If you'll bear with me, I'd like to tell the story, as I see it, of September 11th and my Dad and I. It is very personal and it has been difficult to write, but I feel like this community is a great group of people to share it with.
"9/11 changed everything," is a platitude. The reality is much more complex than that. My Dad and I continued down our professional paths in the coming years, I graduated college and he retired from the NYPD, but some important things did change.
The changes we experienced don't fit in with the "Great American Flag-Waving Patriot Day" narrative; we turned to peace, not war and revenge. While our story isn't the most dramatic (Nicolas Cage isn't going to play my Dad in a blockbuster film), nor is it the most tragic (neither of us were killed by the attack...yet), I hope you'll learn from it, be touched by it, or maybe both.
Tuesday morning, seven years ago, I woke up early for my 8:30am World Politics class to learn and talk about international relations. Three weeks ago I had moved down to DC to begin my freshman year in college. My Mom, Dad, younger sister and our Westie (the whole family!) made the trip down from Long Island with me, to see me off and to wish me luck.
My Dad woke up early that same morning like he always does, even though it was his day off. Being a New York City cop for almost twenty years had left him unable to sleep past six or seven. It was all those years of 5am shifts, forcing him out of bed at 3:30.
He was only a couple of years from retirement, getting ready to end his career as I was getting ready to begin mine. I had been chomping at the bit to get the hell out of boring LI, while he wanted the hell out of the stress of being "on the job."
So, after class ended at about 9:45, I was walking back to the dorms with a friend, chatting about the professor and the annoying guy that loved to hear himself talk. Halfway back, one of her friends came hurrying up to us, looking stricken. "Have you heard? The Pentagon's been destroyed, there was a car bomb at the State Department, the Mall is under attack and the White House has been evacuated!"
Before we could ask any questions she ran off. We picked up the pace a little, to say the least, and hurried to the dorms in stunned silence. I could only think that DC was being invaded. By who though? Who invades the United States? If this is full-scale, I have to get inside, as I don't want to be caught outside if bombs start falling.
At some point my friend and I drifted apart, lost in our own thoughts. I made my way into our floor's lounge, as my roommate and I didn't have a TV. A bunch of people were gathered around staring at images of the two Towers burning in NYC. Oh my God! They're attacking New York, too? What the hell is happening? As I listened to the TV news, I slowly realized what was actually going on. I lost my immediate fears of being caught up in a war, but began worrying about my family in New York.
I didn't know my Dad's schedule and figured he'd be working. I also figured he would have rushed to the scene to do whatever he could to help. I knew I had aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents that lived and worked in the City. Calling home was completely useless as all the lines were tied up. I started fidgeting nervously, wondering if they were okay.
Then a Tower fell. Was my Dad there?
I spent the next half hour getting more and more anxious, trying to call home, trying not to imagine how likely it was that my Dad had been either in the Tower or at the base. I was alone in a strange place with no one to tell me it was okay.
Then the other Tower fell. The smoke was apocalyptic. It looked like half of Downtown was destroyed. Of course he was there. No one anywhere near that could have survived.
The next few hours were a blur. I heard from the news that many thousands of people in the Towers had probably died. The smoke cloud was huge, but it looked like the real destruction was confined to a few blocks around the Towers.
At some point I drifted into my room. I had no idea where my roommate was. My bed was on the top bunk and I guess I didn't feel like climbing, because I ended up lying in his bed, sobbing and wrapped up in the sheets for I don't know how long. What would life be like without my Dad? Eventually I came out of it, found some of my friends and watched more TV with them.
I finally got through to my home at about 1pm and my Mom answered the phone. My Dad was off that day, she said. He was home that morning, but left the house at about ten or eleven to go to his precinct...he figured he would be needed. My other relatives were fine. My uncle had to walk home to Brooklyn (from his job in Manhattan) over the Brooklyn Bridge, along with thousands of others, but everyone was okay. It was probably the biggest relief of my life. I'm sure my Mom felt the same way when she heard from me.
My Dad spent the next six weeks or so doing three different jobs, working 10-16 hour days, six or seven days a week. He worked security at Ground Zero, making sure no unauthorized people got into the site (and also making sure no authorized people stole anything from the abandoned stores and homes).
He also spent time digging through rubble at Ground Zero, and later in the dump on Staten Island where they brought a lot of the wreckage, looking for evidence. "What kind of evidence?" I asked once, imagining cops with magnifying glasses searching for traces of explosives, like on TV. "Body parts," he answered. When I was home for Thanksgiving he quietly told me, when we were alone over cigars, about finding a foot here, a finger there...how he had found a whole mess of remains, some intact, on a catwalk between two buildings that were right next to the Towers. Whatever you found, you picked up with gloves and placed into big plastic evidence bags. This was tougher than security, but it was third job that was the worst.
The hardest job, the one that required all his strength to carry out, was physically the simplest. It was working the morgue. Not working with bodies, but simply swabbing the inside of the cheek of a living person with a Q-Tip. The relatives of the victims were coming there, thousands of them, day after day, offering up some of their DNA so it could be matched with the remains they had found. For hours on end, he was face to face, rather inside the faces of people who had just lost their loved ones and were hoping for that last little bit of comfort...to have something to bury, even if it was just a toe.
These weeks of selfless, dedicated, almost superhuman effort will probably cost my Dad his life. By April 2002, he was in the hospital for what he thought was a heart attack. No, it was his lungs spasming, we found out. They were completely messed up, but he was released after some monitoring and was put on an inhaler. His horrible, uncontrollable cough that had started since the previous fall would never go away, however. There is no doubt among my family that it was from his work at Ground Zero. In fact, what he has is widely known as "World Trade Center Cough," and is shared by most of the first-responders. See this.
I talked to him this past June about it again when I was home (I still live in DC), over a couple of beers after a particularly rough coughing fit. He told me again about the disgusting air, green smoke that rose out of the rubble at times and of how they were left alone to deal with it at first, then given simple cloth masks (like you would use when you're painting or cleaning with bleach) that turned black within an hour. Also about how they were told the air was perfectly safe.
We then talked about the Latino laborers that were brought in to clean up the debris of the Verizon building, which had part of its face torn off in the collapse. About how they were probably picking up armfuls of asbestos and other toxic trash with only surgical gloves and masks...stuff that would have done next to nothing to protect them. "I'd bet they're all dying or already dead by now," he mused. "Poor bastards."
Then he said something I wasn't expecting. "I'll probably be dead within ten years." I told him no way, he was doing better now, but he insisted. "This shit is going to kill me." I hope he's wrong.
Back in DC, my life went on as a college freshman after September 11th, albeit a bit chaotically. On Thursday, two days after 9/11, I woke up to my RA pounding on my door, telling me to get the hell out of the building, there was a bomb threat. One of my friends had his internship in the White House mailroom cancelled because of the anthrax attacks. Heavily armed soldiers took over the city for a while.
The disaster also had some positive effects on us, though.
Before the attacks, I considered myself a Democratic-leaning independent, but I'll admit that I was pretty war-like in my thinking. I thought that the US was a great nation and that we were a force for good in the world and that our wars were always just and righteous. My education about the real state of affairs was sorely lacking.
My Dad was even more belligerent in his outlook towards other countries, but didn't really think much of our country's leaders, nor was he patriotic at all. He hated both parties and voted for Perot in the 90's out of spite.
In the weeks following the attacks, I completely transformed my thinking. A few days after 9/11, I ran into a girl I had hung out with a few times before the attacks...a girl that would later be my first love and whom I would date for over a year. She asked me, "What do you think of all this?" I replied that those who carried it out needed to be utterly destroyed. To my great surprise, she started crying. I hugged her and asked what was wrong, trying to console her. "It's just all this hate," she sobbed. "From everyone." That woke me up and forced me to deal with my own responsibility for the violence in the world.
In the next week, I was struck by a Socialist newsletter my roommate had picked up from an activist on campus that described the consequences of US-led sanctions on Iraq. It used a metaphor of a 747 filled with children crashing every few minutes (I forget the actual figure). How could a good country do this to innocent children? My counter-arguments about Saddam being evil and Iraq deserving it crumbled away as I thought of the horrors of 9/11 being visited on Iraqis families every single day.
Through further research and hard thinking I realized that the only sane way forward in this world, was to work for peace...that my country was good only insofar as it was a force for peace. By the time the bombs started falling on Afghanistan, I was seeing it as yet another atrocity, not revenge like so many others in our country.
My Dad too, went through a transformation. I'm not sure how it worked on him or when it really occurred, but his thinking on war and violence has definitely changed. He likes to talk shit that will get a rise out people (for example, on prisons: "Just put all the bastards on death row and execute 'em tomorrow!") and he was definitely for the war in Afghanistan for a while, but the change was in evidence by October 2002.
My family came down to visit on the weekend that there was an enormous anti-Iraq war march planned. I was going and they decided to come, too. Even my Dad, though he was a little uncomfortable, especially with the more colorful marchers.
So there he was marching with over 100,000 other people saying "No!" to another war, a man that had worked countless riots, demonstrations and protests as one of the guys in all the heavy gear with a baton and a shield. Ol' NYPD tough guy among a minority in our country (at that time) standing against more senseless violence. He also voted for Kerry in '04!
If you've read through to here, you have my great thanks. You can see that our story is not the one that the Republican Party would have you believe. You know, the one where the poor victims in New York and DC clamor for revenge and death.
Yes, my Dad will probably wind up being one the fatalities (though delayed) of 9/11, but I blame the city, state and federal officials for that just as much as al-Qaeda. Rudy Giuliani, Christine Todd Whitman and George W. Bush are as guilty in my eyes as Osama bin Laden. I hope they will all eventually have their day in court before they are imprisoned...even if that is just wishful thinking.
More importantly, I think that I've really valued my Dad and his presence in my life a whole lot more. I try to tell him that I love him more often than I used to, which isn't always easy when you're two rather stoic guys.
Thanks for reading!
Peace