The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

The laborers I was with kept ask- ing me where I got it. They were right to ask. No one had prepared anything. An emergency coordinator by the hospital area kept calling for construction workers. I grabbed him and pointed, shouting “There they are, there they are!” The laborers, professionals all, were sitting in the shade of a build- ing. They were resting up because they all, each and every one, knew they’d need every ounce of strength they could muster once they got to what was now a moonscape. “If you want construction workers,” I said, pointing, “There! There they are.” The volunteer sign-in procedure was probably the best-run aspect of the staging area. Some men took our names, addresses, and next of kin (in the event we didn’t make it). Women hung signs up directing people on how to sign-in. St. Vincent’s hospital hastily distributed appeals for blood donors. One man came up to an impromptu coordinator with a clipboard asking where the sign-in center was. The clipboard coordinator just looked at him. “He’s the sign-in center!” I exclaimed. “Hey, You! Big Guy!” One fellow with a bullhorn began organizing us into construction, search and rescue, food service, and med- ical groups. “All you big guys! Over to construction,” the bullhorn called out. “Everyone over 5’9” and over 225 pounds, in the back! All you strong guys over there!” One of the drawbacks of looking younger and stronger than you are is that you don’t get any breaks. I haven’t turned gray yet. I must appear robust because every time I tried to join the search and rescue line the man with the bullhorn shouted, “Hey, you! Big guy! Over there!” For the rest of the day I would be known as Big Guy. I joined the steelcutters, as they would be called later that night. These volunteers were professional construction workers. Thanks to my longtime association with New York real estate, I knew a bit about them. They were peo- ple from the laborers’ union, welders, heavy equipment drivers, and even an electrician. We were further broken out by those who knew how to organize work crews. “Big Guy” was assigned to a pick-and-hammer crew without explanation or ceremony. It wasn’t until we were preparing to board donated trucks and don hard hats that I told one of the contractors that I hadn’t done anything like this for 15 years. (And I was long in the tooth for it back then, too.) As we waited, the reporters start- ed to infiltrate us, and we jeered them. The steelcutters saw the reporters as parasites and oppor- tunists. They were daytrippers from the safe world. This was not the Roman arena. We all just wanted them to go away so we could get on with it. When I lined up with a tall man to collect hammers and picks he said to me, “What’s the sense? You are going to die anyway. If you are going to die, you might as well die helping someone.” Number Seven was in its death throes. The word went out that it was coming down. We all wanted it gone so we could get survivors out before nightfall. I walked to an open road to watch the inferno. It looked like those demolition clips I had seen while channel-surfing. The windows blew out. The skyscraper imploded. Then the backdraft hit. The cloud billowed down the urban canyon. It swelled and a strong wind blew. An overweight policeman was in a dead run just ahead of the cloud. We scattered. I ducked into the corner of an apartment building. The fellow next to me hid his face against the glass fram- ing. “Not a good idea,” I thought, remembering the one air-raid drill I participated in as a kid. You never lean against glass. It could splinter out into your face. There was a second backdraft. That was when I decided to act like a New Yorker and stop running. Ashamed of myself, I deliberately walked through the second dust cloud. Whenever the fire department drove by there was applause. But when the firemen cycled off, they were plainly exhausted. They were covered with white ash. I watched them as one would watch tired troops trudging to the rear. After that I looked at the billowing cloud with apprehension. The more so after the word was passed to me, “It’s not going to be nice. It’s going to be pretty gris- ly. You’ll pick up an arm here, a leg there. There’ll be a lot of dead bodies.” F O C U S 66 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 I asked about the federal workers at the World Trade Center, one of those empty questions one asks when there isn’t anything else to say.