9/11: Never Forget

Thank you.

Thank God for Americans who remember. I know a marine who forgot what day it was this morning, and had to be reminded.

I would not want to have been that Marine. On that same note, I think we owe all of our service members a HUGE debt of gratitude. I remember, as a member of the Natonal Guard, how I was treated in the weeks and months after 9/11/01. I was in until March of '03 and how our military service members are treated today is vastly different than it was during the time when those images were fresh in everyone's mind. I think we should all try to keep that outlook "up front" in our heads.

I am a retired New York City Detective. I was assigned to Manhattan South Narcotics and had been for about two months, my team boss was Sgt. Vega and my Administrative Lieutenant, a great guy named Lt. Hennigan. I had been transferred from Bronx Narcotics where I had worked for about seven or eight years. I look at the clock right know and realize that I was asleep in 2001. I had been detailed to election duty that day and was going to work a day tour. The horror of September 11th 2001 started for me with a phone call from my ex- wife, she was calling to tell me to turn on the television because one of the towers of the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane.....terrified at first, I turned the T.V. on and saw....and thought what, probably most of you did. I reassured my ex-wife that everything was going to be ok. It looked like a small plane had hit the tower because of pilot error. Because I had the detail that day, I jumped into the shower and had my uniform at home which I threw on.
It's also important to tell you that I was a State Board member on the New York State Fraternal Order of Police, part of a team that represented approximately 30,000 members of the law enforcement community in New York State. This is important because we had a few cars with Fraternal Order Of Police markings on them complete with lights and sirens. At the time, one of the other board members who lived near me had one of the cars. I lived in Levittown, Long Island, for those of you not from New York, it would take over two and a half hours for me to get to the city during rush hour on a regular day. I called the board member who lived near me and had one of the cars (he was retired from a different department). I asked him if I could stop by, drop of my car, take the marked car and I mentioned that I had no idea when i would be back to get my car. Of course, due to the circumstances, he said no problem. As I hung up the phone with him, I saw the second plane impact on the World Trade Center.

It was at that point that I thought , I'm sure, what many of you thought...there was no small plane, this was no "pilot accident" and that thousands and thousands of lives were either lost already....or were soon to be lost, I do not mind telling you that as I write this I have a couple of tears. I lost it a little bit at that time...I know this because I got lost going to pick up the other car. A lapse of time which may be a reason I am still here today. I got to the house, switched cars, equipment, keys, etc. I started towards the city obviously using everything that car had to get me there as fast as possible. Thank God, I had picked up the car. It was pretty insane trying to get onto the roadways necessary to get me to the city. At first and for a while the traffic was impossible. People did not know where they wanted to go and were turning around over dividers...backing out of entrances.

As I got onto the major roads, it was amazing, no more traffic, there were patrol cars, first Nassau County, then the City cars blocking the entrances to the parkways and expressways. They were making sure that whoever got onto the road had a legitimate purpose. Once on it was amazing to look in the rear view mirrors....you would see cars lined up behind yours, some with lights and sirens, some with official parking placards showing on their dash boards or visors...and they would be flashing their bright's on and off.

To look out of the front of your car and in the direction of the city, it was terrifying. I had never in my life seen the amount of smoke pouring from the city, and it was not the "normal" smoke from a house or car fire...it was the smoke....the smoke of war, the smoke that comes only when and where someone has made the kind of a strike against a nation that history is changing in front of your eyes, it was the smoke of uncertainty, it was the smoke of death and it was a smoke that was telling each and every one of us to go faster....to get there , to do something..anything. I could also hear the yelling on the radio, it was absolutely horrifying.

The smoke was also confusing, because you would look into the smoke trying to see whatever was there, was it two buildings...was it one....was it less than that. I had been to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the details on the midnights after word. I never thought after looking at the size of the crater left after that bombing that anything...anything could ever take one of the buildings down, never mind the both of them. The closer you got to the city, the more anxious and scared you got. Looking at that scarred skyline I realized something...felt something; I never want to feel again, never again would the skyline of the city be the same, Never would I gaze upon the World Trade Center, an area so large it had it's own zip code. The other thought, much more crushing in it's enormity, was the fact that people were lost....not 20, 30 or 40....not hundreds but thousands.

I arrived soon after the second Tower collapsed and contacted my command. I remember a group of us went into a hardware store with a broken front trying to find anything useful. Anything that would help. maybe gloves or a mask. I left that building with three things.....the first, I have no idea why I thought it would have a purpose; a pipe wrench...I held onto it for hours only to toss it to the side, the other things were a mini-mag lite and it's holder. There was nothing...nothing we could use in there.

I went to the tip of Battery Park first, we were cutting gaps into the permanent fencing so boats could pull up and evacuate people to New Jersey. We could hear people calling 10-13's (officer needs assistance) or 85's (basically the same thing) on the radio's. We also heard that the Pentagon had been hit, we heard things that were not true as well, like the Sears Towers were hit or the capitol. As we were letting people onto the boats, every time a boat pulled up, tug boat, harbor pilot boat, Police Harbor units etc... a line would form and people would get on. Well a boat had just pulled up to the gap where I was, it was a huge tug boat. I noticed a guy on the line who just did not look right. Before the boat pulled up, I announced that anyone getting on the boat had to show whatever was in their bag or on their person if asked. I was just glancing into bags as the people got on. The guy that caught my attention looked more and more nervous as he got closer to me. He got up to me and then when I asked to look in his bag, he said no and that he just wanted to get on the boat. I asked him again show the bag and he tried to pull it away from me. To make a long story short; he was cuffed and in custody inside the bag was a loaded and cocked 9 mm with extra magazines covered by a couple hand towels.

A sergeant that was nearby was notified, a car was called for and I was transported with the "perp" to a chief. We were sent by the chief to a nearby precinct, I filled out the arrest report, the complaint report and the arrest was assigned to a restricted duty officer. I was transported back to the World Trade Center. I was relieved because the courts had been closed and would remain so indefinitely, I just wanted to get back and get into the search and rescue. I was NYC Emergency Medical Services as well as a volunteer firefighter trained in rescue before I became a cop.

When I got to the actual site, I could not believe what I saw. I was near the West Side Highway by Ladder 10 and Truck 10. The first thing I remember is a sound that to this day chills me to the bone and brings me right back to 9/11. It was the sound of the device the firefighters wear that starts to beep if there is no movement for awhile or if they are activated. They sound almost exactly like the alarm on a truck that is backing up. There were hundreds of them going off. We had no masks, gloves, nothing except my riot helmet. We were trying to find anyone...anyhow. I remember looking around at all the other buildings that were burning. The firefighters were trying to do the best they could. There is a Marriott Hotel on the west side highway that was not destroyed in the attack. They had hoses running all the way up the inside trying to spray the building next to it and get as much water on it as they could. I was with a group of firefighters two of them had devices that could see the heat signature inside of the buildings and could tell which were in really bad shape due to the heat. One of them mentioned that building 7 which contained the mayors emergency command bunker, was not doing well. To our horror that building collapsed close to 1730 hours. Whoever was there, worked through the night. We heard that the Chief of the Fire Department had lost his life. Some of what we heard was sadly, true; some was just rumor.

We were trying to go in a little at a time, we would form lines of emergency workers just taking off little scraps a bit at a time. There was nothing more that we could do, if we found a hole that we could crawl into and look for anyone, we could not make any real progress because we were working with our hands. But we dug, inch by inch. I had never in my life seen so much death and destruction. We had heard that hundreds of firefighters and cops lost their lives. Night turned into day and we kept going, there were volunteer doctors and nurses who had set up triage centers, one was at ladder 10 and truck 10. We would stop digging, exhausted and we would go into the triage center. They would give us fluids by I.V. , wash our eyes out, give us some oxygen, and we would go back in. Hoping that we would find anything. Every now and then someone would yell quiet.....they had thought they heard something and that whole site......with all of those rescue workers would get so quiet you could hear a pin drop; but it never panned out. There was fire burning underneath the pile for over a month, areas where you would not het burned, you had to watch because you could fall, or get cut upon razor sharp debris.

I remember going into the subway across from the World Trade Center....there was a train in the subway, thankfully, everyone had gotten out. One end of the tunel had beams that crashed through the top of the tunnel completely blocking one side; the other side went on a downward angle and the tunnel just filled with water in that direction.

What we really needed to help us search were the iron workers....and I still remember when they started to come in. They were unreal, and they worked just as hard as us. But they could cut through beams and thick pieces of metal. One of the things that also struck me was that there were only inches separating floors. entire floors separated by anywhere from 4 to ten inches, and there were no phones, no computers. The biggest office buildings in the world and everything was just dust. There is no need for me to keep going into the horrors which we all know so well.

I spent over 72 hours there, went home, took a shower and headed right back. Thousands of people who did not make it, people who will still have medical problems and die from 9/11 related illnesses and no one knows for sure just how many will have these effects shorten their lives. All 7 buildings that made up the World Trade Center Complex....gone. The most serious attack to ever occur in the continental United States. The only attack on the United States that comes close to 9/11/2001 is Pearl Harbor. I lost two very close friends from the New York City Police Department who served in the Emergency Services Unit.

I worked for one month at the site performing search and rescue and then peer and survivor support. I actually ended up transferring to a unit that helped men and women of any rank in the New York City Police Department get through the emotional trauma of 9/11 in addition to other critical incidents they may have gone through.

There is an amazing sign of hope that I think separates this country from others. The thousands and thousands of volunteer workers that responded, from police, fire, emergency medical services, Doctors, Nurses, peer support, steel workers,iron workers to people that were feeding us and trying to make sure we had basic needs. I remember a sight that brought hope back into my heart during the nightmare of the search and rescue; anytime I left the area there were huge crowds of people on the West Side Highway that would try to cheer the rescue workers up. When you were stopped in traffic, they would offer drinks or food to you. The country responded amazingly as well, after some time went by and there was more of an understanding of the materiel's needed, there would be miles of tractor trailers full of all manner of equipment to help us do the rescue work.

Thank you for taking the time to read this...and thank you for caring

Detective Michael J. Saxe Retired/Disabled NYPD

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