The First Responders

It is said that 9/11 may be the best-documented event in all of history, and there certainly have been enough books written about it. No doubt, every September 11th for years to come Barnes & Nobles will pull out a ‘9/11 table’ with books on the subject stacked in little neat piles. But on the anniversaries that have gone by so far, I couldn't help noticing that most of these books were written either by news journalists or firemen—virtually nothing from, for, or about the NYPD, (there is one picture book).

In fact, precious little has been written about what the police department did on 9/11, and that little has been largely critical. We were blamed for the break down in communication that occurred during the attack both by the media and the Fire Department.

Then the family of the victims wanted an explanation from our government as to why 9/11 happened. They wanted to know how our intelligence agencies like the FBI and the CIA had failed the American people. The victims’ families pressed for an investigation, and a ten-man panel was assembled to oversee the commission. Eighteen months later, in the summer of 2004, their final report was presented to the public.

The 567-page “9/11 Commission Report” (at the affordable price of ten dollars) sold faster than a new Tom Clancy novel, and, in less than a week, it was in its second printing. And, why not? It had all the earmarks of a best seller: suspense, intrigue, politics, mystery, and espionage. If you turn to chapter nine, you will find a two-page description of NYPD’s response to the attack. In fact, it was not a bad job of summarizing the actions of the NYPD response on September 11th, but there was something really missing: there was no direct testimony from the "first responders," the police officers who were on duty at the time of the first attack and who rushed to the scene to deal with the chaos as it began to unfold. And it wasn't only the report itself from which direct testimony was missing. The police had never even been asked to give their perspective on the story. It strikes me as amazing that nobody had ever talked to the cops themselves about their experience. A few of the guys did do interviews for the foreign press, but nobody in this country has ever asked these first responders, and I mean the guys that were actually inside the towers, “Hey, what happened? What did you see? What did you do? What was it like?” Not even the brass in the Department had been interested in talking to these guys.

I have written this book to make up for this gap in the public record concerning what happened on the morning of September 11, 2001. I wanted to know what the cops saw, how they felt, and what they did. I wanted to give these police officers a face and a name. I thought the best place to begin was to talk to the first responders. But I had to decide which officers I was going to speak to. Since I was a patrol officer myself, I thought it would be easiest to interview other patrol officers, but that was only until I learned that approximately 2,000 police personnel responded to a "Level-Four Mobilization" once the attacks were reported. So I decided to concentrate on the Emergency Service Unit (ESU). The Emergency Service Unit comprises our Rescue/SWAT teams. They had a smaller, initial response to the scene, they were better organized, and they kept an account of the whereabouts of their men. So, I tracked down as many ESU first responders as I could find. (Some of the officers are still on active duty but many of the men mentioned in this book have retired.) And over a cup of coffee, we talked for an hour or two, or sometimes three, and I heard their stories.