9/11 Survivor Tree Dedication

 After the 9/11 terrorist attacks a severely damaged, but still alive, pear tree was found in the remains of the World Trade Center complex. The tree was rehabilitated and returned to the site, a symbol of resilience, survival, and rebirth.

Later seedlings were produced from that tree. The Albion Fire Department had one of those young offshoots planted near the firehouse, and dedicated it on September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the attacks.

Standing by the tree and its memorial stone are two of the Albion Fire Department's oldest members, Phil Jacob and Bob Brownell, who according to rumor still miss taking care of the fire horses.

A good turnout.

The memorial stone.

AFD Fire Chief Bob Amber.

The tree is on the right, with the stone covered by Phil Jacob's turnout coat before its unveiling. To the left is the AFD Fire Bell, which dates to 1887. Oh, and a fire hydrant.

 

Phil Jacob again, because he deserves two pictures, along with a very cool (you can tell by the sunglasses) local author.

 

 

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 

The Heroes of 9/11

Much as I tried, I couldn't write anything new this year to memorialize the events of 9/11.

I was so heartsick over our horribly bungled and costly withdrawal from Afghanistan, I found myself unable to say anything that wouldn't just attract pointless political arguing. Oh, I found words--I'd even go so far to say they were eloquent. But despite the obvious connection, writing about it now would only take away from remembrance of the terrorist attacks.

So I deleted the whole thing, thus saving the internet another corner of hate throwing and name calling. Instead, I'm reprinting here the column I wrote for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Sadly, I didn't need to make many changes.

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            I've mentioned before that I’m uncomfortable using the word “hero”. Like many words, it’s overused and clichéd. What is a hero? Not a sports star. Being tough doesn’t make a hero. Not a skydiver. That may make you brave, but not heroic.

            Ronald Bucca was a member of the 101^st Airborne, then served in the Special Forces and Green Berets while on active duty in the army. He became a New York City firefighter in 1978, and on September 11, 2001, became the only FDNY fire marshal ever killed in the line of duty.

            Does somebody become a hero when they take on a dangerous occupation? I don’t know … the flagger who controls traffic during road construction has an especially dangerous job, but I don’t know if you’d call it heroic. You could even argue that a firefighter or police officer doesn’t automatically become a hero the moment he puts on the badge. Maybe – potential hero?

            But then, isn’t everyone a potential hero?

            Steve DeChiaro is a businessman, and was just entering the Pentagon for a meeting when the building was struck by an airplane. No one would have blamed him for saving himself; he had no legal responsibility to act. Certainly he never thought he’d end up winning the Defense Department’s highest civilian award, the Medal of Valor, for his actions in rescuing and treating people that day.

            Sometimes, maybe, a hero is just someone who overcomes their fear and acts – not on a lark, but to do something important, something vital.

            Tom Burnett was the vice president of a medical devices company. He found himself on United Airlines Flight 93, and after his plane was hijacked he learned, in a cell phone call to his wife, of the attacks on the World Trade Center. He didn’t know for sure what the hijackers were planning, but it must have quickly become clear they also wanted to kill.

            Burnett must have also known that an attempt to take the plane back would likely be fatal … but that if it failed, they still might keep the hijackers from taking a large number of civilians on the ground with them.

            Sometimes being a hero is a matter of relativity. A firefighter might do something on a day to day basis that others see as heroic, while he just calls it another day on the job. But others wouldn’t normally expect to see a crisis, beyond a paper jam in the copy machine.

            Welles Crowther was an equities trader. The biggest risk for him on the job was a paper cut, or a coffee burn. He was on the 104^th floor of the South Tower when the first plane hit.

            Witnesses described how Crowther, a former volunteer firefighter, took control, organized people, and got dozens out of the building before it collapsed.

            Sometimes it’s the call of duty, of course.

            Moira Smith, a 13 year veteran of the NYPD, had already been decorated for heroism. It’s hardly surprising that she headed into the World Trade Center to rescue people, and became the only female member of the force killed that day.

            Her daughter would be 22 now. I hope people tell her about her mom.

            Or … maybe heroism just runs in the family?

            Eric Moreland was a George Washington University student at the time, but also a volunteer firefighter and paramedic. As often happens to off duty emergency personnel, he was just happening by when an airplane crashed into the Pentagon.

            Moreland, at great risk, charged into the burning building and carried injured people to safety. Then he stayed to help remove the dead. Then he drove all the way to New York to help out at the world Trade Center.

            Moreland’s grandfather, Lt. Col. Conway Jones, was one of the famous Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. His father flew 80 combat missions in Vietnam.

            Whether it runs in the family or not, some people are just born to serve.

            Special Agent Leonard Hatton fought crime as an FBI agent, fought fires as a volunteer, and fought for freedom as a US Marine. He reported the second plan crashing into the south Tower – not from inside the World Trade Center, but from the roof of a nearby hotel. Then he went in. What else could he do? He died that day, but if he’d turned his back on the call for help, he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.

            There will always be some who suffer for their service.

            Jim Ryan survived, but was still a victim of 9/11. A New York City firefighter, he came back to the WTC site again and again, for months. He helped search for survivors, then victims, and as time went by there was nothing left but to search out bits of what were once people.

            What else could he do? Over three hundred of his brother firefighters were there.

            The cancer diagnosis came in 2006. His lungs finally failed him on Christmas, 2009. He was 48, and died on the same day that someone else grabbed the headlines by trying to bring down another plane, with a chemical bomb strapped to his leg.

            On September 11, 2001, 341 FDNY firefighters and 2 Fire Department paramedics were killed; 23 NYPD officers died, along with 37 Port Authority PD officers and 8 private EMS medics.

            On 9/11 at least 200 people, faced with the horrors of burning to death, jumped from the Twin Towers. Among the almost 3,000 who died in the four sites linked in the attack were citizens of over 70 nations. I don’t know how many of those people qualified as heroes. A lot of them, certainly. And just as certainly, the dead from that day are only a fraction of the victims.

            Every now and then some short sighted person will suggest we stop obsessing so much about 9/11, that we “let it go”. After all, it’s been twenty years, right?

            They’re wrong. They’ll always be wrong. Ten times twenty years, they’ll be wrong. Not only because we must keep this from happening again, but because heroes vanish too quickly, in the flotsam and jetsam of pop culture and the concerns of everyday life. Their memory goes too quickly, just as they do.

            Be inspired by their stories. Saddened. Enraged. But never forget.

 

 

9/11

Do You Remember?

This is my 2009 9/11 column. Sadly, nothing much had changed since then.




SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK


I have this recurring nightmare. I wake up one September morning, look around the neighborhood and check the news, then realize I’m the only person who remembers what happened on September 11, 2001.

Maybe it’s not such a terribly unrealistic thing to worry about.

Where were you on that morning? I headed home from work with no particular plan other than getting some sleep, and turned on the TV for background noise while I got ready for bed.

A shell shocked newscaster was reporting that an airplane had just hit one of the
World Trade Center towers, and that the other was on fire.

“Wow,” I thought, “what a horrible coincidence.”

Then I realized it couldn’t be a coincidence. The only logical answer was that an airborne news crew had been dispatched to cover the fire, and accidentally flew into one tower while filming the other one.

It didn’t take long to realize something even more horrible was going on.

Where were you that moment? The moment the world changed forever? Do you remember?

My then-girlfriend was a 911 call taker for the New York City Fire Department. Having a similar job myself, I knew she was having a really, really bad shift. Still, although I couldn’t remember which part of the city her dispatch center was in, at least whatever was happening seemed to be limited to the Towers.

Then a newsman at the Pentagon in Washington reported hearing the building shudder, as if something huge had hit it.

The United States was at war, as surely as the moment bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As I shoved a videotape into the VCR and pushed “record”, I remember thinking that September 11, 2001 would be one of those dates remembered forever, just like Pearl Harbor Day.

Will it be, though? Forever is a long time – how many school kids today can tell you the date of the Pearl Harbor attack, or the date when Kennedy was shot? Who remembers the date the Confederacy bombed Fort Sumter?

I had my scanner on, but there was an odd silence at first. Everyone was glued to the TV, if they weren’t actually on TV. I watched a reporter, standing in a Manhattan building with the burning Towers behind him, as he repeated what we knew, and what we didn’t. Suddenly, just behind him, one side of a Tower seemed to slide away. A wall is collapsing, I thought. A lot of people just died.

It wasn’t just a wall.

High rise buildings have burned before. The Empire State Building was also hit by an airplane, and survived – but it wasn’t made with truss construction. Other burning high rises didn’t suffer the immediate destruction of their fire protection systems, the explosive heat of a jet fuel fire, and an impact that blasted off critical insulation material, all at once.

Engineers and firefighters alike later realized the collapse was inevitable. Trusses are only as strong as their weakest member, and without any form of protection they fail early when attacked by extreme heat. There was never a chance to save those buildings.

I stood – apparently I’d never sat down to begin with – frozen in place as I realize what happened. A lot more people just died than I’d thought. A lot more.

Which Borough was my girlfriend’s dispatch center in?

By now the scanner was becoming active again, as word went out across the country. In an extraordinary first, every emergency service was being placed on standby. The military was mobilizing; every single airplane in the sky was being grounded. No one knew what was going to be hit next, or how many of the enemy were out there.

I hurried to the firehouse, picturing what would happen if someone flew a plane into downtown Fort Wayne, or rammed a gasoline tanker into a building, or detonated an ammonium nitrate bomb. At the very least we’d be moved up for standby; we might even end up on the scene. Rumors whirled, but one thing we did know was that anyone who could organize four hijackings could coordinate a dozen attacks, or three dozen, or a hundred. We’d been caught flat footed, and the possibilities were endless.

I wonder if anyone remembers the fear of that day, the stress of not knowing who had attacked, or what could come next. I wonder if anyone even remembers that, while we’ve killed or captured many of these extremists since, the remnants of their organization, and others, are still out there. Planning.

My department didn’t get called out that day. Like everyone, the Albion volunteers who could get away from work stayed near a TV. After awhile the repetition became too much and many of them wandered to other parts of the station, or just stood by the doors, looking outside at a brilliantly sunny world that was no longer so bright.

I made increasingly desperate attempts to reach my girlfriend. Surely, even in this, she’d get a break sooner or later? I didn’t realize how much critical communications equipment that had once stood at the top of a Trade Center Tower.

The dispatch center, it turns out, was across the river. She spent the morning talking on the phone to people who were about to die.

Oh, but that was a long time ago.

The economy has taken everyone’s attention away from the events of eight long years ago. (Fifteen, now.)  Generally, Americans are homebodies: They concern themselves first with their economy, health care, taxes. That’s why, despite years of extremist attacks and killing of Americans and American allies, it wasn’t until 9/11 that we really had it knocked into us that we were at war with another ideology. Once things settled down and the economy soured, our thoughts went elsewhere again.

But that doesn’t change a thing. Thousands of people are still dead. 343 firefighters were still murdered trying to save others. We could pull every soldier out of every country in the world and bring them home right now, and we’d still be the Great Satan that those crazed terrorists have dedicated themselves to bringing down.

For the sake of all those who died, and all those who may die in the future, please: Remember.

FDNY at the AFD … and Fish, and Parades

The Chain O’ Lakes Festival is a big week for the Albion Fire Department, as always:

The all you can eat fish and tenderloin dinner is Wednesday, June 8, at the fire station (which is, not shockingly, on Fire Station Drive). It used to start at 5 p.m., but my information is that it starts at 5:30 this year—and that is some darned good fish, so it’s well worth another half hour.

That’s ten bucks for adults and $5 for kids 4 and up—and free for kids under 4, so if you’re really, really short you could try putting on a Power Rangers t-shirt and see what happens.

Meanwhile, the AFD puts in a big appearance Saturday at the Chain O’ Lakes Festival Parade, which kicks off at 5 p.m. And there’ll also be horses, so for all I know it might kick off literally.

But that won’t be the highlight of the day, not this time. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. the fire station will be hosting an apparatus from another fire department: the New York City Fire Department. FDNY’s Rescue 4 is one of five rescue trucks at ground zero on 9/11, and it’s touring the country as part of the Remembrance Rescue Project. This is awe-inspiring, emotional, and very cool—please stop out to see it. You can learn more about the project at http://remembrance.co/.

FDNY Rescue 4

FDNY Rescue 4 at the Victory Museum in Auburn. This rig was taken out of service on September 11, 2001. (Better photos later, when I get a chance to download them.)

Making Fun Of Terrorists (And Other Bad Ideas)

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            I made a promise that I would attempt to go back to humor when I wrote my September 11^th column. The reasoning: This is a humor column.

            Still, it’s hard to forget that we’re at war.

            Ha, see what I did there? I made a joke already! Lots of people have forgotten we’re at war. Extremists are cutting a swath across the Arab world, gaining power by the second and threatening pretty much everyone, yet we’ve somehow managed to convince ourselves that it has nothing to do with the rest of the world. If Americans had this much self-denial in other areas, we’d all be well within our body mass index goals. And I’d be off the M&M’s.

            Still, it occurs to me that humor is needed during bad times, even more than during good times. Over in Iraq, the ISIS people hold a weekly comic open mike night, every Wednesday at seven if they’re not busy beheading infidels.

            On a related note, if you go on the comedy stage over there, I suggest you be well rehearsed. Believe me; it’s not a good idea to bomb.

            Anyway, I was thinking maybe I could start making fun of the Muslim extremists who want to convert or kill every human being on the planet, because how funny is that? Plenty of room for belly laughs, there.

            The key is that, so far as I can tell, extremists have absolutely no sense of humor. At least, not about themselves. Sure, they think blowing up New Jersey is hysterical, and who doesn’t? But make one joke about airdropping a pig farm on Tehran, and they go hog wild. So I’m thinking I could do my part in this war by poking fun at them until they get so mad they make a mistake, like accidentally touching the red wire to the blue wire during terrorist training camp.

            It’s hard to come up with original material. The bad guys change, but the jokes remain the same. Here’s one I’ve heard dozens of times, with different characters each time:

            Hitler and Göring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Göring says: ‘Why don’t you jump?’

            I didn’t make that up: It’s an actual WWII era joke, maybe the first version of that one. The newer versions are usually in an airplane, though. I know what you’re thinking: “What are they doing on a radio tower?” I don’t know … counting swastikas? Don’t ask questions, it’s a joke.

            See, it’s funny and tasteless for the same reasons: Hitler was really evil. By the same token, it’s okay to make jokes about extremists, who in the case of this particular war happen to be Muslim. It is not okay to make jokes about Muslim moderates, because they don’t want to kill everyone and take over the world. The good news is, according to a Muslim website, 93% of Muslims are not extremists. The bad news is, 7% of a billion people is … let’s see …

            A lot of people.

            Actually, if my calculator is correct, that’s a mere 70 million extremists. For comparison, over the course of all of WWII the German military recruited a whole 18 million, so not to worry. Of course, the Germans had the support of the Italians. Sort of.

            I don’t follow this theory some people have that any Muslim is a bad Muslim. For one thing, I have Muslim friends, and any friend of mine is automatically a good person. For another thing, I’m a Christian—and I’m a way different person from those evil morons at Westboro Baptist, who go around picketing funerals and telling everyone they’re going to Hell for watching “Jersey Shores”.

            Having said that, I should point out that you are going to hell if you watch “Jersey Shores”. At least, if you watch more than two episodes.

            Not wanting to offend moderate Muslims led me to give up my original plan: to paint a giant caricature of Muhammad wearing Groucho glasses on the side of my house. Well, that, and the neighbors’ latest petition.

            The more I read about it, the more I realize the extremists over there don’t know any more about Islam than Fred Phelps and his hysterical followers knew about Christianity. Can all religions, and the non-religious, live in peace together? Sure we can … as long as a group isn’t strapping bombs to their kids and sending them into shops full of other kids because they think it will get them 72 virgins. How many virgins do you need, anyway?

            By the way, the specific idea 72 virgins for suicide bombers is a myth. We don’t need to make up crazy things about extremists—they’re doing just fine all by themselves. And if you’re thinking of blowing yourself up anyway, I’d point out that there’s no guarantee the virgins are female, or even human. Maybe half are male computer geeks, and the rest are hamsters. You could spend all eternity picking up hamster droppings and Doctor Pepper cans.

            The point is, when a group of people decide they’re going to convert the whole world to their way of thinking, or blow it up, you can’t just ignore them. Next thing you know they’re on Main Street, burning your joke books and your whole collection of Pauly Shore movies.

            Oh, wait! I just had a brilliant idea. Get information about terrorists by torturing prisoners of war with … Pauly Shore movies!

            After that we may still not admit we’re at war—but they’ll sure know it.

9/11: Where were you?

Where were you?

I'd just gotten home from a shift in dispatch, and decided to turn on the TV while getting ready for bed. Newscasters had just announced that not only had one of the Twin Towers exploded, but that an airplane had just flown into the second one. What a horrible coincidence, I thought; could it be the second plane was a news aircraft filming the first fire?

It took only a minute to realize the awful truth. I didn't sleep that day.

As I watched a correspondant speak, I saw behind him what appeared to be part of a wall peel away from the World Trade Center. Nobody realized right away that the entire Tower had fallen ... once I realized that I knew I'd just watched a lot of people die, among them many dozens of my brother firefighters.

Within an hour every fire department in the country was placed on alert, as more attacks were expected. I stopped and filled my car's gas tank on the way to the station; by the time I returned home and price had jumped far above anything ever seen. To this day, I top off my gas tank just before the annniversary.

I must have been on the way to the fire station when the Pentagon was hit, because I was listening to a radio interview there with a reporter discussing the military response at the time. He heard a noise and felt the building shake; again, it was some time before anyone was sure what was going on.

My fire department had no calls that day, and I spent all morning trying to get in touch with my girlfriend, who was a 911 call taker with the New York City Fire Department. Not only was cell phone service down, she was at work and couldn't have answered anyway. She talked to some of the people who died that day. It wasn't until later in the afternoon that I knew for sure her dispatch center wasn't close enough to be effected by the collapse, although there was also the worry at the time that their building might also be targeted.

Yesterday, the 10th anniversary of the attacks, I went to a breakfast and memorial at the Noble County Public Library in Albion, where they did a great job with a 24 hour long observance. I was able to attend only a small part of it, as I once again worked a shift in dispatch that morning, but I wanted to thank them for my efforts. I also wanted to thank my fiancee Emily for her understanding and support; I tend to get down near the anniversary of the attacks, maybe this year more than usual, and I think I shut down a little the last few days.