It was a beautiful cloudless crystal blue day with a gentle wind blowing.
At the time, our office was in WTC#6.
I got back to the office after my run and was coming out of the shower when the building shook and the lights flickered.
I quickly got dressed and went to my office to get phones and radios to help coordinate our evacuation/relocation.
I immediately left my building and moved onto the plaza toward the New York City Mayor’s emergency command post that was forming up on the street below WTC#1 to serve as the USSS police and fire liaison.
I am a licensed and practicing paramedic with many years of incident command experience.
As I was moving closer to the command post, something caught my attention and I suddenly stopped, narrowly missing being crushed by a person who had jumped from one of the fire floors high above.
It etched an enduring impression in my memory…the sight of fellow human beings raining out of the sky as they had courageously made a final very intimate decision driven by searing fire.
They, like us, all came to work that Tuesday morning following our normal routines, instantly immersed in this horrible conflagration without any warning or sense of direction or outcome.
Debris launched at us as if it was shot out of a cannon.
Up until the second plane had hit, we were still trying to confirm that the explosion high up on WTC#1 was caused by a plane as the early reporting was very chaotic…but, now with the second hit, we knew that it was a plane, and we were under attack.
There were now two major incident scenes that instantly overwhelmed on-scene resources that inadvertently influenced the separation of the police and fire commands.
I had a team of agents with me and moved to a new location east of the WTC complex, where the NYPD command post was being re-established and resources assembled.
Instantly, everything went black, and the air was so hot and thick that I had to put my face into the armpit of my jacket to breathe.
Small fires had started on the street from the plane’s fuel that began to set cars and trucks on fire.
People started emerging from the cloud covered with grey soot, all wearing a death mask that was void of any expression.
I accounted for and re-assembled my team of agents and started to move toward the WTC plaza to assist with finding and evacuating the injured when we heard the unnatural sound of metal bending.
We had no idea at this point that WTC#2 had totally collapsed…we couldn’t see anything but the top of the radio tower on WTC#1 through all the smoke.
As the dust slowly settled, a wall of fire surrounded the WTC complex as more jet fuel ignited everything in sight that could burn.
From my limited fire training, I figured out how to get water pumping through the hoses and we soon were tamping down the flames so people could get out.
I lost about three hours that day, where I don’t recall what happened or what I was doing. We came across a firefighter, a building maintenance technician and a civilian, who were all severely injured.
It was the first time that day that I put my hands on an injured person.
An off-duty Port Authority police officer became my driver and a couple of my agents helped me attend to the injured.
I remember that we drove south toward Battery Park and the wind was blowing dust and debris through our windowless ambulance as we were working on our patients.
Our police officer driver had heard that Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan was a staging area for ferries transporting the injured to the New Jersey side of the river.
Later, I got involved in several other rescues, but it soon became apparent sometime late that afternoon that we were not finding any more people alive.
I eventually left the WTC complex late in the evening after our 49-story office building (WTC#7) had collapsed from the fire that ate away at its base when WTC#1 fell into its lower floors.
The look on the faces of my wife, daughter and son told me that they had suffered severe emotional pain throughout the day wondering if I had survived, as they had already learned about the loss of other neighbors around us.
I sat down to watch the TV replay of what happened, realizing for the first time that day that the two towers had totally collapsed.
It was a sobering recognition that my team and I were so close that we could not see what had unfolded around us, but miraculously not close enough to get swallowed up by death that stole almost 3,000 innocent and vulnerable lives that day.
As the days advanced, I became the USSS Ground Zero supervisor and liaison.
On Friday, September 14th, I was asked to brief and share with President George W. Bush what it was like to be on the street that day.
I left Ground Zero and New York City on December 7th, 2001, but not before witnessing that day a heavy construction crew pull an I-beam out of the ground that was still steaming hot on the end as they wet it down with water.
I had been transferred back to Washington, DC, re-assigned to take over White House complex security operations for the USSS.
S had witnessed that day unfold from a ridgeline just west of New York City on the edge of the town where we lived.
When I came home on the night of 9/11, S had given me a huge tear-filled bear hug.
S told me that he needed to go down to the WTC complex to understand what happened.
He had been there many times in the past for different memory filled events. I initially resisted, as did his mother, who promptly said “no way…bad idea”.
Something told me that he needed to do this, so I took him down to Ground Zero and dressed him up in a police jacket, hard hat and respirator to hide his identity.
We had an agreement that if I detected any signs that he wasn’t handling the trip, he was out of there.
I escorted S for three hours around the immense debris field, explaining where buildings once stood and what had happened that day to the best of my recollection.
When we finished, he had a look of determination in his eyes and said that this trip to Ground Zero helped him understand.
S graduated from an Annapolis area high school in 2005 and began diving year-round as a salvage diver in and around the Chesapeake Bay.
One day he came home and announced that he had enlisted in the Navy and then added that he had volunteered for SEAL training.
I thought my wife was going to take my head off, as she was holding me responsible for this surprise announcement.
I assured her that I wasn’t prompting him but did assert that he needed to cut his own path in life, that this was his decision.
I made sure that S knew what he signed up for and what he was getting into, introducing him to several recent combat hardened frogmen.
He replied, “I am going to be part of the solution…what happened to us on 9/11 can’t ever happen to us again.”
As S entered the Navy, I retired from the USSS after 22 years and soon found myself being recruited back into the Department of Defense to work on the counter-IED (improvised explosive device) threat that was taking down and maiming so many of our warriors deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The IED was the main weapons system employed by extremist terror elements looking to paralyze our freedom of movement on the battlefield and to erode national support at home through graphic visual recordings of explosive attacks on our forces.
Ironically, I started with the SEAL Teams 30 years prior...the same age as S.
As a senior leader for DoD’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) and Director of the Counter IED Operations-Intelligence Integration Center (COIC), I traveled many times into the war theaters supporting both conventional and special operations forces.
She said that while I was overseas, she had dinner one night with her girlfriends who were all complaining that the school bus was never on time to pick up their kids, about their husbands coming home from work late and not being able to get the week at the beach that they wanted.
One of my wife’s girlfriends turned toward her and asked about what was going on in our home.
The next spring, he entered Basic Underwater Demolition-SEAL (BUD/S) training in San Diego, receiving his SEAL Trident in October 2008 as part of Class #268.
S had numerous combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as an 18-D special operations medic and SEAL sniper.
He eventually served as the lead petty officer (LPO) for Special Operations Urban Combat (SOUC) training.
The training realistically mirrored the environment that the deploying platoons would encounter.
As the LPO, S continued to be exposed to blast overpressure and physical forces from weapons firing, use of explosives, tactical simulations and helicopter operations.
In the spring of 2015, S began seeking help for severe insomnia that further evolved into increased anxiety, memory loss, headaches, loss of coordination, vision problems and other uncharacteristic conditions that were progressively eroding his physical and mental health.
A year later, S was honorably discharged from the Navy after being diagnosed with PTSD and related conditions.
S informed us that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted his brain donated for traumatic brain injury/Breacher’s Syndrome research.
At the time of his death, he was dressed in his SEAL Team-7 t-shirt, wore red-white-blue board shorts and had illuminated a shadow box beside him with all his medals, insignias and other symbolic memorabilia.
Following a postmortem examination of S’s brain, we learned that he suffered from an undiagnosed severe level of microscopic brain injury uniquely related to military blast exposure.
Military blast exposure that was suffered in both training for combat and combat operations.
The twentieth anniversary of September 11th, 2001, will be an emotional rekindling of memories for the [......] family in many ways, as it will be for others like us who have witnessed and supported their loved ones be part of the solution.
That debate and weight of consciousness will lay on the political leadership that comprised multiple Administration’s and Congresses over the past 20 years of war and global conflict.
As for my son and his teammates, they achieved personal accomplishments and experienced high adventure that goes beyond common definition or comprehension.
Unless you were there alongside them and walked in their boots, you will not understand.
Conventional and special operations warriors, men and women from all parts of our society, made up an all-volunteer force that swore an oath to protect and serve us…every day.
Their selfless demonstration of personal strength and resiliency needs to be a guide-on for our society as we move forward to confront other inevitable challenges and threats.
We as a nation need to have the same strength, resiliency and commitment to ensure our national security.
Many of them return from their service burdened by both the visible and invisible wounds of war.
A recent Brown University study reported that our nation lost 7,057 warriors post 9/11 to the Global War on Terror (GWOT).
As an often-neglected footnote, the same study highlighted that over 30,000 warriors and veterans were lost to GWOT related suicide since that beautiful Tuesday morning of September 11th, 2001.
They have been our “domestic warriors” protecting our society every day with the same selfless commitment and compassion.
We must NEVER FORGET the many sacrifices founded on love that these valiant warriors, military or civilian, made for their teammates, families and nation so that we may continue to live free, healthy and secure.
S loved being a SEAL and he loved the SEAL Teams…we miss his physical presence every day.
We are comforted knowing that he and his fallen teammates are still out there in a different form protecting us every day.
Respectfully,