A note before this post. I went back and forth about whether to post it at all.
Today is September 12th, 2026. I was in Brooklyn on this day in 2001 — then a medical student, close enough to see the towers from my bedroom window until they disappeared the day before — and I spent the whole of the next day down there. Somewhere in thinking about that yesterday, I remembered that I had written what happened that day.
Not for publication. I was not a writer then and had no notion of becoming whatever I suppose I am now. I went to medical school in the Caribbean, at a time when the cost of a phone call was prohibitive, which meant email was the only way I spoke to anyone I loved, so I wrote a great many of them and received a great many back. If there is a place where my writing career started, it was probably then.
What follows is what I sent that week. The people I sent it to — close family, a few friends — have told me over twenty-five years that they never forgot it. They still bring it up. That is the only reason I am posting it.
It is uncut and unedited. The punctuation is bad, the sentences run on, I swear a little, and it ends without deciding anything. I corrected a handful of typos so you don't trip over them, and I added the dates each part was written. Nothing else has been touched — the parts I would want to fix now are the parts that make it true.
One man’s vantage point, from before I understood what I was looking at. Here it is, if you want it.
I wrote this first part on Tuesday, September 12, 2001 in the evening, in Park Slope Brooklyn, where I lived at the time.
September 11, 2001
I’m fine, everything is very very crazy around here, normally I can see the towers from my bedroom window but now I can’t anymore... I spent the first couple of hours getting ahold of all I knew in lower Manhattan, my first cousin works in the building right next to the Towers and I just got word that he is fine, hadn’t gone in to work.. My parents are fine, my father at his hospital in the Bronx, mother in her apartment on 33rd St., she hadn’t gone out this a.m....Here in Brooklyn, all Attendings, Residents and Students are on standby at all the area hospitals (students are doing so volitionally, I live across the street so I have been checking in periodically, but our hospital is very very quiet, almost nobody is allowed in unless you have an I.D, they are only taking the sick, and the very sick at that, it is only now that some of the victims from Manhattan are starting to be transported out to Brooklyn, my hospital expects their first patients to arrive tonight, but we have 150 residents to handle that and at least as many Attendings..(none ever came by the way, one of the unquestionably sad facts of the disaster, the fact that after the first rush of victims in the morning, there were very very few, if any others to get out and require medical help) All surgeons are supposed to be at the hospital in a disaster and they are patiently waiting, I just sat in the cafeteria with a couple of ‘em, everyone is really, really sad, many people there had at least one person they knew in those towers.. We are about 4 miles from the towers but all the bridges are closed for the time being..... The blood donor lines here are 5 hours long at my hospital, there is nothing I can do to help as you need to be a certified blood taker, which I was very surprised to learn that no resident or even Attending physician knows how or is allowed to do..(we draw blood and start IV’s all the time, but draining a pint into a bag takes some special sort of skill requiring a blood donor technician..)... So, basically, the situation here is that many, many more people want to do something than have something to do at the moment.. Very strange feel to everything... That’s all the news I got except to say that I am fine, don’t worry about me, I’m just sitting here trying to figure out how to help, like almost everyone else who is not downtown...
P.S Although no one has yet made the suggestion on radio or television, I am sort of thinking that it might be smart to not use the phone around here unless absolutely necessary, just in the hopes that one less unimportant call might help one more important call go through.. just a hunch, so I am trying to stay off the phone...
Thursday, September 13, 2001 — written about Wednesday the 12th, the day I went down.
So, that day I spent like almost everyone else, shuttling back and forth to the hospital, hoping and waiting to be of help as it was too maddening to sit and watch all those horrible images on the television over and over again.. but I did so anyway, all of us at the hospital were doing so.. rumors flew that patients were to arrive but none did.. you couldn’t get into the city for quite a while as all inbounds were closed.. they opened the subways later in the day and I found out later some of my fellow students went in, and were on the scene for a couple of the much publicized rescues (i.e the amputation rescue), a few stitched up some cuts, but many were in the smoke and rubble.. difficult night, woke and went to work at the hospital, was busy in the morning doing Neurology consultations and then I ran into a trauma surgeon I worked with last year and he told me and a couple of other students I was with to get ready as he needed us to go in with him... I changed into my scrubs, got some equipment, and off we went, hurrying out of the hospital, jumped on the subway, and headed in.. Got out on the East side in Chinatown, and jogged west with the others.. all the barricades were passable for us, and we rushed down there.. Approaching the disaster area was mind-blowing and then it wasn’t in a way.. It was sort of like any other time when I get out of the subway into Manhattan and you hit the street, you are always left with the feeling you are somewhere new and have never been before, even though I have lived in and around here all my life... same for yesterday, it was simply like approaching an area of the city that I had never ever seen before (and hope to never again).. Most of the previous landmarks in that immediate area were barely recognizable so you didn’t really compare it to what you knew before, you just were overwhelmed with the amount of destruction around you.. the approach was drastic, starting about 5 blocks away, the streets all turned white with rubble and the ground was full of papers and ash, one cemetery of a church down there had ash and papers piled to the tops of tombstones...many, many burned out, black, charred, and crushed cars, most police cars or fire engines... the area was covered in smoke with heavy rubble dust in the air, all enveloped in a mild burnt rubber smell, so at this point we all put on our surgical masks..
as we approached the WTC plaza (that is the 4-5 block square area which held the towers, the square in between, and the surrounding buildings to the east which abutted the approaches to the towers on the plaza itself), at first all we could see was dark grey smoke and haze in the middle rising far above the plaza.. these first buildings which are directly on that plaza to the east were all charred and burnt out, hollow, no windows, and very, very black..... at times you could barely see the outlines of the sides of the tower bases behind them, but what you did see were mountains of rubble in and around where they used to be... scaffolding rods, concrete chunks, girders, beams all jutting out in huge piles everywhere, huge portions of building could be seen laying horizontally, surrounded by mazes of metal and steel debris….many of the other buildings within the whole 5 square block area had every single window blown out, while others had random windows blown out up to the thirtieth and even higher floors.. one building diagonally across from the plaza was completely gone, all you could see was rising girders with huge piles of rubble 40-50 feet high in the air.. there were tons of firemen all over in there with saws and blowtorches..
We got to the medical triage area and hooked up with nurses and orthopedic surgeons from NYU and St. Vincents.. No medical care was being given to anyone at the time, although many tables and IV bags were set up.. All medical personnel at triage were simply watching the excavation activities and searches, simply being ready.... the night before was busier, mostly with students giving many eye washes to the firemen and cops , but the eye washes were not as great a problem yesterday as a lot of the smoke and dust had lessened... I was there for 20 minutes, just taking in the whole area, totally blown away.. we then got an order to move the triage area away from “ground zero” as more space was needed for equipment and men, so I helped move many of the tables and supplies... The really demoralizing fact of the day was that, even with the hundreds at work and on the scene, there had been no reports of ANYONE having been brought out alive since 7:00 that morning...
After moving that East Triage area, me and a couple of guys circled around to the southern approach of the plaza, to where another triage area was, the whole rubble and surrounding streets on these East and South sides were filled with hundreds of men from every conceivable agency and of type of uniform.. Nat’l guard, police, SWAT, Green Berets, Search and Rescue, paramedics from every conceivable private and public ambulance, fire department guys from every town within 50 miles, court officers, army soldiers, etc,etc.. many “bucket brigade” lines had formed and were forming which began on the periphery and snaked into and up and around the mountains of rubble into the interior, near the bases of the towers from this South approach where I spent most of my day.. We were given heavy gloves and we jumped into these brigade lines and began simply handing all objects and material that were being passed back from the forward areas.. melted computers, air conditioners, concrete blocks, 20 foot-long, twisted, bent scaffolding rods, buckets of rubble, huge steel girders and beams, with ten of us under it stumbling down the hills to take to the outer side street entrances where the bulldozers were working in removing all that we brought out by hand.. the crazy thing was that a lot of times, they would yell out “Hot piece” and we would be handing things along, that were still really hot from the fire....at other times they would yell to put one of the pieces in a special pile on the outer street, not far from a dump truck which had spray painted on the side “airplane parts”, as something about the piece must have suggested an airplane (not that I could see)..
anyway, at that rate of human removal, it would take literally months to remove it all.. we were standing on all this destruction, all of it plastered with paper, paper and more paper.. saw tons of resumes ( we sort of joked that we hoped they hadn’t got the friggin job), tax returns, cancelled checks, etc, etc,..the snail paced rate of work was necessary based on the assumption that there were people underneath us, and possibly alive so no cranes or bulldozers were being used in the rubble interior and only on the periphery.. there was a lot I did not understand though, as all these brigade lines were long and snaked over many piles and hills of rubble which weren’t being dug out or searched through and I did not know why all attention was being directed to the center of all the destruction with no efforts at the periphery.. (perhaps they had already sniffed or “sensed” the periphery, I dunno, I suppose they wanted to get to the lobby or something but I just felt that there was a high possibility that we were standing atop possibly many survivors who had been on the plaza when it went down.. (I quite possibly may have been right as today’s big news of firemen walking out were all in an SUV, which was definitely on the periphery of the plaza, I just don’t know what side they came out from).. anyway, work continued for several hours, handing all the destruction backwards while handing empty buckets forwards.. this was interrupted periodically with two types of shouts, which rippled backwards from deep in the interior.. we just heard them and yelled them backwards.. they were either for “Dogs!” (the firemen in those forward areas felt they were on to someone, so they called for dogs, the shouts went down the line to the outside and the handlers would run up, most often carrying the dogs in their arms as the dogs couldn’t navigate the rubble with their little feet... if the call wasn’t for dogs then it was for “Body Bags!” which were handed up the line only to be followed a short while later with men coming out and over the tops of the hills carrying a stretcher with a body... then there were a lot of saws being handed back, either broken or needing a blade replacement, and at other times we were just handing small stacks of saw blades forward.... the night before, one of the students who had been there wrote the following today:
“there were were often calls for “Quiet” which hundreds of workers would echo down the line until it became absolutely silent - they were listening for any sounds coming from underneath the rubble. At one point one of the canine units had signaled a specific area and fiber-optic cameras showed a leg underneath two feet of rubble - we dug feverishly (with an audience) only to realize the grimmest of our fears - it was just a leg, mangled and shattered. It was placed in a bucket and passed on.”
So, work continued until late afternoon, at one point, our first injured rescuer came back from a forward area.. A stretcher was called for and moments later a huge fireman was being handed back, hand by hand, on the stretcher.. He was conscious, but in a lot of pain, although I saw no obvious injury or bleeding... At the end of the line was a waiting ambulance with paramedics, which soon left...
Very soon after, suddenly, all hell broke loose really.. I didn’t hear what caused it but suddenly there were shouts from all directions of “GO GO GO GO GO” and I looked up to see hordes of firemen with axes and saws hurtling down from the top of the rubble hill I was working on the back side of .. They were all coming down towards me and me and my buddy simply turned and started running down, completely freaked, I thought there was an impending explosion or something so I ducked behind a huge metal sheet-wall sticking out of the rubble to shield myself, only to be almost flattened by firemen coming up over the top of it.. stupid friggin move on my part and very dangerous so I simply got up and ran down with them, flying over god knows what, almost falling, totally freaked..I didn’t stop until I reached the now oft mentioned Liberty Plaza building at the south east corner of Ground Zero (hate the term but don’t know what else to describe the main area)..This incident was mentioned in one of the New York Times Articles today, they reported that one of the remaining tower bases had collapsed causing this rush.. Me, I was there and I had no idea what had caused it as all I saw and felt was the rush…So, I then stood in front of the Liberty building with my buddy, sucking wind for a couple of minutes, when all of a sudden, another roar of “GO GO GO GO GO “ comes up and I look down the street and see hundreds of firemen and cops fleeing out of the side street and along and up the street in front of us, towards and past us, but not for long as I was immediately right on the side of the pack with them.. jumped down the flight of stairs in front of the Liberty building, turned the corner around some concrete wall, lost my stethoscope, kept running, turned to see what we were running from, had no idea, but now I was totally a mess, cause I thought some huge cloud of rubble or fireball was gonna engulf me as I was running (I had been definitely watching too much TV over the past 24 hours ‘cause all those images of people outrunning rubble were embedded in my brain).. Finally stopped as I saw a lot of people had slowed down and all were looking up backward at the Liberty building which now had a slight visible twist to the side of it.. you could see it was not aligned right.. friggin 80 story building too and we were standing right under it when this last rush started.. To tell you the truth, at this point I really had had enough. I thought that we were now clearly violating the cardinal and first rule of trauma rescue, which was to survey the scene, and if determined not to be safe, then you DON’T GO IN. So, I kept walking, reached a new triage area at Pace University, which actually turned out to be the “old “ Liberty building one which had been moved an hour earlier these 6 blocks north to Pace, just by the entrance to the Brooklyn bridge..it had been moved due to someone deciding that the Liberty building was unsafe.. (I guess they had suspected it for at least an hour, but it took some guy seeing the twist in the building to start that rush to get us out of there)... totally nuts.. I really had gone in there under the assumption that the reports on television of a team of structural engineers having been sent out that morning to determine the stability of the adjoining buildings had been completed and satisfactory results been obtained... guess not.
So, at this point, call me what you want, but I no longer wanted any part.. I had no hard hat, no firecoat, just scrubs, sneaks, and a stethoscope (which this genius had gone back to get ).. I thought it was too dangerous, I was too tired, and felt that adding a tragedy to a tragedy was not really the right thing to do here, so we left.. I truly thought, perhaps selfishly, that this is work for the firemen, although the stuff we were doing was truly helpful and necessary and was what every single person, including all the firemen down there, was doing. It was all about digging and searching by hand and saw and blowtorches.. if you weren’t doing that or on the lines, you were passing out food and water.. friggin NYU CardioThoracic surgeons (11 years of training mind you) were doing a great job of handing out water to us.... there really were a ton of resources down there, not only the hundreds of men but medical supplies for all types of injuries, tons of water, sandwiches, cigarettes, gatorade, there was a bombed out burger king right on the corner which had all its counters filled with food brought in, there was also tons of equipment too, hundreds of large green steel trunks of stuff from the National Guard, huge piles of saws and axes and sledgehammers, shovels, crowbars, saws, torches, fiber-optic cameras, and dog units … however, at this point all those brigades we had formed to go into the rubble had all disappeared with that collapse of whatever it was.. I left, I just didn’t feel good about going back.. I don’t know how to justify this but then again I do…or I don’t, I just don’t know... I must admit though, that those guys down there I think are truly risking themselves to do that rescue.. I don’t know how many of them realize the danger they can be in when one of those piles or adjoining buildings come down but they are all in the rescue profession and are simply going ahead and doing what they do I suppose.. I really really hope that nothing else happens during the rescue because I had the strongest feeling last night when I was leaving that every step I took home was a safer one (I have some sort of need to argue that it was a saner one too, but will just leave it for now…..
Friday, September 14, 2001.
Addendum- I saw one of the guys I went down there with today, he told me he had gone back last night (Thurs) and that it was still really crazy.. At first he said they weren’t allowed in the rubble that day, due to the danger, so were just stationed at triage on the periphery, but at some point they needed help so they went in... He told me that there were even more “rushes” or “stampedes” than the day before and that it was getting out of hand... The slightest crash or scare sent everyone running for cover... They were not finding anyone, but everyone was still crawling all over the rubble, carrying stuff out still. I hope that no one gets hurt in those rushes ‘cause the one I was in was very dangerous and very scary...
A coda, twenty-five years later.
Reading all of that back just now, I got to the end and kept sitting with it, and another memory came up so vividly that I am surprised it never made it into the emails at all. That is because it wasn’t one day. It was every day, everywhere I went, for months.
Everywhere in Manhattan and Brooklyn — every place I lived, walked, worked, biked and traveled through — every telephone pole, every post, every side of a building, every storefront, every window was plastered with printed-out signs. A photograph, usually of a young, healthy-looking person. A name underneath. And then, in big black letters, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON?
They did not thin out. That is the part I still think about. Week after week, month after month, they kept appearing fresh. After it rained, you would see new ones, newly printed, going up over the ruined ones. And you would see the people putting them up, walking around in something like a fugue state — destroyed, grieving, and ultimately helpless, and this was the only thing left that they could do.
Anyone standing far enough back to have gained any emotional distance could see that it was futile. In any rational sense, it was bizarre, inexplicable behavior. Nobody was going to call.
I recognize it now, though, because I had been doing the same thing. We stood on that pile for six hours passing buckets hand to hand, and nobody had come out alive since seven o’clock that morning, and we knew it, and we kept passing buckets. People will keep doing the only thing available to them long after it has stopped making any sense. I did it too.
All those people, and all those signs, and how long it went on. That is the part I will never forget.
If you appreciate my writing, support is welcome.
The Stone and Water Series
Twenty-five years separate those emails from the books below. Sitting in Brooklyn at two in the morning, typing badly to people I loved, I had no notion that writing would turn out to be the thing I did. But the impulse has not changed — something happened, somebody ought to write it down, and nobody else was going to.
What changed is the evidence behind it. That week took me a night to set down. The Stone and Water Series took the most concentrated effort I have ever put into anything, as it is the most carefully researched work I have done, or expect to do.
You can buy the series, in whole or in part, from my website — where every book is personally stamped with my hanko — or from Amazon.
