The Third Wave (2 page)

It was starting to get dark when a slick black car with four men inside pulled up to our area. It looked like a scene out of the movie
Men in Black
. A mysterious suit-clad arm emerged from behind the tinted windows and placed a loudspeaker on the car’s roof. Earlier, someone had placed a spotlight on the ground to light up the area after nightfall, and it shone through the car, making the shadowy figures inside look even more impressive. A radio broadcast began. It was President George W. Bush telling us that we were now at war. The crowd was spellbound. Hundreds of rescue workers surrounded the car, hanging on every word. Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the car quietly
vanished. A buzz of excitement hissed through the crowd. I felt a surge of pride: We were now soldiers, fighting on American soil.

At this stage, only a small group of exhausted firemen were being allowed back into Ground Zero. But who was going to take care of the firefighters, I wondered? Michael and I gave each other a cheeky look and then hid behind a group of firemen, using them as cover to sneak back into the danger zone. We knew that many firemen were still getting hurt, and we were determined to help them. We were also eager to look around for anyone who had been buried alive.

As we stepped into the ash and flames, I silently recited the same prayer that I had prayed all day: If it was my time to die, then I was ready. Up until then I had had an amazing, fulfilling life, for which I was grateful. In welcoming and accepting the thought of my death, I felt no fear at all.

Michael and I walked around for hours with our first aid kits and saline bags, treating firemen with burned, sooty eyes and small open wounds. We climbed over remnants of smashed jewelry stores and unmanned banks, desperately looking for someone trapped but still breathing. It was a pitch-black night: The soot lay like a blanket across the sky and the power had gone out. We felt like the only people left on earth.

In the late evening hours, we came upon the American Express building, which had been converted into a small disaster-response staging area and morgue. The ground was soaked in mud and water, which oozed over my flip-flops, through my socks, and around my toes as I stumbled to help a fireman. His eyes were bloodshot and full of soot; he looked like the walking dead. He had been working in the Marriott hotel and was the last one to run out before the south tower had come crashing down on top of it. All of his friends were dead. He sat on the ground in
despair, a broken man. I whispered words of comfort and stroked his hair as I cleaned his eyes.

The wind created ashy tornadoes that danced around us as we tried to wash the soot out, making our task even more challenging. On top of that, I realized that although my eyes were fully open I couldn’t see anything—my eyes were filled with dirt, too. So Michael and I sat face-to-face on a pile of rubble to blindly clean the muck from each other’s eyes.

“Darling,” I said, “you take me to all the best places.”

“Only the best for you, my dear,” Michael replied.

As soon as our eyes were fresh, we ventured back into the action.

At 11 p.m. on the evening of September 11, 2001, Michael and I arrived at Firehouse 10. Miraculously, it had been left standing, even though it sat directly across the road from the World Trade Center’s southeast corner. Someone’s splattered head lay in the rubble just two feet from the main door. Inside, everything was covered in ash, and exhausted firemen lay on the ground, overcome with grief. Firehouse 10 had become their de facto resting place.

Michael and I decided to set up a mini triage station there. We rigged flashlights above our heads with ropes tied to the ceiling and sat on the floor with our bags of saline. Every few hours I would look up to see another fifty weary firefighters wandering in to have us wash out their eyes. They spoke of friends who had died and of how much they loved their wives. One fireman ranted about having lost his fire hat, though it was clear to me that it was not really his hat he was upset about losing. I kissed their foreheads before sending them back into hell.

Neither electricity nor cellphones functioned, so there was no
way for any of us to contact our loved ones. This was a huge source of anxiety for many of the firemen, who desperately wanted to get in touch with their families but couldn’t bear to leave the disaster area. Fortunately, earlier in the day when I was waiting at City Hall, I had managed to get calls out to my parents in Australia and to close friends, telling them that I was okay and not to worry. Many days later, when I finally returned home, my answering machine was filled with messages from other friends, including a few ex-boyfriends, wondering if I had survived.

The next morning around dawn, Michael and I moved our triage station out of Firehouse 10, which was simply too chaotic and crowded, and set it up in a broken bar called St. Charlie’s, located only a block away on Liberty Street. We needed a base to work out of and protect us from the elements, and the bar was the perfect size and location. With a little shove on the front door, we got inside. We cleared a space on the ground and set up our few possessions. Then we found a can of spray paint and made a sign to put outside the front door. It read
GROUND ZERO FIRST AID STATION
. Eventually, our little hangout became home to any Ground Zero workers who stumbled across it.

Just about every shop window had been smashed by the collapse of the Twin Towers. There were destroyed storefronts with jewelry, cash, and expensive clothing lying everywhere. All any of us wanted, though, were basic necessities such as bottled water and toothbrushes, which we’d grab whenever we could find them. The only store that had remained locked shut was the athletic shoe store on the second floor of the World Financial Center. So, in a strange twist of fate, the one thing I most desperately needed—a solid pair of running shoes—was the one thing I couldn’t get. By the evening of September 12, my waterlogged feet were in dire need of protection. When two firemen walked by with a dead body on a stretcher, we blessed the body and then took off his size fourteen shoes. I needed them more than he did now. My feet were only a size seven, so Michael cut off the front part for me and my toes wiggled through like creatures poking their heads out of a cave.

With Michael Voudoras at our Ground Zero first aid station

We ran purely on adrenaline as the hours raced by and our fatigue increased. It was tough work, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk away. I could never have lived with myself if I had. This was a front-line war zone, and every second that passed could mean life or death for someone buried beneath the rubble. Even a million rescue workers wouldn’t have been enough to help. Some volunteers left to get supplies or meet loved ones, but they always came back. Most refused to leave until they collapsed in exhaustion and had to be carried out on stretchers.

On the second night, Michael and I and the others who had
joined our camp sat around St. Charlie’s broken bar and held hands as we sang patriotic songs by candlelight. We then quietly passed around a bottle of Scotch from behind the bar. For about an hour, I caught some flashes of dreamless sleep against the wall. I woke up with a red rose in my hand. I am still not sure who put it there.

On the morning of September 13, we could still hear people buried alive under the rubble making tapping noises, and this kept us going. Tragically, we had no way to get down to them. Ironworkers dug for hours but made only a small dent in the seemingly bottomless pile of steel.

Many of the friends I had worked with during my days as an investment banker had been in the World Trade Center buildings when the planes hit. Initially, finding them had been my primary motivation for going down to Ground Zero. I quickly discovered that that was the case for many of the volunteers I met. But after only a short time, we each realized that it didn’t matter if we knew the victims or not; we wanted to help everyone. “Nobody goes home until we all go home” became our quiet motto. Even after the tapping noises stopped, we never gave up hope.

Michael and I stuck side by side, continuing our work as first aid volunteers. The fires underneath Ground Zero were still burning out of control and black soot filled the air. It smelled ghastly, a combination of dead bodies and burning electrical wire.

By the third day, we had collected a team of ten or so nurses and medics and volunteers who had also somehow snuck across our path. Our gang climbed onto the piles of rubble when the rescue dogs found a body and helped pass small buckets full of
rubble and body parts down the long line of hands, sometimes forty workers strong. They led to a dump truck that whisked the remains away to an unknown destination. These lines became known as the “bucket brigades.”

Along with a constant stream of firemen and policemen, people from other agencies began to pour into Ground Zero: the FBI, the U.S. Army, the Marines, ironworkers, Con Edison technicians, and medics, just to name a few. Although I was already deeply entrenched in the recovery effort, I now had to contend with the Army, the National Guard, the FBI, the NYPD, the CIA, and a line of large tanks that were locking down Ground Zero and preventing volunteers from entering the destroyed area. At every opening, guards stood with machine guns controlling the flow of people and denying most of them entry, except for certified personnel.

I was just an everyday civilian with no formal credentials other than the will to help. When I heard about the lockdown, it occurred to me that if I left Ground Zero now, I might never make it back in. But after three full days down there, I decided to venture out anyway. I made a stop at a friend’s house, where I refueled myself with food and stocked up on supplies.

When I returned, I marched straight past two National Guards with submachine guns, trying hard to look like I belonged there. I knew the work I was doing was probably the most important thing I would ever do in my life, and I was determined to get back to it. Luckily, they didn’t stop me.

The miserable rains started late on the night of September 13. It was freezing. Everyone had to come off “the pile,” as it was too hazardous to work—large chunks of iron debris were still slipping off the surrounding buildings.

I was stuck inside St. Charlie’s bar cuddling with a large older nurse under green garbage bags that we hoped would help fight the wind blasting through the broken windows. We lay across three steel chairs and held each other tightly. A few hours later, I woke up and apologized for holding on to her stomach. She replied, “Actually, those were my breasts!” We laughed, regaining our sanity. Then we looked around to find that we had been sleeping in a corner filled with human feces.

The next day, while working on the rubble pile, I heard the voice of an angel calling out in the haze, asking if anyone wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken. I hadn’t eaten since having a snack at my friend’s house the day before, so I stood up and screamed, “OVER HERE!” I couldn’t believe my good fortune: Kentucky Fried Chicken is like crack to me. I sat in the midst of the burned plastic and ash, tearing at my precious piece of meat, its succulent juices running down my filthy face.

Throughout my life, my true friends have always known to bring me a bucket of KFC to make me happy. Jonathon Connors, my good buddy who worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center, was one of those friends. As I devoured my piece of chicken, my mind floated to him, and I hoped that he had made it out alive. I picked up my phone. Miraculously, it was one of those rare occasions when I could get a cellphone signal. I made a call to a mutual friend, and learned that there had still been no
word to anyone from Jonathon. I knew at that moment that I had lost him. It made me more determined than ever to keep working. I found some sunflowers in a wrecked kosher goods store and asked a Con Edison worker to tie them onto lampposts in remembrance of the dead.

After my minifeast, I found a toothbrush and water in a burned-out store and brushed my teeth while sitting cross-legged in the gutter. When I was done, I tied the toothbrush to my waist with a piece of rope, knowing I’d lose it otherwise. Then I started laughing at myself, imagining how absurd I must have looked. I thought about all the
M*A*S*H
episodes I had watched on TV growing up and how, ironically, they had prepared me for this very moment. I’d learned from them that humor was an important part of surviving a tragedy.