American Ground

by William Langewiesche

  Strangely enough, it was this patriotic imagery that ultimately drove the disunity on the pile, and that by early November nearly caused the recovery effort to fall apart. The mechanisms were complex. On the one hand, there were some among the construction workers and the police who grew unreasonably impatient with the firemen, and became overeager to repeat the obvious—in polite terms, that these so-called heroes were just ordinary men. On the other hand, the firemen seemed to become steadily more self-absorbed and isolated from the larger cleanup efforts under way. The resentments rarely erupted into fistfights (though fistfights did occur) but increasingly were expressed in private conversations on the pile—often on the subject of the looting that for the first few months tarnished the Trade Center response.

  The looting was shadowy, widespread, and unsurprising. The Trade Center was known to have been hit before by errant policemen and firemen, after the terrorist bombing of 1993. This time the thievery was less intense but longer-lived. It involved small numbers of construction workers and men from the same uniformed groups as before, and it was shallow and opportunistic rather than deeply criminal in intent. It started in the shopping complex, with the innocuous filching of cigarettes and soda pop, and expanded into more ambitious acquisitions. As rumor had it, the tribalism at the site extended even to the choice of goods. Firemen were said to prefer watches from the Tourneau store, policemen to opt for kitchen appliances, and construction workers (who were at a disadvantage here) to enjoy picking through whatever leftovers they came upon—for instance, wine under the ruins of the Marriott hotel, and cases of contraband cigarettes that spilled from U.S. Customs vaults in the Building Six debris. No one, as far as I know, stole women’s clothes, which hung on racks for months, or lifted books from the Borders bookstore, which were said to be contaminated with dangerous mold. After a few arrests were made, the filching shifted to the peripheral buildings, which were gradually thinned of computers until the authorities wised up and posted guards. It’s important to realize that these transgressions occurred not in a normal part of the city but in a war zone, where standards had changed, food and supplies were provided free of charge, and a flood of donated goods (flashlights, gloves, Timberland boots) was believed to be backwashing onto the streets. It was also a place where the entire nation had been attacked and was responding as a collective, and where therefore, surprisingly for modern America, the meaning of individual property had been diminished. In context the looting simply did not seem shocking.

  Knowledge of it, however, cast a shadow on the use of the word “hero,” and at least once became a source of embarrassment and bitter mockery. One autumn afternoon, at the base of the South Tower ruins, diesel excavators were digging into unexplored reaches of the Trade Center’s foundation hole. Fifty feet below the level of the street they began to uncover the hulk of a fire truck that had been driven deep by the collapse. The work was being directed by the field superintendent for one of the major construction companies, a muscular and charismatic man who was widely admired (and to some extent feared) for his un-abashed physicality and his manner of plunging unhesitatingly into battle with the debris. If for no other reason than his confidence in the enormous mechanical power at his disposal, the superintendent believed in acting first and worrying about the consequences later. Early on he made it clear to me that were he in charge, he would clean up the site in no time flat, and that his first step would be to throw the firemen off the pile. Such was his disdain that he might even have included Sam Melisi in the toss, hard as that was to imagine. He assured me that he’d had nothing against firemen before (he shrugged and said, “Why would I?”), but he just couldn’t stand this hero stuff anymore. He didn’t like the moralistic airs these guys were putting on. He didn’t like the way they treated the civilian dead. And he especially didn’t like the fact that they kept forcing his operation to shut down—once for three days straight—while they worked by hand and poked through the rubble for their colleagues’ remains.

  Imagine his delight, then, after the hulk of the fire truck appeared, that rather than containing bodies (which would have required decorum), its crew cab was filled with dozens of new pairs of jeans from a Trade Center store. When a grappler pulled off the roof, the jeans were strewn about for all to see. It was exactly the sort of evidence the field superintendent had been waiting for. While a crowd of initially bewildered firemen looked on, the construction workers went wild. “Jeans! Look at these! Fucking guys! Jeans!” In their eyes, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the looting had begun even before the first tower fell, and that while hundreds of doomed firemen had climbed through the wounded buildings, this particular crew had been engaged in something else entirely, of course without the slightest suspicion that the South Tower was about to hammer down. This was not what the firemen wanted to hear. An angry fire chief tried to shut the construction workers up. He offered an explanation—that the jeans (tagged, folded, stacked by size) had been blown into the crew cab by the force of the collapse. The field superintendent, seeming not to hear, asked the fire chief to repeat what he had said. When he did, the construction workers only jeered louder.

  Scattered jeans lay on the pile for several days. The story got around. For Ken Holden and Mike Burton, this and other incidents on the pile amounted to important lessons in their war’s early months: the site would never stand united, as sloganeers said it should, so some other approach would have to be found.

  Though the firemen who rioted on November 2 did not believe it, when Giuliani gave “safety” as the reason for reducing their presence on the pile, he was completely sincere. This was somewhat counterintuitive, since the safety record so far had been extraordinarily good: despite the fires, the instability of the ruins, and the crushing weight of the equipment and debris, not a single recovery worker had been killed, and only a few had been seriously injured. Indeed, discounting possible long-term respiratory problems, the injury rate was about half that of the construction-industry average. Some people claimed this as a sign of God’s favor, but a more mundane explanation was that the inapplicability of ordinary rules and procedures to such a chaotic environment required workers there to think for themselves, which they proved very capable of doing. Nonetheless, the city had reason to be especially concerned about the firemen at the site, who formed maverick groups on the pile, prone to clustering too close to the diesel grapplers and to taking impetuous risks in the smoke and debris.

  The lack of discipline was a well-known aspect of the firemen’s culture. In some ways it was a necessary thing, hard to separate from their views of manliness and bravery and their eagerness to take on fires. It also, however, led to needless danger. After he left the service, in January of 2002, Commissioner Von Essen mentioned that as a longtime firefighter, he had often stood on floors among thirty others where only ten were needed. Indeed, on September 11 many of the firefighters who responded were off duty at the time, and many bypassed check-in procedures, or arrived by subway or car in violation of orders to stay away. Many also went into the towers unnecessarily and with little coordination, at a time when there were enough other firemen on duty to handle the evacuations, and when the Fire Department had decided that the fires were unfightable. Sixty off-duty firefighters died that day. “Courage is not enough,” Von Essen later said. “The fact that the guys are so dedicated comes back to hurt them down the line.” The police at the site were better disciplined—and, partly as a result, they suffered fewer casualties on the day of the attack. But nearly two months after the tragedy, with no conceivable justification for continuing to jump into voids or clamber across unstable cliffs, there were still firemen running wild.

  Giuliani had good reason, therefore, to rein them in. Viewed from the outside, the plan seemed sensible: you scale back the searchers to three teams of twenty-five—one from each of the uniformed services; you allow only one spotter at a time to stand beside each diesel excavator on the pile; until human remains are found, you require the other
team members to wait in designated “safe areas” nearby; you do not allow ordinary firemen to keep shutting down the site; you create a joint command to soothe people’s egos but give practical control to the engineers and the construction types, who are businesslike and know how to finish the job; you shrink the perimeter, with the goal of returning even heavily damaged West Street as soon as possible to the city; you thin the crowds of hangers-on by requiring new badges for the inner and outer zones, and asking the Red Cross and the Salvation Army to consolidate and simplify their feeding operations; you scale back the public displays of mourning; you encourage people to get on with their lives.

  The planners were not completely naive about the transition: they suspected that they might have some difficulty in getting the firemen to comply. Mike Burton decided that the best approach would be to start with strict enforcement of the new rules, and loosen up later for the sake of efficiency. I was surprised by his confidence that anything here could go according to plan. And indeed, little did.

  Questions of personality and professional formation were at play. The construction crews, like the DDC itself, were made up of hard-driving people, accustomed to shaving minutes in a time-obsessed industry. Though they understood the desirability of finding the human remains at the Trade Center site, they were not going to slow the excavation of the ruins just to ensure that the final inspections at the Fresh Kills landfill did not turn up body parts. Mike Burton in particular was pushing for speed, and was determined to finish the job below cost and ahead of schedule—however arbitrary those targets may have been. He was climbing his mountain of success, and was not about to let a gang of irrational firemen get in his way. In public and during the morning meetings he was gracious and respectful toward them, but in private—in the confines of the kindergarten rooms, or during long walks with me on the pile—he let his impatience show. On the evening after the riot we came upon one of the new search-team “safe areas” (a ten-foot square of Jersey barriers spray-painted FDNY), and he shot me a hard little smile of victory. He used the firemen’s term for it and said, “The penalty box.” I assumed he was thinking about the attack on the police. He may have believed that the way forward was clear. He seemed not to notice that the penalty box was empty.

  This was not a game. There were no rules. The firemen continued with their headstrong ways on the pile, refusing to submit to civilian authority. Five days after the riot, after the unions formally apologized to the police, Giuliani began a partial retreat. He said he would increase the size of the search teams to fifty. The firemen were unmollified. The place where their friends had been killed was still being turned into an unholy “construction site.” Three days later, on November 10, charges were dropped against all but one of the arrested demonstrators. It did no good. The firemen pulled out the stops and demanded a meeting between the mayor and the dead firemen’s families.

  The meeting took place behind closed doors in a Sheraton hotel in midtown Manhattan, on the evening of November 12. It had been a rough day already: that morning an American Airlines flight departing for the Dominican Republic had crashed into a residential neighborhood in Queens, killing 265 people, and most of the officials at the meeting had visited the scene. Now they sat behind a table on a raised platform—the mayor, the medical examiner, the fire commissioner, and, from the Trade Center site, Mike Burton and Bill Cote. The crowd they faced consisted mostly of widows—an increasingly organized group that spoke for mothers, fathers, and children as well, and that after two months of national sympathy was gaining significant political strength. Payouts to the victims’ families hadn’t yet begun, and firemen’s widows, not without reason, felt neglected and put-upon. They believed that the city was essentially giving up on the search for the dead. And they were angry about it.

  The medical examiner was the first to come under fire. He had begun to talk about the procedures in place for handling remains when he made the mistake of mentioning that full or even partially intact corpses had not recently been found, and that they were unlikely to be found in the future. A woman stood up and yelled, “You’re a liar! We know what you’re finding! You’re a liar!” Others chimed in, shouting that their husbands’ bodies had been recovered in good condition. One woman yelled that when her husband was found, the searchers on the pile could even see the dimple in his chin. It was as if an emotional dam had burst in the crowd. The medical examiner listened somberly. When the crowd briefly quieted, he tried to explain his reasoning: the excavation had moved into the mid-levels of the ruins, where the debris was severely compacted and the dead had been shattered or vaporized; furthermore, from what was known of the pile’s composition, along with the processes of organic decay, there was little chance that whole bodies would be discovered in the future. The widows would have none of this. They continued to shout “Liar!” until the medical examiner sat down. The months ahead would show that the medical examiner was wrong—that the ruins were riddled with unexpected cavities deep down, and that nearly whole corpses, particularly of heavily clad firemen, lay waiting to be found. However, this would have been impossible to predict at the time.

  The mayor handled himself well that night. He was patient and compassionate, and he allowed the grieving crowd to rail, but he did not pander to it. About the medical examiner he simply said, “He’s not lying. He’s telling you what we know.” Then it was Burton’s turn to talk.

  Burton started gamely into an explanation of the transition on the pile, including the new placement of spotters, the “safe areas,” and the handling and inspection of the debris. The crowd listened sullenly for a while, until a woman stood up and yelled, “We don’t even want to hear from you! You’re Mr. Scoop and Dump!”

  Burton was flustered. He said, “Listen, this will only be a few more minutes. Just let me explain our thinking, so we’re all on the same page and can have a rational conversation.”

  The woman shouted, “No! You’re not the sort of person I want to talk to! You’re the problem!”

  Burton tried a soothing tone. He said, “We’ll get through this, if you’ll just . . . ”

  “No! You’re Mr. Scoop and Dump!”

  Others joined in, shouting, “Scoop and Dump! Scoop and Dump! Scoop and Dump!” Burton allowed a small, nervous smile to flicker across his face. His tormentor saw it. She yelled, “You’re smirking? You’re smirking at me? You think this is funny? This isn’t funny!” Someone else shouted, “Yeah, he’s smirking!” and again the whole crowd started in. Burton was mortified. He made a few weak attempts to speak, but the widows were relentless, and they overwhelmed him. For minutes he stood miserably on the platform, absorbing the abuse, unable to advance or retreat. Bill Cote felt terrible for him, and wanted to go to his rescue, but could not. Finally the mayor stepped in and got the crowd to simmer down. He told a little story and made a quip that caused Burton’s tormentor to smile. The mayor noticed and said, “You see, you just smirked. When people are nervous, they smirk. So can we please put this behind us now? Let’s just stop.”

  But the widows were too angry for that, and they soon widened their attacks. They had some legitimate complaints—for instance, that the Fire Department had never gotten around to contacting some women about their husbands’ deaths, or to clarifying the associated administrative and financial details. A few of those whose husbands had yet to be identified were still having a hard time accepting their demises. And what about their paychecks? If a fireman remained trapped somewhere inside the pile, wouldn’t he still be on duty and earning overtime? Conversely, was it correct to assume that all those who had disappeared had stopped working at the moment of collapse? Unexpected though these questions seemed, they were obviously practical, and the fire commissioner admitted that the department had done a poor job of handling such things.

  For the most part, though, the widows simply vented their emotions. They argued as much among themselves as with the officials at the head of the room. One woman kept insisting that her husband was
still alive, because she could send signals to his beeper and it would respond. Others, who had accepted the reality of death, were infuriated by the possibility that any of the firemen’s remains would not be found until they reached the landfill. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be the most difficult issue of the night. The crowd demanded to know why the final sifting operation could not be moved from Fresh Kills to the Trade Center site or the streets nearby. There were many reasons why—including dust, noise, neighborhood opposition, and, most important, the complete lack of space in Lower Manhattan—but neither Burton nor Cote was about to say that now. They promised to look into the possibility. Of course the crowd did not believe them. At one point a woman came forward with her son, a boy of about seven, and started screaming, “You tell him! You tell him!” Burton and Cote looked at her without understanding. Tell him what? She continued, “You tell him his father’s going to be found at the dump!” The crowd broke into applause. The woman began to cry. “Tell him! Tell him!” Her son watched her in apparent confusion. Friends came up, put their arms around her, and led her and the boy gently away.

  Burton and Cote were badly shaken. When the meeting ended, after more than three hours of emotional storms, the two of them got into Burton’s Jeep and drove away through the quiet streets. At first they did not speak, except briefly to agree that the experience had been the worst of their lives. In the theater district they found a bar, and went in for a drink. The other customers there—tourists pioneering a return to the city, lovers hunched together before bed, late-night regulars of various kinds—could never have guessed the role of these nondescript men, or the utter seriousness of their talk.