13 September 2003

OK, it's the thirteenth and it is time to get over it for this year, let the memories recede and bury them till it is time to rip the scab off again next year. But I found myself in a funk last night, frozen in a capsule of travel time and the fumes of recall are still swirling here in the gray Arlington morning. I felt like I was stuck in time, and I am having a hard time kicking the unpleasant feeling. I had scooted out of Chicago not all that early yesterday, and there was no real reason to feel so tired, though we had stayed up pretty late. Maybe it was standing at parade rest in formation with these old bones and reluctant joints. I hadn't expected that. I thought I would be on a metal folding chair and my butt would hurt. But it worked out OK.

Coming back, the airliner I was on didn't do anything at all unusual, which is a good thing. I was back in the office at 2:30pm, right on schedule, gone exactly 26 hours. I did not turn on the overhead light in the office and sat in the glow of the computer monitor and looked at the steady rain that was coming down outside. Hurricane Isabel is coming, force four, and they say we will be getting a lot of rain. It had seemed a lot longer than a day away from the office. The drops crawled down the window.

United Flight 610 coming back was an Airbus 310. Nice airplane, pretty new and it was empty, at least in the Premier section. I took the port window to lean my head against and dozed briefly through the long taxi to the active runway. When I awoke I was dreaming of blue water and looked down to see that we were over the southern end of Lake Michigan. It looked for all the world like the ocean, vast and limitless. There was a fine haze, but I could see the occasional white cap down below. We came ashore not far from Grand Haven, in Michigan, and Air Traffic Control routed us parallel to Intestate 94 across the state. I was a legal resident for over 52 years and with retirment have suddenly become a Virginian.

I saw US 27 and US 23 go by and we went out over the water at Toledo. Looking up the Lake Erie coast I could see the cooling towers of the nuclear plant at Monroe, where Custer was born, and the opening to the Detroit River that separates us from Canada. The river flows from the Northeast, draining the Upper Lakes, and Canada is to the south of the Motor City, an odd quirk of geography. I looked down as the Erie Islands scrolled by. There had been a Union prisoner of War camp there and hundreds of Southerners perished in the northern cold coming off the lake. There was not much concern for that mass casualty, since there was a lot of that sort of stuff going around those years. Life during wartime. There is only a stone there now to mark the event, the camp having disintegrated long ago.

I followed the trace of the Ohio Turnpike as it plunged east and we left the lake somewhere around Rutherford B. Haye's home, a national monument to a forgotten President, lost in the little green squares of farmalnd. We bored southeast across the great green checkerboard until we hit the weather front near Pennsylvania. We were not far from Shanksville, where Flight 93 went in. It would have been right around the time I lost contact with the ground that the passengers rioted, collectively saying they were not going to the Capitol or the White House.

I couldn't see the ground and I leaned back and thought about the dedication in Naperville. The weather had been wonderful for the flight outbound to Chicago. It was sunny and bright for the drive west to a wonderful Midwestern town thirty miles or so west of the Windy City. We did our best to do the trip in an upbeat mood. I was with an old pal with lots of ancient memories to share. We upgraded the rental car to a Sebring convertible and we kept the top down the whole time. We steeled ourselves to keep this light, in the mode of an old fashioned road trip, when we used to measure the distances in the number of beers it took to drive to the destination.

"How far is Naperville?" we would have asked.

"Two beers, maybe three, if the traffic is bad."

But that world is as far gone as the dinosaurs. Naperville was honoring it's only fallen son, Dan, but by the determination of his parents they were honoring all those who died. We were determined not to think to hard about it, and we had a beer before we changed into our white uniforms at the Hilton to drive to the ceremony downtown. It is a model little town, neat little bungalows, just the right distance from Chicago to have retained a unique identity as a small town on the plain. We were in a place out of time. The Burger King is an origianl oblong box with two red rhomboid neon shapes on the roof, a quotation from the Golden Arches. I have not spent enough time in the heartland of late.

The people were homoginous and neat. At 4:30 in the afternoon people were jogging and kids were walking around and the porches were shaded and the air crisp with a hint of fall. I could feel that jack o'lanterns were not far away.

I could not escape a strange feeling of dread, though. Maybe it is survivor's guilt. I wasn't there two years ago, and I feel awful sometimes that I was not.

We were waiting for the ceremony to begin. Security had sealed the parking garage that the town council was so proud of having built. Naperville is a place of civic pride. I was introduced to a big bull of a guy in Fire Department Blues. He had a crew cut and a bull-like neck and blue eyes that had a disconcerting distance to them. His name was Mike and he was from the famous Fairfax County emergency response team. His name was the same as my grandfather, and like him he is as Irish as the day is long. He was from New York originally and his father and uncles were all either FDNY or NYPD. He had been invited to the dedication of the Naperville 9-11 Memorial for the same reason we had. We all had a special connection to Dan.

Mike was one of the special ones to Dan's folks. He is a disaster and structural rescue specialist. He and his team have been deployed to the Philippines and Kazakstan and Armenia and Turkey and other places suffering from Acts of God. They have a special deal with the State Department. The velcro patches on their coveralls come right off so they can change them to reflect who is paying for the deployment. Sometimes it is the taxpayers of Fairfax and sometimes it is Uncle Sam. Mike was wearing the Fairfax patch the day he met Dan.

There was a nice buffet table and we were standing around waiting for the ceremony to start and we were talking shop. Mostly his shop. I found it galvaniszinfg and I asked about the Day. Mike said it was pretty frantic, and the whole thing blurred. Fairfax joined the call around noon, and they went into the fire when the wreckage was still shifting around. He had been pretty impressed by the structural strength of the Pentagon. It was built the old-fashioned way, he said, couldn't built 'em like that today, too expensive. Even with 65 load-bearing pillars knocked out most of the concrete stayed exactly where it had been poured.

It was pretty bad when they arrived and deployed from the trucks. They plunged right in and part of his team was overcome by smoke in their urgency to get in and look for those who might still be alive in the inferno. He had to pull back at least once to get help for his guys, several of whom had to have medical treatment. Mike took command of the special resource detail, setting up shop in a General's office, sweeping the debris of the General's distinguished career from the desk-top with a sleeve and spreading the blueprints out where they could place the marks of where the bodies were going to found. There were Bureau guys there, announcing the place was a crime scene even while the flames rose upward.

Mike said that he got frustrated sometimes would get confused sometimes, coming out and trying to put the marks where they were supposed to go, but the fire and smoke and fatigue he would get confused and make the marks wrong and have to start over. They worked with urgency through the afternoon and the evening, balancing speed with the increasing realization that the fire meant there were not going to be pockets of survivors. Around midnight they got to the third floor where the Navy Command Center had been. He found Dan and Vince and the others clustered around Dan's desk, which was charred but still upright.

Dan had called his key players together to talk about strategies in dealing the news that New York seemed to be under attack, that airplanes were hitting buildings, and that they had to realize that America was probably at war. They were talking as the airliner pushed forward over Columbia Pike and headed down hill over the Navy Exchange gas station and hit near the helipad at four hundred miles an hours, filled with enough jet fuel to get clear to California. Then the fuel and the airplane and the passengers plowed through the E-Ring, and the D-Ring and the C-ring and parts flew on and scattered in the alley of the B-ring. Mike remembered finding "Otis" first. That is what he called Vince because that was his given name. It was also our way of making a nick-name out of it, referring to Otis Day and the Knights from Animal House. Vince was Dan's Deputy, and he had been a football player at San Diego State. He was a big man. It was hard to get him out, he was so big. Mike said he was not burned hardly at all and they could read his nametag.

Mike had seen this sort of situation before, and he said the deaths probably came quickly because the fire had just sucked all the oxygen out of the room. It was a blessing that they had gone quickly, and a greater blessing that the structural wall saved the ones who lived. The wall separated the kids who pounded and screamed trying to get to Dan and the rest but the door was wedged tight and glowing with heat and finally they had to go and leave Dan and Vince and the others behind or die themselves. It was the fickle nature of the flames that determined what happened to the remains. Dan was also recognizable and Mike got his wallet and some other things out of the polyester uniform that Dan wore. Stupid thing to wear, in a fire, and it is prohibited on the ship where there is not place to run from the flames. In the Pentagon, though, we want to look crisp and well-pressed and the artificial fabric holds a military crease.

Until it melts. Dan wasn't burned that badly, Mike said. At least he was recognizable. He got the name from the wallet in Dan's back pocket, and he dropped it and one of his dog-tags in a plastic bag for processing and ultimately a return to Dan's folks in Naperville. Mike was impressed that everything, even the change in Dan's pocket made it through the thirteen separate hands that carried the evidence along the chain after he collected it. I gathered it isn't always that way at disaster sites.

I was trapped in a strange fugue state in the conversation. I was eating a meatball and looking at the formal blues of the Fairfax Fire Department with several personal decorations. I was in summer whites, festooned with badges and ribbons. But I knew who the hero was. Mike matter-of-factly said the other kids were unrecognizable. They got them out, though, while traipsing through the wreckage of a room that held some of the Nation's most sensitive secrets. The FBI said "We're in charge, it's a crime scene!" and DoD said "it's classified!" and the other Feds- EPA, HHS, et al, said "Yeah, but we're in charge. We have the jurisdiction here."

Mike and his guys just went on working. They knew who was in charge. It was the ones who were actually in the building. That was them. The Disaster Mortuary Assistance Team from the Office of Emergency Response showed up during the afternoon. Mike said they were actually pretty useful, not bad guys at all. You have to keep order and continuity in these situtions, make sure the evidence goes with the right body or things really get confused in mass casualties. The DMORT provided Mike fifty special identification cards to insert into the large bags he and his team were filling inside the ruin. Mike came back to him about a half hour later and said he needed more cards and the Federal guy said "No, you are just supposed to put one card in each bag."

Mike looked at him with his blue eyes a little bleary and said that was the way they normally did it in Fairfax and he need eight more cards right away.

It is disconcerting to meet real heroes, people who live so far out on the edge that the fantastic seems normal to them. Hell of a guy, Mike is. I talked to his wife later at the post reception at Sand's parent's house. She is pretty and nice and their daughter works at one of the three-letter agencies I know here in town. She loves Mike a lot but she thinks he is a little crazy sometimes. There had been a huge earthquake in Armenia, and Fairfax deployed to help. He and the crew were working on a pile in that used to be a five-story building. There were maybe two alive in what had been the basement and the pile was unstable and the aftershocks kept coming. The Fairfax guys put mattresses outside and when they felt one coming they would throw themselves out windows to get clear. But they were getting close to the man who was trapped when the ground began to tremor and he begged them not to leave him.

I asked what Mike did, knowing that I didn't have to.

"Oh, they stayed" she said camly. "They didn't want the man to die alone."

She said she worries sometimes, but that is life with Mike.

Copyright 2003 Vioc Socotra.