed behind us. They were in groups of three or four, marching toward midtown, some sprinkled with ash, many others caked with a dust that had hardened on their skin as it mixed with sweat and traces of blood. They passed by like ghosts—grayish-white figures carrying bags, suitcases, and purses. Extras from the set of horror film, quietly walking home.

As I followed them uptown, a businessman from Atlanta who was in New York on business told me that he couldn’t get through to his wife on his cell phone; he knew she’d be scared as hell. “I was on the 81st floor, and we were probably the last to get out, but the firefighters kept coming in, heading up as we headed down. They just kept filing up the stairs.”

Then, a sudden gasp from a group of Chinese men and women on the corner, and we turned to watch the second tower follow the fate of the first. After a few seconds, I continued my dazed trek to my apartment on 19th Street.


I’M NOT SURE WHY I WENT BACK. The morning of the twelfth I heard a homily at Mass imploring Christians not to yield to the pain and evil but to overcome adversity with faith. That message stuck with me.

The van of volunteers drove us through the smoking and dusty streets of lower Manhattan, cluttered with countless thousands of sheets of paper; all around us, cars and emergency vehicles looked like they were made of papier-mâché. Fruit and bagel stands stood abandoned on empty sidewalks, the apples and bananas sitting in undisturbed rows, coated with a layer of pulverized concrete half an inch thick.

For someone raised in peaceful and prosperous America, Ground Zero itself was astonishing to behold. In the center of the street south of the World Trade Center was a crater 60 feet deep and 120 feet across. On each side of the pit, the mangled remains of the towers themselves. They say that each floor of each massive 110-story building was an acre in size. Spread before me was 220 acres of pure destruction crammed into a 16-acre plaza.

Stringy steel rods cut like irregular staircase steps—the skeleton of the building facade—surrounded two six-story piles of debris. Twisted red steel. Windows. Carpets. Toilets. Bits of copy machines, computers, file cabinets, desk. And of course, hidden somewhere within the mountainous piles, the mutilated remains of over 3,000 human beings. And then there was the noxious smoke, streaming from a thousand cracks and fissures in the piles from hundreds of hidden fires beneath them.

No one seemed to be in charge. Hundreds of firefighters crawled around on the piles in small groups. Several pockets of 20 or 30 of them labored with torches, shovels, wire cutters, jackhammers, electric saws, oxygen canisters, hoses, dogs, and their bare hands. At the fringe of the pile—near the Brooks Brothers store that had been transformed into a makeshift morgue—stood several long lines of emergency workers who handed off buckets of debris, one by one. Spontaneous order emerged from the chaos.

So, for example, a New York City fire captain in the pit who needed 40 welding tips phoned a friend in New Jersey who has a boat. His friend calls the local union, and in an hour a couple boxes of welding tips are loaded onto a ship, along with several boxes of food, clothes, medical supplies, and 15 guys looking to lend a hand. An hour later the captain docks the boat at the Cove, east of the American Express building directly adjacent to the site. Ten minutes later, a motley group of construction workers, police officers, volunteers, FBI agents, and National Guardsmen arrive to unload the boxes and pass them down a 150-man work line. Linda and Jackie, two nurses, organize the unloading at the end of the supply line: “Medical supplies here! Clothes, there! Construction supplies, here!” The captain radios that the welding tips are off the boat. Twenty minutes later, a retired veteran named Rich makes his way into the makeshift supply store on the second floor of the AMEX building, finds the welding tips, and hauls them in a golf cart across the plaza to an equally makeshift transfer station. Half an hour later, the captain who “ordered” the welding tips from his friend in New Jersey not more than two hours ago walks over to pick up his supplies.
Much of my time was spent directing materials around the site. The supply triangle between the dock, the AMEX building, and the piles ran nonstop for several days and nights. In the days following September 11, similar operations were repeated throughout Lower Manhattan, as thousands of people spontaneously found and contributed to the supply chain.

There was much goodness and bravery at the site, but there was also fear, as frayed nerves frequently conspired to induce instantaneous panic. When something shifted unexpectedly on one of the piles, for instance, a firefighter would run, sending the team around him leaping from the huge mound, thereby inspiring hundreds of workers in the quadrant of Ground Zero to scatter. Within seconds several hundred workers would be “running for their lives” down the nearest street tossing their tools, kicking up dust behind them, tripping over live fire hoses.

Then, as people began to realize that it had been a false alarm, the explanations would begin. “The Millennium Building was gonna come down.” “I smelled natural gas.” “There was a fire on the pile.” After twenty minutes or so, people would slowly creep back toward the site. This cycle repeated itself several times in the first few days, until a system of bells and bullhorns replaced leaping bodies as the official evacuation call.



PRESIDENT BUSH ARRIVED AT GROUND ZERO on Friday, September 14—the first day in my 24 years of living that I experienced genuine patriotism. When word got out that the President might pay us a visit, eyebrows lifted and smiles cracked on faces. As soon as he stepped out of his black Suburban, the workers dropped their shovels and scurried around to welcome him. Many of us stood on overturned buckets behind a few rows of people to catch a glimpse, and those behind us stood on two or three buckets. Scores of workers climbed on top of the trucks, cranes, and emergency vehicles higher on the rubble, or stood on an overturned I-beam to catch a glimpse.

I thought to myself that this scene must be reminiscent of some bygone time in America’s political history when a White House staff did not plan every presidential visit weeks in advance. I thought of Lincoln at Gettysburg, stepping out of a train to make a speech, and spontaneous crowds of people, some climbing into trees or on walls, gathering around to watch and listen. Here was our Commander-in Chief, faced with unprecedented destruction on American soil, to rally men and women in hard hats at the center of a wounded city, at the center of stunned nation.

As he passed in front of our section, his hand met mine, and he looked me in the eye for more than a moment to hear me stammer what I believe was something like, “God bless, Mr. President, we’re behind you.” He was in no hurry to speak to us as a group, but rather took his time meeting us individually. The crowd around the rubble was growing fast, reaching at least 1,000. There was clearly an enthusiasm in the air for the first time since September 11.
When the President finally grabbed a bullhorn and began to speak, it was hard to hear him at first. Someone behind me shouted, “We can’t hear you!”

“But I can hear you!” the President proclaimed loudly. “And the rest of the country hears you! And soon, the people that did this...are going to hear from all of us!”

At that moment, a shot of electricity surged through the crowd. Cheers erupted and echoed off the surrounding buildings, each draped with a tattered American flag. “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” It went on and on.

Then—at the corner of West and Vesey streets in New York City, on the edge of a mass grave, at the feet of the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s mightiest nation—I was overwhelmed with an unexpected sense of fraternity and love of country. Not fifty feet away lay the remains of 3,000 innocent people, and here, at their side, a band of their brothers stood before their leader, united in an unconditional love of justice. I really do think that is what it was.

ONE NIGHT AT 2 A.M. I was on my way through the rain to pick up supplies in the AMEX building, which among other things was being used as a transfer station for the bodies and parts of bodies we had recovered from the site. From there, they were packed onto trucks to be taken to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital. As I entered the atrium of the building I saw scores of workers holding their hard hats over their chests. Fifty yards away a dozen firefighters proceeded slowly in my direction carrying a body bag. I removed my hard hat and stepped to the side. As they approached, I could read their red, swollen eyes. Their uniforms were dark with mud and soot. Raindrops dripped from everyone’s gear. A priest wearing a raincoat, a hard hat, goggles, a respirator, and a headlamp came forward with a book and oils. The men carrying their fallen friend cried quietly as the priest rolled back the bag and anointed the body, administering what appeared to be Last Rites. In the atrium, heads bowed and no one moved. Time seemed to stop as profane space became as sacred as a shrine. Eventually, the priest stepped away, and the firemen walked slowly forward, out the doors and into the truck waiting outside. Without a word, we went back out into the dark rain to work.

Before the rainstorm, nearly everything at Ground Zero was covered with a layer of dust, which became the parchment for the messages of rescue workers. On windows or walls, you could find short compositions: “God Bless America,” “Engine Company 6,” “Give us Justice,” “Revenge is a bitch,” “We miss you Johnny,” and the like. But one message stood out. Written with a black marker on a flier posted on a pillar of the AMEX building, “RIP Fr. Mike.” Father Mike Judge, a Franciscan priest and Chaplain of the FDNY, died while praying in the South Tower on September 11. In the days since September 11, working around the clock with little-to-no-rest, I lost track of time. But this message reminded me that it was Sunday.

Sunday was my fifth day working at Ground Zero. I was exhausted. After making my rounds at the supply area, I walked up North End Avenue to the support center at Stuyvesant high School. I had heard earlier in the day that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was going to hold a 5:30 Mass, and I felt the need to attend it. As I entered the building, I saw a man dressed in a white habit walking slowly but deliberately down the hall. The tip of his Roman collar peaked out of the robe. He looked and spoke like James Earl Jones and his face was very serious. It occurred to me later that he was probably a Franciscan and had likely just come from attending to the dead at Ground Zero.

All around us, the volunteers buzzed back and forth, and police officers and workers passed by. I asked the priest whether there would be an evening Mass around the site, and he told me that the only one had been held at 9:00 that morning. I told him that I was hoping to attend the memorial Mass at St, Patrick’s, which I instantly realized had started six minutes earlier. He then said very deliberately, “I can offer you the Holy Eucharist. Would you like that?” And then, with five days of chaos in my head and my body fatigued, a nameless priest in a white robe, almost invisible in the white hallway were it not for his dark complexion, put his hand on my head, said a blessing, and placed the Body of Christ in my mouth. My eyes remained closed for a long time.

Here, amid the nonstop movement and clutter of bodies and buildings, amid the constant acrid smell of smoke and smog, amid the signs reading “Warning, high levels of asbestos here,” amid the dozens of workers who seemed always on the verge of breaking down in tears, amid the steady flow of sobbing civilians who toured the place where their loved one lay entombed, amid the constant sounds of machines, crashing metal, and sirens, amid all of the destruction and death—here was a pocket of peace. Here, Christ was present, not only among us, but now, again, inside me. And then this angel in the whirlwind sent me on my way and resumed his slow but deliberate work through the horror, looking to dispense solace to any and all who would accept it, passing through the tumult, almost as though he were from another world.

Return to the table of contents