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| Home Front |
| Ground Zero Diary |
| 2001-09-29 |
| C. J. CHIVERS NY Times In the hours after the twin towers came down, as Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani began imposing a media blackout at the rubble, hundreds, then thousands, of people converged at ground zero. They were a mismatched mass of motives and skills: police officers, firefighters, part-time soldiers, bureaucrats, dog handlers, contractors, military veterans, staffs from emergency rooms, civilian survivors still coated with stinging ash, chaplains, massage artists, utility workers, misfits and thieves. Stepping from the confusion and wreckage around them, they bonded on a first-name basis and strung together the tens of thousands of small deeds that transformed the nightmarish bedlam into a new city within the old. To spend 12 days among them — 6 as a volunteer digging and lugging trash, 6 more as a reporter covering the National Guard — was to be privy to a universe more bizarre and more ordinary than the vignettes that found their way out. The inhabitants of ground zero ate together in abandoned restaurants and beside piles of putrid garbage, they fell asleep together wherever they could, they sobbed and prayed together and, as they became familiar with Lower Manhattan's emerging new landscape, they shared directions to working phones and bathrooms that were not splattered with vomit. Already there were pockets of grief. In a market near the command post, doctors had gone through, seeking supplies. Bereaved firefighters followed, looking for beer. Three of them gathered in the dancing shadows, their faces alternately orange and black, and began the first of the wakes. They had been off duty when the planes struck and had dashed from private lives to rubble, stopping at firehouses along the way and grabbing anything that had been left behind. They wore other men's gear. One had boots several sizes too big. Another was in street shoes. Their fire companies had been devastated. They could find no one familiar to report to and little equipment to use. They drank beer and watched the Deutsche Bank building burn. "I think all my guys are dead," one said. Another firefighter, reclining in a puddle, said he had approached a Special Operation Command chief who seemed to be in charge. He didn't recognize the man. "I looked him over and was like, `Who the hell are you?' " he said. "He looked me back and said, `I'm the SOC chief. I'm the only SOC chief left.' " Already there were pockets of rage. Al Sapienza, the actor who played the gangster Mikey Palmice on "The Sopranos," had pedaled to ground zero on his bicycle. Now he took a brief break from hauling body bags. "Anyone," Mr. Sapienza said, "who would use the name of God" — he paused — "to kill innocent women and children" — he paused — "does not deserve to live among us in a world of laws and just people." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |