OT: NYPD Officer Paul Mauro's Ground Zero Notes
Tiny Dancer
is riveting enough. It's also the first account I've read of Billy Joel
crying when he visited the workers at Ground Zero.
From another group via The NY Post:
ONE GROUND ZERO COP'S HEARTBREAKING ACCOUNT OF DAYS JUST AFTER 9/11
NY POST/By PAUL MAURO
EDITOR'S NOTE - On duty at Ground Zero in the days after the
World Trade Center attacks, NYPD Officer Paul Mauro kept jotting
down notes and stuffing them into his pockets. He knew he would
need to write about it someday. This is his story.
A FEW nights after the Sept. 11 attacks, a woman on North Moore
Street took one look at me in my dirty uniform, started crying and
silently handed me an apple. It was a moment so charged with
metaphor, I got confused; I couldn't even thank her. I'm sure she
thinks now I was an ungrateful jerk.
You want to hear a strange truth? There's a part of the cop psyche
that's tremendously uncomfortable with such moments. Clutching
that apple, I couldn't help wondering: What happens when I go back
to writing tickets? What happens when the apple woman hears I took
her brother in on an old turnstile warrant? What happens when it's
business as usual again?
But that's the thing, this time. This one is so big, business as usual
may never fully return. Forget the public, that's not who I mean. The
real change had better be in us. If Osama bin Laden has reminded
America of who we are as a nation, he's reminded New York's cops
of who we are, as well.
LATE into that first night, when we've been standing on the same corner
for 14 hours without being sure of what's to come or what day we'll finally
get home or how completely our lives might be changed, two studious-
looking young women tentatively approach us. On my lips is yet another
demand that they get back behind the police lines, but the words catch
in my throat and my alarm rises vaguely when I see one of them gingerly
carrying a box.
She's on me before I can protest, right up to me and my partner, and
she asks if we're hungry. She and her roommate made peanut-butter-
and-jelly sandwiches for us, if we want them. Which we do, desperately.
Looking into the box, I see that inside each sandwich bag is a little note:
"Thank you for your bravery" and "God bless you." And so I have the first
of what will be many moments when I find it difficult to speak.
AFTER four hours of attempted sleep, I'm back for the evening of Day 2,
assigned over by the river, where I discover that, when there is no triage,
there will be a morgue.
A group of eight or so professionals - medical examiner, Fire Department
paramedic, Police Department chaplains - hunch on folding chairs awaiting
the next arrival to the tent.
Then the call goes up outside the tent: "Heads up. Body coming!" That
a single rescue worker can carry the body bag gives some indication
of what's inside.
The worker lugs it onto a table made up of a sheet stretched over plywood.
We crowd around. Will it be a cop? A fireman? Will it be some horror I will
never forget?
The paramedic unzips the black plastic bag. This is human? That is
my first thought as her gloved hands sift the contents. But then I see.
Within a mat of gray dust and paper fragments, a latticework of ribs.
No blood or flesh, nothing that is not simply gray and woolly with ash.
Only occasionally is there more than this. One bag reveals a severed
human foot, the toenails painted a heartbreaking violet. And this is what
shocks you, what sits you down with a nauseated, displaced feel of a
world spinning awry. Not the gore or the lack of it, but the small details
that point tellingly to fragile lives caught in the maelstrom.
Those details are what I'm here for. I'm one of five cops tagging and
bagging anything that might be linked to one of the dead. It's far, far
tougher than viewing human remains.
A leather shoulder bag holds a management textbook and a notebook.
The textbook has a woman's name on the front in a graceful, feminine hand.
The notebook has her weekly classes written into the scheduling grid.
Little reminders are written beside the schedule: "Keep up with the reading!"
You wonder: How could these things survive intact and their owners be so
completely erased?
WE'RE digging now, anybody who can. It's still only Day 3, and the chances
of finding somebody alive are, in theory, still real. It's a cyclical process;
you pull carefully at the impossibly antagonistic tangle of metal and concrete,
until eventually, a major beam or girder is exposed. Then the ironworkers
hook a crane line to the girder and hoist it free.
There is something mythic in the sight of the cranes in operation. At one
point, I look up from the wreckage to see an ironworker descending from
the heavens, poised atop a huge metal hook at the end of a crane cable.
Behind him, the red arm of a derrick scrapes the sky.
A crane, off to my right, is noisily hoisting a half-melted girder free of the
rubble when a chorus of despair goes up.
I turn in time to catch a glimpse. It is a young woman, or rather the top-half
of one, stuck to the top of the beam. Her arm flaps free once, a disembodied
wave; then the torso falls free, disappearing anonymously back into the
wreckage.
WHEN the first building came down, a sergeant from my precinct was on
the street outside. He's long and lanky, and when he dived under a car
for shelter, an arriving emergency vehicle ran over his legs.
Another sergeant dived under a fire truck, and later described the debris
hitting the truck as sounding like someone dropping Volkswagens from
50 stories. As he lay there, he thought he heard gunshots, but dismissed
the idea. But he was right. Other cops were shooting out windows of buildings
so they could dive to safety inside.
Those are what passed for success stories down here.
IN THE weeks that follow the attacks, I will be handed a bottle of water by
Matthew Modine, drink beer with the New York Rangers, and be the recipient
of best wishes from Jason Alexander and Kevin Spacey.
For one night, Midtown becomes "celebrity Ground Zero." A telethon is
being held to benefit victims and their families. After Billy Joel's rendition
of "New York State of Mind," I am deputized to drive him down to greet
the workers at Ground Zero.
Upon rounding a corner and taking in the panorama of the destruction,
Joel gets the "cannot speaks." The workers all know this feeling, and
they happily ignore the fact that the star is openly weeping as he signs
their hard hats.
The city will eventually forget us. After all, we are just doing our jobs.
We'll be the enemy again soon enough. Which is fine, that's the nature
of a contentious and complicated relationship.
But we, the cops, we had better remember - not what we've seen, but
what we've done. It's the way you remember the things you've done
that make you who you are.
Cheers,
TD
It comes down to reality
And it's fine with me 'cause I've let it slide
Don't care if it's Chinatown or Riverside
I don't have any reasons, I've left them all behind
I'm in a New York state of mind
from Billy Joel's "New York State Of Mind"
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LizzieZ
chronicling those days. Good thing I can type this, because I am speechless.
Thank you so much for posting.
Liz
Nanc
disappering slowly but surely. I don't think we should dwell on 9/11 but I
wish people would keep waving their flags and remembering how blessed we are
to live in the USA.
Nanc
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