My hope is to be alive for the 50th Anniversary of September 11, 2001, but if not, below is some of what I want people to remember.  Maybe it currently serves a purpose too.

Driving down to the search and rescue, I had never seen the streets of New York City so deserted.  We never called it Ground Zero nor 9/11, but called it The Pile and September 11. It was easy to find going down FDR Drive.  All you had to do was follow the smoke.

I parked my car in front of Mike Bloomberg's campaign headquarters, where the NYPD said the military was, and was immediately loaded up in the back of a deuce and a half, where we were dropped off in front of The Pile.  My brigade S1, Col. Mike Finn, who later died of a rapid cancer, was in the same truck.

Many of us could not tell where The Pile was because the smoke was so thick.  For days we dug.  On Thursday, September 13, the area I was standing on, which had been the North Tower, was so hot that the soles of my army boots began to melt.  I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like in the Towers.

The things we saw and found, much of that is censored and understandably so.  Maybe someday more of it will be released, and only as appropriate.  Some never should be. I still can’t decide what to do about the people who fell out of the buildings. One half says do not show it, and the other half says it should be shown every day to remind us of the demonic ideology we are against and have still not fully understood in 2026.

That Friday, September 14, it rained, and it seemed the World Trade Center was crying.  The guy I spent most of the day digging with, a Civil Affairs NCO who was also with the National Park Service,........

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