Face of terrorism Volunteering for Red Cross at ground zero, Maine journalist sees raw humanity

Ground zero did not make me cry. That’s an embarrassing admission – even to me – but last December when I went to see the wreckage of Sept. 11, the small streets of Lower Manhattan were as crowded as Times Square on a Saturday night. I felt choked, and my impulse was to flee.

The line for the viewing platform, which had opened the day before, was eight blocks long. A police officer told me the wait would be three hours. The air was cold and I was already suffering mild agoraphobia. So I left.

Later that morning, I stopped by a friend’s office in the neighborhood. He makes documentaries on the top floor of an eight-story building and was in his office when the planes blasted into the World Trade Center, which he used to be able to see from the roof of his building. On Sept. 11, he stood aghast, filming the entire event. He showed me the footage, which was gritty and smoky and terrifying all over again.

What was more shocking, however, were his own vocal reactions recorded on the tape. I can’t print here what he said, but his voice, in the midst of shaky screens of smoke, was deeply unsettling in a way ground zero, with masses of tourists and street vendors, had not been.

The utter shock in his voice, in fact, transformed me. I heard the uncensored humanity of his experience, and I realized that what had been missing for me at ground zero was the raw, individual horror – the pregnant woman who lost the father of her baby, the Mexican woman who hadn’t seen her husband in a year and now never will, the little kid who watched the attacks from his apartment in Battery Park and will never trust the sky again.

Only then was I able to accept an invitation from my friend to sneak into a skyscraper adjacent to the World Trade Center site and ride to the rooftop. Never mind the discouraging fact that he talked our way past security guards not once, but twice. Never mind that the floor we stopped on was covered with workmen, none of whom stopped us or questioned us.

But there, with the winter wind bracing across our faces, we stared 22 floors down into the abyss of ground zero.

Two days later, I became a volunteer at an American Red Cross disaster assistance center in Manhattan. Since my background is in journalism, the organizer for volunteers directed me to the public affairs office. There, I was given a cell phone, a stack of papers with lists of names and telephone numbers.

For the next four hours, I called previous volunteers and thanked them for the work they had done with the Red Cross. And could they come back again anytime soon?

At first, I was bashful about making these calls because no one likes to hear from organizations via phone. I know I don’t.

Unbelievably, every person I spoke to was polite, talkative, appreciative. I spoke with lawyers, doctors, educators. I spoke with people who were unemployed, in bad health, asleep when the phone rang. One man was in Iowa in his car. Several put me on hold while they looked for a piece of paper on which to jot down the service center number so they could call again if they had any more time to donate.

“I didn’t know what the Red Cross did until this hit my community,” said a young woman who was transplanted from Alabama to Brooklyn. “No one ever has to tell me again.”

After working with the Red Cross, she said, she enrolled formally in courses to become a leader in disaster situations. Would she be back to help again soon? You bet.

Each person treated me as if I were the Red Cross that day. Here’s a paraphrase of what they said: “You guys are great, and my time with you meant so much.” I didn’t stop to explain that I was a one-day-only volunteer. In that moment, I was as much the Red Cross as anyone.

Given the controversy surrounding the organization during those days – the resignation of its director, criticisms about effectiveness, and questions about allocation of funds – it was good to know that on a grass-roots level, the place was tirelessly busy.

And they needed to be tireless to face not only the immediate problems of disaster relief, such as food and shelter, but also the unexpected glitches. That very morning, more than 1,000 limo drivers had lined up outside the building hoping to get financial assistance. “They are Russians,” one worker said during a lunch of pizza, fruit, and other donated snacks. “They know about standing in line for hours to get a loaf of bread. Some of them have been in this line for days trying to get a check. Americans are too impatient for that.”

The conundrum, one leader told me, was that the disaster fund had been set up solely for the families of victims who had died on Sept. 11 and not for others – taxi drivers, store owners, housekeepers whose lives had been hard hit by a ripple effect. Many of them were sitting in waiting rooms at the center. I have never heard so many languages spoken in one room.

Was this the face of America? Was it the face of need? Or the face of tragedy?

It was, I am sure now, the face of terrorism which had made no distinctions on 9/11.

After speaking to more than 200 people by phone, I was daunted by the large number of names still remaining on the list. By late afternoon, however, I was scheduled to drive back to Maine and would have to leave the work to another volunteer. I asked my supervisor if I could take one cell phone and the list with me. That way I could finish the calls and mail the phone back in a few days.

Talk about being overcome with a sense of responsibility and helplessness. The woman cocked her head and said: No, but thank you.

As I got in my car, the streets were transformed in my mind. Ground zero had become much larger than a burgeoning tourist trap and the square of rubble I had witnessed earlier that week. It extended across the city and reverberated from the man in Iowa, to a woman in Virginia,

to the city in Maine where I would lay my head by the end of the day.