The release of many of the 911 tapes from 9/11, Friday, finally put the spotlight on another relatively unheralded group of american heroes.
Today we think of terror as being somebody else's problem — in Iraq, at the Pentagon, in the White House, in a Humvee, or on a Marine patrol in Fallujah.
Just a few short years ago, we realized it was our problem when the Towers fell, the planes crashed, when the passengers fought back on Flight 93, when the Pentagon burned, when the interceptors were scrambled, when Bush left the grade school, when the firefighters and the police officers died in the hell hole in lower Manhattan — where they still, like they occasionally do in Pearl Harbor or on Guadalcanal, find human remains.
But on that day of days, the war on terror was also brought home to the 911 dispatchers across america, from Manhattan, where they handled the dreadful carnage at the WTC, to the folks that got the cell phone calls from the high-jacked aircraft and those that received the calls when Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania and when the plane hit the Pentagon in Virginia.
911 operators are usually civilians, but not always. and they live in a special world of phones, computer screens, incident cards, stress and endless minutes that can crawl like months through the stress laden atmosphere. It's a place where the pieces to a gigantic puzzle begin to fall into place with a Poirot-like efficiency or with a helter-skelter kind of wilding madness. The calls can come in on an incident in a slow volume as a fire grows in intensity, or blast in as 20 or 30 lines light up instantaneously when a tank farm explodes - or, in the case of 9/11 in Manhattan, when all the boards go crazy and when the whole place lights up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.
You get a special feel for things while sitting in an enclosed box like a dispatch center. Like a blind person whose other senses are magnified due to their loss of sight, you listen for those tiny nuances that mean so much and indicate the true gravity of a situation that you can't see. You can pick up fear in a fire chief's voice that you never heard before. Engine companies that are usually quite talkative go silent and can't be raised for status checks. Emergency buttons, those beacons for summoning aid for the uniformed responders, which indicate the user's number on the radio screen, begin to go off. The special calls for apparatus and ambulances begin to stack up so fast they can't be processed as quickly as they come in. The computer aided dispatching begins to run behind because it, too, with its own personality, is having a hard time keeping up with your inputs. Engines, tower ladders and rescue companies coming in from all over town are calling for their staging areas. all manner of chiefs are transmitting orders, special requests, locations to stage and for high-rise packs, changes of frequencies, requests for squad companies, direct messages to rigs and calls for every available chaplain.
and in the mayhem you build a mental picture of what's going on and try to wrap your faculties around the size of the emergency tearing the heart out of your city and putting all the guys and gals that you've done your absolute level best to protect and to help in awful danger.
They're your firefighters and your cops and your folks from the Port authority because you've handled their needs and gotten them help and answered their calls and been there for them as long as you've punched the clock, the mike buttons and entered the info on the screens — ever since the day you started work - when the whole place looked so big and complicated and everybody looked so busy and distant and you wondered if you'd ever make the grade and fit in and earn your bones.
Then, in the middle of the cacophony of calls a sudden horrible silence cuts across the radio channels and many of the phone lines go dead. and terror grips your heart and you begin to shiver — just like the Shuttle operations team when the Flight Director shouts, "Lock the doors!" You know the problem's real and that it's not going away and that it's just got to be terrible in scope. You stand up and look around and notice that everybody's doing the same thing and they all have the same stricken, punched in the gut, pale far away look to them. and the head dispatcher hollers, "C'mon everybody, let's get back to work." But there are no histrionics, no cave-ins - just that pause to catch your breath and take a drink of Coke.
But like it said in the articles, even after the Towers fell, the dispatchers were asking if the Towers were still up because they couldn't believe that they were down. and many of them are still looking for the Towers.
There must be a technical glitch somewhere keeping all those people off the air because the Towers could not have fallen and killed all those guys. This cannot be happening today, not on my shift. What in God's holy name could I have done to save more of those poor people.
Then, like the Shuttle explosion and crash, or any other huge explosion and death - or like it was during the 23rd Street fire in 1966 - it's time to begin picking up the pieces and get things back on track. Slowly the radios, though fewer in number with voices in a painful shock but resolute in purpose, begin to came back on line. The phones begin to ring again. additional calls go out - more rigs are going in. Regular calls for service and other fires give you something to concentrate on. Off duty guys are coming into empty stations and the house watch offices are calling you with information. Status boards are being updated. Work overcomes the empty hole of grief. The day moves into night. Coffee and sandwiches appear — the all-purpose fire department remedy. Relief comes in with more dreadful news. Time moves on. Shock turns into pain. The scar tissue appears and begins to solidify, its choking tentacles spreading though bodies bent with the fatigue of overwhelming loss.
as a firefighter and as a cop I sat many hours in similar rooms, handling smaller emergencies - those little bits of life and death, those fires, automobile accidents, lost kids, suicides, violent crimes and missing people that mark the rapid decline of our society. I've listened to my share of frantic telephone exchanges, to the slurred ramblings of those who've overdosed, folks calling to report the dying, and to those screaming from inside burning buildings. My stomach has churned on those dreaded officer down, needs help calls. I've responded to the fire, explosion, people trapped, automatic second alarms.
But there is nothing in america which can compare to what the Manhattan fire dispatchers endured on that 9/11 day in their bunker in Central Park. as the My Way article explains, many of the operators have gone, victims of the stress and the terror which tore them and their world apart that day, having realized that the callers they were speaking with and the firefighters they were dispatching to save them, died in the collapse, wiped away forever.
Much is said about preparedness. But nothing can prepare you for 12 hours in purgatory, where many of the calls you will take will be a prolonged station on the cross — for the caller and for you. There is no preparation, no training for responding to the agonizing death of thousands and the sudden disappearance of entire companies of firefighters and squads of cops.
One day as a little kid dreaming about a future in the fire department, and hearing a fire siren go by, I told my grandmother, who was already used to three generations of firefighters, "It means somebody's in trouble." "No," she said firmly, "it means that someone's getting help."
May it always be so.
Like the guys who can enter a bar and never have to buy a drink, I wish that something more could be done for those 9/11 dispatchers. But, by their nature, they are usually a quiet bunch, not prone to hooting and hollering. But they certainly deserve our prayers for their sacrifice, for their unseen bravery and for their suffering.
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