I don’t consider this topic in general, or this thread to be Mindless or Mundane but there’s no place I could have put it besides here. It’s not a poll, and surely not a GQ or GD…
Unfortunately I missed the memorials on TV yesterday, but this thread has allowed me to pay my respects again. You’ve managed to overcome time and distance to recreate the horror and overwhelming tragedy of that day. Thank you for re-posting it.
And despite what you’ve said about the wide nature of heroism, you truly are a hero.
I’d say that this thread could fit in GD, not because of the D, but because of the G.
Great.
We read GD not just for the debates, but also for the serious thoughts.
Thank you.
And post it again next year…
19 years out. Certainly not the sharp pain of many years ago.
Oddly, a few weeks ago I went through boxes in deep storage. Found a packet of photos mailed to me a month or two after 9/11. Omar had a camera.
I’d forgotten that I shot some images of him in front of the burning heap of demolished buildings. And that I didn’t want to " Pose ". It felt all wrong to do so. He shot one frame of me from behind as we walked down the West Side Highway on the way to Ground Zero to be deployed for the day.
Brought it all back in a rush.
The images. And the smell. I will never forget what it smelled like that day and the next.
Proceed through life with care. It’s not nearly as immutable as one might think.
Apparently the O.P. I composed almost 20 years ago is decimated. I went to the top; it’s unreadable.
I’m going to post the Narrative again here in a series of posts.
Doing my best to avoid the torrent of media this week and especially this coming Friday and Saturday. Might be a good day to go out to Robert Moses State Park with my Dearly Beloved™ and watch the ocean.
Take a few minutes on Saturday, please. If you don’t pray, think of the lives lost and the loves unborn as a result of the attacks. SO much loss. If you pray, pray for peace.
Cartooniverse.
September 8th, 2021
EVERYTHING CHANGED
The camera meeting I was in that had started at 8:30 am was still going when the first plane hit. We were in the basement of a 150-year-old synagogue in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, on Norfolk Street just off of Houston. When the first plane hit we were told and as we continued our meeting, we thought it was a poor errant sightseer who was blown into the Twin Towers. When the second plane hit, we knew that was wrong.
The show was “ Life 360", a new series produced by ABC for PBS. The director was the director of World News Tonight. When we watched the tape of the second plane impacting- only a few moments old at that point, the pager was beeping incessantly for the director to call in. No cell service or land lines were working. I ran outside with a few other crew members and we walked up to Houston, and from there saw the huge holes in the side of the Twin Towers. I went to my car to get my E.M.T. jumpsuit.
The director called a meeting and canceled the show immediately. The cameras were to be returned quickly to the remote truck, and the entire equipment package now belonged to ABC News for use on coverage. Anyone willing to work on that coverage was asked to stay. He could see that I already had my jumpsuit on the table, and he pointed to me, saying “ You, leave now.” He knew I wasn’t going to be involved with this event as a cameraman.
I walked away from the Steadicam knowing that it would be fairly secure inside the synagogue. The owner lives in the place, and lots of other gear was left in there. I ran for my car and got my jump bag and Oxygen tank bag, and walked west on Houston street. I had bought myself a badge when I passed my EMT Test and got my certification. It has the state seal of NY on it, and my Dept. Of Health EMT number in large numbers. It was mostly what we call a Buff thing; an item that is more a show of pride in what we do than a practical item of work. It turned out to save me heartache, walking and stress. It gained me access and IMMEDIATE recognition faster than almost all of the other Non-NYC EMS workers I met. It served the purpose very well, and I was glad to have it hooked on the breast pocket of my jumpsuit. At Broadway, I stopped and kept an eye on the ambulances that were speeding down with lights and sirens going. One driver saw me and slowed, rolling down his window. He yelled out to me to ask if I was looking for work, and I said yes. He let me hop on, and I worked with Citywide Ambulances for a few hours. We headed down Broadway, and stopped north of City Hall. In an intersection we were stopped by NYPD because there were victims there. I first worked on an NYPD officer who was sitting on the ground, in the midst of an asthma attack. Virtually all of the people we saw were coated with a thick layer of grayish flakes, stuck to their hair and faces and clothing. This was the ash and dust kick-up from when the buildings had gone down just a few minutes before.
I got the officer into the bus and then had two women walk up to me. Karen had lacerations to her right upper arm; perhaps a 2 inch long 1 inch deep gash. Her other wounds were superficial. Her eyes were deeply irritated, red and weepy. Her friend Theresa had a scalp hematoma with swelling, adjoining a scalp laceration that was fairly small but bleeding profusely. I tended Theresa first, since the NYPD lady cop was on the bus’s O2 and doing better. I wrapped gauze squares against her scalp to contain the bleeding with pressure, and cleaned her other cuts and scrapes. In addition to those two women, I was also keeping an eye on the woman we had in the stretcher. She was in severe respiratory distress, futilely sucking on an inhaler and diaphoretic. I took turns with the other EMT yelling at her to keep her conscious. Straddling the stretcher and rendering care to the three patients I had at once was something I’d never imagined having to do.
After we dropped them off at St. Vincent’s, we went back for more. We only had two patients this time, but having severe athsma problems. When we got them to the E.R., I was out of oxygen, and the crew I’d jumped on with was being dispatched up town. I got off their bus and thanked them for letting me ride along.
I wanted to find a cascade system to re-fill my O2 tank, and learned then that in NYC, they have filled bottles delivered. They don’t USE a cascade system. I either had to ditch my tank ( which isn’t my property, it belongs to my ambulance corps.), or find some way to re-fill. While I stood near the E.R. entrance to St. Vincent’s, a firefighter walked by. He asked me what was up, and I told him. He said his station would have spare tanks, and he flagged down an NYPD van that was tearing up the street with lights and sirens going. He and I got a very fast ride all the way across town to like 4th ave and 13th st. It was there that I was told no, they had no spares. Now I was back out of it, and had a long walk ahead of me to get back to it.
I made it to the first traffic light. There I saw a large panel truck with it’s back door up. It was filled with people, almost all sitting down. There must have been 25 people crammed into this truck’s back area. I ran up to it, and climbed in. They were all very kind- I was clearly doing EMS work and they had supportive things to say. I was fed Coke and some strawberries, and dropped off at St. Vincent’s by them. They were headed out of town, to the Bronx.
It was there that I got onto a FDNY ambulance. The EMS service in NYC was folded into the Fire Department a few years ago, and so they are the “official” city EMS service. When you call 911, you most likely would see one of their crews. I walked up to one and asked if they needed a hand. In I went, and we did a few more calls down close to the Site, picking up people who were sitting or standing in the streets, either hurt or just having such trouble breathing because of the dense matter in the air. Not only the Jet-A fuel burning, but the dust clouds billowing up made it hard to breathe.
For a while we had other EMT’s and Paramedic’s in the back. I was sitting next to one man, and I asked him how he was doing since he was sitting there very quietly. He said, “ I lost my bus ( ambulance), my partner and my radio” and he gestured towards an empty radio holster. I figured that he meant that he’d lost his crew because he jumped onto another ambulance during calls, and now he’d lost his radio and couldn’t find out where his people were. I asked if that was what he meant, and he said, “ No…I mean, I LOST my bus and my partner”. When the first plane hit, his crew was in the area. Triage area was set up immediately on Vesey Street. That is the street bordering the WTC to the north. There was a line of fire trucks, ambulances and MCI ( Mass Casualty Incident ) vehicles being staged there, when the first tower came down.
He had been sent to run for some supplies, and so was not with his partner in their ambulance, when it was destroyed by the falling tower. He literally lost his bus and his partner. I didn’t know what to say to the man. Saying “ I’m sorry” somehow seemed very inadequate. And yet he needed to keep working. It seemed the be the rule of the day- if you were walking and working, you kept on doing so even if you knew you had lost someone else in the attack.
We wound up being staged at the Chelsea Piers, in long lines. Volunteer crews from all around NY and NJ and Conn were showing up, and were mixed in with the FDNY ambulances. Everyone was showing up and wanted to help. ( This became a problem later on, and as of this writing- 9/14/01- is still a problem at the site. ). I stood with the crew I’d been with for about an hour, and then I started to think about how things were going at that point.
Several times during my time at the sites, I got the same feeling and tried to act according to that feeling. I have to describe this carefully. In the initial hours, all hands were desperately needed and so I was accepted into other people’s work environments, their ambulances- out of pure need. That was great, it was what I assumed would happen. But, by about 2 p.m. on Tuesday, we were all staged there at the Piers and I began to feel as though I was an outsider with the FDNY crew. For one thing, they could be sent out on a regular 911 call at any moment. For another thing, the trips downtown had passed and lacking any work, I was standing with strangers as they talked about their crews, bosses, etc. They were all TOTALLY professional and kind in their attitudes towards me, but I figured that I ought to thank them for having me along and find other work to do before the crew chief had to gently tell me that I had to not go along with them on their next call.
My instincts were right, because when I went to her and shook her hand, and thanked her, she looked VERY relieved that I’d taken the initiative there and saved her the embarrassment. I just felt like it was unprofessional to hang on at that point. I went inside of the Chelsea Piers, which at that point were still just about completely unsecured.
The Piers are a multi-use area. There are film stages, sports areas, an ice hockey rink, etc. “Law & Order” shoots there but luckily was dark this week. Two immense sound stages were empty, wall to wall. Air conditioned and huge, they were the perfect field hospital site. Supplies were already pouring in from the FDNY EMS Supply people, and so I attached myself to the supply guy and he got me going with stuff to set up an Oxygen Therapy station. I learned how to use some gear I’d not seen before, and was in the Basic Life Support room. After an hour or two of that, I realized that I wanted to be on the other side, where a Trauma Operating Room was being staged. I thought that would be more interesting. I’d no idea if EMT’s were needed in there, but I walked over and started helping to set up the tables.
Basically, 50 operating rooms were staged in one huge room. Because there were two very large medical conferences going on in NYC this week, there was an influx of surgeons in the area. More than enough came and volunteered and so they actually had shifts assigned for workers. I hooked up with Alain and Omar, two surgeons. We went scrounging for supplies and set up our table in the far corner from the entrance way. We were next to the supply tables, and that became a slight problem. People would wander over looking for stuff they’d not found yet, and if they saw it on OUR table, they’d reach for it. One of us had to stick around our table- Table 1- just to insure that our hard-stolen and hard-found supplies stayed with US.
Omar was the perfect thief. He said, “ I’m going to just wander around and see what’s out there”. He’d come back 15 minutes later with some 18 gauge needles or a regulator for the O2 tank. I had mine on my tank of course, and for a long time we kept it hidden because I was the ONLY person in the entire room with a regulator for a tank. Plenty of spare O2 tanks, but no regulators had been delivered yet. Obviously, it made the tanks useless if you couldn’t tap INTO them to get the O2 out. Omar loved finding more stuff. He was about 35, whipcord thin guy with long straight hair. He moved with this precision, I got the feeling that he was a very meticulous surgeon. He did General and Trauma surgery so he said. Alain was a cardiologist and surgeon- apparently on Wednesday he wound up doing a lengthy interview with Peter Jennings.
There was a lack of I.V. poles. Since we were lucky enough to be staging in a movie stage, there were lots of lights that the electrics who worked for Chelsea Piers brought in. I got a real double-take from one of them at one point. This guy set up a 2,000 watt light, and ran electricity for it. It was a large and very harsh light, and so I asked him for Tough Spun- a diffusing material that gets held onto the light with wooden clothespins. I asked for Spun, and 4 clothespins. He just looked at me in total surprise, I was obviously dressed as a medical person. I told him that in my other life I was a cameraman, and he cracked up- but got me what I wanted for the light. Unlike some stations, we had a nice soft even light to work by. Except…for the fact that we didn’t get any work at our table. More about that later.
As I said, there was a lack of real I.V. poles. I knew how to set up a line and a bag, and wanted our table to be ready with fluids. Finally I dug up a stand used to mount a movie light. I had no crosspiece yet, but I figured if I could get something, I could rig a good I.V. stand. I found a thin strip of plywood that had been cut, like an inch square by 6 feet. I broke it down to 3 feet long, and took it. I taped it across the top of the stand, while Alain held it there in place for me. He was very amused at what I was doing. Obviously used to a standard O.R., this was coarse in the extreme but would have been acceptable given the circumstances.
I went to New York this last year. Part of it was the WTC Tour. We start across form St Paul’s Chapel hearing from the guide about how as a journalist he couldn’t get into Manhattan so he tried to hitch a ride with his local fire department but there was no room because it was a shift change and both shifts were going in. Blah blah blah. Dude I didn’t pay all this money to listen to your story. My feet are cold. Let’s go!
Then he said it. “I went back the next day for an interview and they were all dead.” 
Moderating:
Formatting fixed in OP and following as needed.
Bumping. 22 years since 9/11.
This morning I sat in St. Bart’s Church on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The local firehouse always shows up to the memorial service there; the church was on the sidewalk with support of food, water and spirit on the day.
That connection continues.
I tend to avoid the photographs and video compilations that float around in the days leading up to 9/11. That’s enough to avoid any real triggers.
Not forgetting is important. It’s important for those fields of poppies, it’s important for the Holocaust, it’s important for 9/11.
Healing and moving on is equally important. I’m in touch with a few people who had no direct involvement but who suffer from PTSD from this event. I’ve encouraged them to get some help.
Today is a day to smile at the Muslims in the neighborhood, right along with everyone else. Random terrorism has nothing to do with regular folk of any and all stripe.
Everything really DID change on that day, at least in New York City. Coupled with the 1993 bombing ( which is frequently forgotten, oddly ) and other acts of violence, the city is more hardened now than ever. This is a loss and it’s also real life.
There are two people named in this narrative. One is completely lost to me and I’ve spent a LOT of time trying to find him. The other is in touch with me. Omar stopped working as a civilian surgeon and entered the Army as an Officer and a surgeon. To this day he serves in deployments all over the world, overseeing field trauma surgical training. Between deployments he works with a hospital system as a surgeon. He fundamentally changed the arc of his life because of this event. A win for his moral compass, a win for the countless soldiers whose life he has saved in real-life MAS*H units.
Those lights, leaping up in a silent scream to the heavens.
To me, they are more painfully evocative, more appropriate, than either the falling waters OR the museum. ( The less I say about the museum, the better off I am… )
If you can spare the time tomorrow, on September the 11th, read the OP in this thread, and the connected following posts that are the complete narrative.
If this day were a book, it’d have 8 million pages. More, really, because it was an assault on a nation and its people and by extension on the planet and those who don’t cherish murder but cherish life. But let’s pare it down and say the book would have 8 million pages. Nominally the population of NYC on a business day back then.
My narrative would take up 8 pages, maybe. It’s a view of one person’s exposure to a mammoth event.
Since this is the Straight Dope, and I’m not quite sure I’ve ever mentioned this part, I will say that I spoke to several Dopers between the time I got my EMS gear out of the car and the time I put it on and left the job site.
THAT is how real and tangible the relationships are that grow here on the Straight Dope Message Board.
So, take a little time and read from the top.
In Peace,
Cartooniverse