Fifteen years after 9/11 terror attacks Americans remember sacrifices

Fifteen years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York and altered America’s feeling of security forever, retired firefighter David Turner still hides his face in his hands when remembering certain details of the aftermath.

For him, the attacks were very personal. Fifteen of his brothers from Battalion 9, Engine 54, Ladder 4, in Manhattan lost their lives responding to the World Trade Center catastrophe.

The attacks that began that morning with four fully fueled commercial airplanes hijacked by 19 Islamic extremists from a group called al-Qaeda ended with almost 3,000 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Two planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, both bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the World Trade Center twin towers causing them to fail and crumble to the ground. The fire and building failure killed anyone who had not been evacuated as well as those NYPD officers, NYFD firefighters and Port Authority officers that immediately responded.

As well, American Airlines Flight 77, also headed for Los Angeles, crashed into the Pentagon penetrating the structure. Passengers on yet a fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93 in route to San Francisco, tried to retake control after learning of the attacks in New York and Washington from friends and family via cell phone. The plane went down in Pennsylvania preventing the hijackers from turning the plane into the White House.

For Turner and most Americans, Sept. 11 is a day they will never forget.

Turner was off after working his 24-hour shift at the fire department. He was not scheduled to work on Sept. 11. At home with his wife, they got a call from a family member who said to turn on the TV.

“It was like I was in shock,” Turner said. “For some reason I knew it wasn’t an accident and I remember telling my wife I had to go. She told me I didn’t have to go and kind of argued with me. Somehow I won the argument and drove in while listening to the radio.”

Turner called the firehouse and could not get through. As he drove, he was thinking he would have to find a way to get into the city. He was about 45 minutes to an hour away.

He remembered where a state trooper barracks was located and thought if he could get there, maybe he could get an escort. While there, another fireman from a different firehouse stopped for the same assistance and the two men decided to go in together.

“There was a police equipment store near the patrol office and the owner lent us a police blue light for our car. At some point while driving, we heard about the second plane. At that moment, I was trying to think who was working that day. Most likely it was the guys who relieved me because they would be doing the next 24-hour shift,” he said.

When they crossed the George Washington Bridge there was a “parade of people walking out of the city and cars clogging the outbound lanes.

“People were leaving their cars and walking. It was a real visual because no cars were going into the city,” Turner said.

The other fireman arrived at his firehouse first so he told Turner to take his car and go on to his station. The two men had just met.

“He didn’t think twice. He just said ‘go.’ He knew I worked closer to the trade center. I was to leave his keys on the floor and he would get his car at some point at my station. I never did see him again,” Turner said, sorry that the traumatic experience left him with no memory of the fireman’s name or phone number.

Turner could not have imagined what came next. All 15 firefighters on that shift were lost.

“Our battalion covered three firehouses and everybody in that battalion got killed that day,” he said. “The truck company [Ladder 4] was in the lobby of the south tower getting people out of elevators. We know that because survivors told us there was a No. 4 on their helmets. The engine company was in the Marriott Hotel at the base of the trade center. We know that because No. 54 spread out in the hallway with another engine company further down. When the first tower fell, it crushed half the Marriott and the other company, further away survived.”

Among a room filled with memorabilia, Turner has the call ticket that shows that Engine 54 responded to One World Trade Center at 9:01 a.m. just one minute after shift change and only seconds before the second plane hit.

When Turner arrived at the fire station, the doors were open, trucks gone and shoes laying right where they had been left by the men climbing onto the truck. He checked the blackboard to see who was working and realized he knew all of them and had no idea if they were still alive.

Turner, along with others who reported to work, were sent to Engine 40, rather than straight to the trade center. By the time they commandeered a bus and arrived, the towers had already fallen.

Visibility was limited and Turner said he could not make out anything. They were just walking over piles of debris and trying to get organized, hoping to find people alive.

“You couldn’t tell which way you were facing. You couldn’t make out streets. It was just devastation, rubble, dust, twisted metal and paper flying everywhere,” he said.

Still, Turner believed his co-workers would be found alive, perhaps in a lean-to, a little void where they could survive and breathe. He was there for three days straight. The more he looked, however, the more he realized everything was pulverized. Pulling anyone out alive would be a miracle.

“It wasn’t going to happen and it was demoralizing,” he said. “Days went by and as the digging began, you could see parts of a reflection from turnout coats and the rescue turned into a recovery.”

Turner holds many memories dear to his heart. It was hard, he said, to deal with calls from wives that kept coming into the firehouse. “You tried to give them hope. I kept saying there’s a chance, it is too early to give up.”

After a few days, however, it was evident no one was coming back.

Turner said he has a few health issues but nothing like many of the responders. And he does not harbor survivor’s guilt.

“I just felt I was lucky because any one of us could have been working that day. All I could say is why not me. I never turned down overtime. I can’t even remember when I went back on the firetruck. It seemed a long time, probably a month before most of us jumped back on,” he said.

Turner said from Sept. 11, 2001 for the next two years “was the worst time of my life.”

“I was pretty much a mess. One of the hardest things was the funerals. Out of the 15 guys, they only found remains of four. Families prolonged having memorial services as recovery went into the spring of 2002,” he said.

Also difficult now is seeing the “astronomical” number of people dying due to their contact at Ground Zero.

Retiring in 2013 partially from disability caused by 9/11, Turner moved his family to the Grand Strand. Today, he works in real estate to stay busy spending time in an office at his home filled with mementos that spark bitter/sweet memories.

A brother lost forever

His brother was among the 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who lost their lives on 9/11 and 15 years later, Peter Grzymalski cannot talk about it without tears streaming down his face.

He and his brother Matthew were very close. Matthew worked for the financial services company that was located on the 101st through 105th floors of One World Trade Center and above the impact zone of the hijacked airplane.

“My brother died that day,” Grzymalski, now a captain at the Forestbrook station of Horry County Fire Rescue, said, “as well as his girlfriend and a bunch of people I knew.”

Along with an estimated two-thirds of the company’s employees, Matthew Grzymalski, 34, and Kaleen Pezzuti, 28, perished that day never to be found due to the collapse of the 110-foot tall structure.

When tragedy struck that Sept. 11, the Grzymalski family was already reeling from the loss of their father and aunt who had died earlier that year.

“My dad passed away on Jan. 2 and my mom’s sister died right after that,” Grzymalski said.

Then an NYPD detective in Queens, Peter Grzymalski had volunteered that day to change his tour to work a local election. He was still at home on Long Island with his 4-year-old on his lap, flipping through TV channels when an image caught his eye and he quickly changed channels to see what it was.

“My wife was at work and had to come home because I had to go to work,” he said. While packing up to leave, the second plane hit. He knew he would be gone awhile.

Assigned to work at the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge where 911 dispatch and fire department headquarters are located, he saw a constant mass of people coming over the bridge as they fled from Manhattan.

Everything was chaotic as the city had never responded to anything like the attacks.

“You just didn’t know what was coming next. It was a relief when you saw jets buzzing the sky escorting planes,” he said.

That was just the beginning of an uneasiness that lasted a long time for many, he said. Because communication systems were down, rumors abounded and everyone was “flying by the seat of their pants.”

While continuing to work all night receiving word that officers and firefighters had been killed at the site and seeing people being loaded on boats and flotillas to get out of the city, he had to rely on people in his office to track down the younger brother he called Mattie.

There was no good news coming out of what soon became known as Ground Zero.

“As time went by, we never got anything. I was in the morgue the next morning as bodies turned into just pieces as they were brought in,” he said. “I had to take my mom to get a DNA swab for a profile. I took my brother’s toothbrush. I was doing what I did for a living and having to deal with this in a personal, victim per say, manner.”

Grzymalski, one of six children, went into crisis mode handling his brother’s loss like a police case. “I started putting a case file together and giving everyone things to do. We did a missing person’s report and as the weeks went on, it was apparent things just weren’t happening,” he said.

But he and his family refused to give up hope. “One of the most difficult parts for me was I was still working and going to the morgue and there were rumors that people might be alive in pockets. Then I learned that nobody from above the floors where the plane hit made it out. How do you go home and tell your mom that? Kaleen’s sister also lost her husband. They had a new baby. He had called from the tower and left her a phone message telling her he was not getting out.”

Grzymalski said coming to the reality after a couple of days that no one else was coming out of the debris that was smoldering like a furnace was “surreal.”

“I was able to function because I was in crisis mode,” Grzymalski said. He spent time at Ground Zero, at hospitals and morgues trying to identify people on lists of the missing. With so many police, fire and EMS responders dying, a separate morgue was set up “so we made notifications for our own,” he said.

It was 10 years before Peter Grzymalski “crashed.”

“My experience that day was nothing newsworthy or heroic. We were just going to work. That was our job,” he said. Had he not changed his shift, however, he would have been downtown sooner. What he began to experience was survivor’s guilt.

“I was in a fog for probably months. I didn’t see things clearly for a long time. What I learned was that I did not have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it was survivor’s guilt and there are mechanisms to deal with it,” he said. “Meeting with friends here, we all share that guilt. We ask, ‘Why didn’t I die that day?’”

Grysmalski said there are so many stories that were never shared; things that happened that fateful day 15 years ago.

“I can sit here 15 years later and talk about it now because it is all about my brother. I’m very proud of how my family dealt with it. You just look at things differently. You start putting things in perspective. My experience has taught me that death is terrible. It is the finality of it,” he said.

A volunteer firefighter on Long Island since the age of 18, Grzymalski found it easy to transition into the fire department after moving to Horry County where he had vacationed many times during his 20 years with the NYPD. Today he finds himself more of a hugger and toucher than he was before. “I get a little more emotional now,” he said.

It took years to put his grief in its proper place. He saw so many terrible sites and attended dozens of funerals but he also saw Americans line West Side Highway leading to the crash site cheering for the first responders as they passed by to do work no one ever wants to do. At first, he said it seemed disrespectful for people to be taking photos, after all his brother was buried there.

“But what I learned was people just wanted to feel connected,” he said.

Each Sept. 11, Grzymalski travels back to New York to go to church with his mom to honor those who died at what she calls “Ground Hero.”

He is saddened that the positives that came out of that crisis seem to have disappeared today. “Police officers and firefighters selflessly gave their lives that day running into the buildings to try to save lives. They didn’t ask who they were sacrificing for. Now 15 years later, cops are the bad guys,” he said.

Gripped by anxiety from the memories at times, especially as 9/11 and holidays near, Grzymalski said he is not running away from it as it has become a part of his life.

“You kind of owe it to them [the victims] to live your life,” he said, “but you can’t put a timeline on grief.”

Refusing to put terrorism in control

On the morning of 9/11, NYPD narcotics detective Robert “Bobby” Antonelli was driving into Manhattan to work his second job with a law firm.

“As I was driving, I heard a plane had hit the World Trade Center and I thought it was an accident,” he said. As he crossed over the Verrazano Bridge from Staten Island, he saw that traffic was stopped. On the radio, he heard that all emergency personnel were being mobilized so he turned back to go to his base station on Staten Island. When he arrived, everyone was putting on their uniforms and loading supplies to head to Manhattan.

“I really didn’t know what to think. It was my job. I wanted to get there like everybody else,” he recalled during an interview from his home in Myrtle Beach where he moved five months ago from New Jersey. “The terrorist stuff didn’t come until the second plane hit.”

Antonelli said he was in Manhattan by the time the towers came down at 9:49 a.m. and 10:28 a.m.

Once the towers came down, the mass exodus picked up with “a sea of people” trying to escape the dust and rubble. Antonelli was stationed near New York City Hall at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge about half a mile from the towers. The debris was so thick and heavy he couldn’t see or breath.

“I was thinking survive. I hoped it was not the end of the world,” Antonelli said. He, his partner and about 50 people moved into a Starbucks until the air cleared some.

“There was mass exodus. It was sad to see. People had cuts, dirt on their faces and were limping,” he said. “I could not believe Americans were running away in fear. The look on their faces resonates with me today.”

The next day, Antonelli was assigned to a bucket brigade at Ground Zero. “We stood on metal so hot our boots would burn. People thought they were hearing survivors but in hind sight there was no way.”

Antonelli lost three close friends at the site. Countless retired responders came to help look for their missing comrades.

On the second day, the city brought in a tank from the National Guard to clean up city hall. They had to remove two to three inches of dust and debris, he said, which was primarily performed by regular citizens not first responders. They were frightened because a lot of buildings seemed very shaky, but he said they did their best.

He and others were outfitted with “junk masks,” he said. “You could feel it [ash] through the masks. It wasn’t pleasant. No one was thinking about safety or tomorrow. They were just thinking about today.”

Seeing Americans in fear really bothered him. Late the first night, he was able to borrow a phone to call home to let his family know he was ok. He said he probably worked 40 hours before returning home.

Antonelli was taken off his regular job of narcotics enforcement and was assigned to bucket security for the next four months. “It was one of the most horrific things,” he said.

Rubble was trucked from the fallen towers to a barge and brought to a Staten Island landfill where it was emptied out into areas 50 x 20 yards wide. It was generally done on the midnight tour with loud generators casting a white light. Seeing the workers in white suits and masks wearing earplugs made for an eerie scene.

“You thought you were on Mars,” Antonelli said.

“The worst part was the smell. A team of investigators had to rake through the materials. If they found rings, bones, fragments, anything relevant to a crime scene, they had to bring it to a designated area and catalog it,” he said.

Antonelli said you didn’t have to be an engineer to realize no one could survive the high heat. Although he got glimpses of people jumping from the buildings, he said he could not talk about that.

Through the years, Antonelli has watched people around him dying from “weird diseases.” He has lost a lot of friends who became collateral damage.

“I knew guys were fighting for their medical coverage,” he said. While every cough makes him wonder if he is next, Antonelli said he thanks God he is relatively healthy. He has become part of a 9/11 health study.

Antonelli said he thinks about the disaster all the time but has to move forward and live his life.

“I refuse to have my life affected by cowards,” he said of the hijackers.

Finding ways to help

Maria Antonelli was a stay-at-home mom volunteering for Caroline Kennedy’s reading program,

When she did go to school to pick up her child she asked the vice principal what to tell the children.

There was also a place for first responders to meet with therapists. “I saw more firemen than police. They were shell shocked,” she said.

On Sept. 10, Antonelli said she had felt secure in America. From Sept. 11 forward, that security was lost.

“We drove to the high school to walk every day after dropping off our kids so we started to go about our day when we heard about the crash on the radio,” she said. “They cut into the music and said there had been an accident and that gave me chills. When I heard what had happened I just screamed ‘Oh my God, they finally did it.’”

People just came out of their cars and houses and dogs were barking like crazy, she said.

“I just knew it was terrorists,” she said. She did not go back immediately to get her son because he was in a school that had been built like an old bomb shelter.

Antonelli said when military jets began flying overhead she knew America was being attacked.

A good friend’s husband worked at the World Trade Center and they were consumed with concern as the buildings began to tumble. There was some relief, she said, when they saw him on TV after a firefighter pushed him out of the building before the collapse. He was able to say to his wife via TV that he was ok.

When she did got to school to pick up her child she asked the vice principal what to tell the children. “He took my hand and said, ‘Mrs. Antonelli, I don’t even know what to say. Just hold them,’” she said.

When her son got in the car, he asked his mom if his father had died and said they needed to run away. It was late in the day before her husband could call home to reassure his son he was ok.

As the crisis unfolded, supplies needed at Ground Zero were announced on the radio. “They were calling for boots and socks,” she said. “The boots were just melting from the heat.”

So she went shopping to buy supplies, which was the easiest thing she could do to help. “I was going out of my mind if I didn’t help. My husband was a first responder and just out of being an American,” she said.

She obsessed over watching news coverage until her son told her it was too scary. She started volunteering at a shutdown Naval base where the National Guard was stationed, making beds and doing whatever she could to help. There she met some American Red Cross disaster volunteers and learned how to use her human resources background to become a volunteer to help provide disaster relief for the thousands of people put out of work by the disaster.

“People could come there and sign up for relief,” she said, saying the disaster affected taxi drivers, limo drivers and many people who lost wages.

There was also a place for first responders to meet with therapists. “I saw more firemen that police. They were shell shocked,” she said.

“I worked with volunteers from all over the United States who gave up their time to help us in New York,” she said. “I couldn’t believe there was that much heart.”

On Sept. 10, Antonelli said she had felt secure in America. From Sept. 11 forward, that security as lost.

“That day, you had to grow up. You saw the real evil in the world,” she said.

For her, hearing the names called on Sept. 11 every year is like “visiting a grave.”

“I have to hear them,” she said. “For me, there isn’t a day I forget. I go to the ocean and say a prayer for those lost souls and those families.”

Digging through piles of ash

A Myrtle Beach resident for little over a year, Jeffrey Webb says he is “going through hell right now” along with numerous others suffering with health issues associated with their response to the 9/11 terror attacks.

Webb was an NYPD detective assigned to traffic court as a liaison between the NYPD and Albany for all moving violations written on Staten Island. Immediately mobilized with full riot gear, his unit reported to the 122 Precinct to be dispatched out following the attacks.

“None of us were sent into Manhattan that day because we didn’t know what would happen next, if the terrorists might take out the bridges,” he said.

Initially, Webb was assigned to an underground gas pipeline where he remained for hours protecting against possible terrorism. The whole time he was concerned about his wife Doreen who worked in Manhattan and for his two children. He called a friend to pick up his kids because he didn’t know when he or his wife might get home.

“My wife was mid-town, not close but no one knew what was happening. Everything was shut down. It was a mess. Everything was disrupted and because of the smoke you couldn’t get near the site,” he said. “Everybody wanted out of the city.”

The next day he and his partner Liz Gonzalez took the Staten Island Ferry arriving to a city filled with soot and ash. They were assigned to work on a pile, just digging and filling buckets. Webb was later transferred to the morgue.

“I think that is what saved my life. It got me out of the debris,” he said. Although less toxic, his new assignment was grim.

“I never found anything when digging but at the morgue, I was handling pieces of flesh and putting pieces together to determine who it was,” he said.

For months, he was hardly ever home, working 18-hour days with no days off.

His wife was afraid to return to the city because she took public transportation riding through tunnels and over bridges.

Webb said 9/11 changed the lives of Americans forever. “Still today we have all this terrorism. It is not going to stop. I tell family always be careful, pay attention.”

One of the horrors of having worked 9/11 is knowing how many people continue to die today due to being subjected to the toxic smoke and other hazards at Ground Zero. Initially working with no mask or safety gear, Webb breathed enough of the toxins that he is having breathing issues.

“Then, we just wanted to find somebody. Nobody even thought there would be repercussions after. A lot of guys have sinusitis or rhinitis making it hard to breath. At night I gasp for air and they [doctors] tell me I could die in my sleep,” he said. In July, he was diagnosed with a “very suspicious” growth in his stomach that will require surgery.

“Liz developed some kind of crazy cancer and died a few years ago,” he said. A friend who worked in the landfill where buckets of ash were dumped also died of a rare cancer. An NYPD website lists 50 officers who have died from various types of cancer due to the exposure with the list growing annually. This is in addition to the 23 who died that day.

Like others who worked in the soot and ash, Webb makes an annual trip to New York for a complete physical provided through a victim’s compensation fund. For local health care, however, he and others who have moved to the area are finding it difficult to find doctors who accept their union’s GHI insurance. With so many first responders having moved to the area, he holds out hope that more doctors will make the effort to accept the insurance.

Living in what he calls “paradise,” however, makes it all worth the difficulty, he said.

Webb said he does not watch movies about the attacks and cannot see himself even going back to New York City to visit the museum. He moved to the Grand Strand where he has put the memories far behind him; although a forever reminder adorns his right arm--a tattoo of a bald Eagle sitting on top of a big apple inside a cityscape featuring the twin towers. At the bottom of the apple is a detective’s shield.

A female officer’s perspective

Twenty-year NYPD officer Lisa Midwood, who currently resides in Myrtle Beach, wrote a poem entitled “Twin Tower” just days after she responded to Ground Zero. Her poem reflects the feelings of many proud Americans who refused to allow terrorists to dampen their faith in their country or their way of life.

Although off duty on that day, the patrol officer began to gather her belongings in preparation to report to her Queens, N.Y., precinct as soon as she turned on the TV and heard the tragic news.

“When I first saw the images on TV, just for a glimmer I thought something happened to the pilot,” she said. “I knew they use that runway so passengers can see the city. I was glued to the TV and saw the second plane hit then I knew we were being attacked.”

Her initial assignment was to patrol in her precinct because the officers who had been on duty had been shuttled to Manhattan. In a day or two, she was assigned to the east side of Ground Zero.

“I was standing on Broadway in front of the Century 21 Department Store that had been there for years. All the windows were blown out of it and that was our assigned post,” she said.

In the beginning, she said, no one realized the danger of breathing in the smoke and ash. The city provided EMT masks that they wore for hours. “When we took them off, they were all black,” she said. It was weeks later before the military provided hazmat suits. “By then, it was too late anyhow,” she said.

Midwood described the scene as pile upon pile of undecipherable crushed metal and twisted steel. “It smoldered for weeks and just kept spewing out. None of us could ever imagine that happening or how anyone could live through it,” she said.

On one of her first days patrolling the area, she and some other first responders gained access to a 70-story building and climbed to the roof just to get an overview of the destruction.

“It was breathtaking. All the beautiful buildings were just gone. There was a point between Brooklyn and Queens where you turned and it was the best spot to see the twin towers. Now, peeking over this building, the towers were gone,” she said.

Midwood said she did not allow the event to affect her personally, although she knew people who were lost in the towers, including an officer who finished the police academy with her.

“I was working too many hours so I couldn’t let it affect me,” she said. “Later I was like everybody else, I couldn’t believe it. It was just so surreal you just couldn’t believe it happened.”

Then came the continuous procession of funerals. “There was funeral after funeral and we had to pay our respects. That was tough,” she said, saying there was a sea of blue uniforms from every state, brothers and sisters supporting their fallen comrades.

Midwood said she saw volunteers with license plates from across the country come in to offer support. “It was just awesome. It was pretty cool to see that humanity is indeed heartfelt,” she said.

Along with hundreds of other officers, Midwood, 53, returns to New York annually for extensive health testing but has had no problems to date. She has seen the hundreds of names who have died from all forms of cancer and hopes that research will continue in hopes that more do not die.

“I thank God every day. I am just very lucky,” she said. She also does not hold the survivors guilt that many do. “Nothing was my fault. I was angry like everyone else and I wanted the media to stop running the same film and turn that stuff off.”

Today, she does not seek out movies or coverage of the attacks. She does not need to see it, she said, because “I lived it!”

Providing crisis intervention

A detective with the Howell Township New Jersey Police Department, Eric Rice also served in a volunteer position as a certified disaster response crisis counselor. It was in that capacity with the New Jersey Crisis Intervention Response Network that Rice responded to a request by the Port of New York Authority to help counsel first responders to the 9/11 crisis.

“I headed a team at the Newark Airport,” said Rice who moved to Myrtle Beach two years ago after retiring with 27 years in law enforcement. “We were there until 2 a.m. as officers returned covered in ash looking like zombies.”

Rice said quick assessments were completed to determine if the responders returning from Ground Zero acted normal and were “not going over the deep end.”

For more than a month, Rice worked with the crisis intervention team, a peer support group, evaluating and counseling individuals working at Ground Zero. They were given hard hats and respirators, he said.

“We talked to officers in and around Ground Zero to make sure they made contact with their families and making small talk about what they were going through but it was too early to talk about their feelings,” he said. That part came later.

After things settled down and people began to return to their normal work shifts, Rice said he was part of an International Critical Incident Stress Foundation mass debriefing held by 20 crisis intervention teams for hundreds of police officers, Port Authority staff and firefighters in Nyack, N.Y.

“There is a time for each intervention,” he said. With such an ongoing crisis, it was important to make the responders aware of what a “normal” reaction would be.

“I think one of the biggest problems I saw from responders coming from the area was that the media played the tower collapse over and over so they were constantly reliving the trauma,” Rice said. “I stopped watching it. I didn’t want to be re-traumatized.”

At Ground Zero, Rice said you knew things were going to be bad. Digging continued often with no results. He said many officers held in their emotions because they did not want to appear vulnerable.

“Cops are unique. My dad said boys do not cry. We should have an opportunity to cry. Cops put on their shield and expect respect for their authority. If they showed emotion back then, it was a show of weakness,” he said.

Trained to offer help during a crisis since 1992, Rice said he was able to deal as a police officer with what he saw and heard. “It was a little less catastrophic for me personally but I still had restlessness and intrusiveness seeing things over and over in my mind.”

He has not yet returned to the city to see the site and the rebuild. “I haven’t really been excited to go see it because it would just bring back the horror,” he said. If he attends a local ceremony on that date, he only stays a short time and he refuses to listen to the names of the deceased being read on TV.

“I knew some officers who died and it remains fresh in my mind anyway,” he said.

From a more personal perspective following his experiences at Ground Zero, the 66-year-old Rice said he has become a much more compassionate individual, engaging with people from “the softer side of me.”

“The aftermath of 9/11 has made me realize how precious having a family is; the support system

The disaster after the disaster

Howard Roberts was a first responder with the NYPD who wanted to share his experiences from Sept. 11 but was too ill and emotional to get through an interview. His wife, Veronica, however, felt his story was important to share. Her husband, whom she says is “a mess” due to 9/11, suffers grave illness due to his involvement in the Ground Zero search, rescue and recovery mission.

On that day, Veronica Roberts had been outside putting her son on the school bus when she came into the house and her husband said, “Ronnie, I’m packing my bags. I’m going to be gone.”

Veronica’s two sisters-in-law worked in the World Trade Center. Her husband’s main mission was to get to those family members. He left and it was hours before Veronica heard from him. When he called, neither of them had yet heard from the sisters-in-law.

“He said, ‘I’m going to look for them,’” she recalled. Eventually, they received word that both women had gotten out of the towers and had run to safety.

Working almost around the clock for three months, her husband came home at night long enough to clean up. “He would take his uniform off for me to hose down before I put it in the laundry. It was covered in white soot,” she said.

“He would just come in and cry because he could not find his friends, NYPD cops and firemen who were lost including a close friend,” she said. Her sons would ask why Daddy was crying.

“People really should know what the wives and children of first responders lived with and what my poor husband went through,” she said. “He really cannot express himself. He has a tracheotomy and cannot breath. He is on oxygen.”

Veronica said when her husband became ill and went into cardiac arrest, the doctors wanted to know why his lungs were so bad. The now 58-year-old retiree who lives in Calabash, N.C., spent 14 days on a respirator. Yet, he has had difficulty being certified to receive victim’s compensation although the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010 reopened and expanded the scope of the original September 11 Victim Compensation Fund (VCF). The VCF was designed to give medical treatment and compensation to first responders and other individuals who were exposed to Ground Zero toxins during the aftermath of the disaster. A second reauthorization allows victims to apply for assistance through Dec. 18, 2020.

Howard Robert’s medical bills are astronomical, his wife said.

“I am inundated with bills. I am so sick to my stomach,” she said. “The first day, they barely gave them those little masks. My husband was gone from home and he wanted to save his friends, my sisters-in-law and everybody else. People 15 years later they need to know the wives’ side. I think it is a damn disgrace that nobody wants to cover this.”

In addition to his illnesses, Veronica said her husband has been left with emotional scars. Even with what her husband has been through, their son will enter the October class of the NYPD and wants to take his dad’s shield. They also have three nephews in the NYPD “family.”

“I salute every wife that has gone through what I have gone through,” she said. “I can never forget it and I’m sure there are millions of other wives that can never forget.”

This story was originally published September 10, 2016 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Fifteen years after 9/11 terror attacks Americans remember sacrifices."