Summer reading: The flawed heroes of Ground Zero

By JOHN ROUGHAN

William Langewiesche: American Ground - Unbuilding the World Trade Center

North Point Press,

US$22 (not yet distributed in New Zealand).

In depictions of hell the demons have pitchforks. In the ruins of the World Trade Centre, an apocalyptic vision of sorts, they had shovels and rakes.

As the big diesel excavators tore at the collapsed steel columns and bit into the debris, large groups of volunteers stood by.

When they spotted something, a severed limb possibly, a scrap of clothing, a brownish smear of flesh in the rubble and mud, they would stop the machines and go to work with their shovels and rakes.

As the weeks wore on, they did not so much see human remains as smell them. To pick up the scent, the shovel gangs worked without the respirators provided to protect them from smoke and dust, and they always ignored the rule not to work within 15m of the heavy machinery.

Could these people, volunteers from several agencies, be the villains of any drama? William Langewiesche, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, does not go that far. But his sympathies are definitely on the side of the demolition men who gave him unrestricted access to Ground Zero throughout the clean-up.

American Ground, he calls his inside story of the tensions and tribulations among those who came to tend America's wound. He is not cute. His prose is as heavy and laboured as the working men he admires, who came from New York's outer boroughs to tackle the ruin in the financial district.

They were sensitive to the search for the bodies, but after a while the firemen working with them disgusted them. The firemen disgusted everybody.

On that terrible September morning, several hundred firemen had gone into the burning towers never expecting them to fall.

For an hour after the first plane went in, the horror was of multiple hijackings - who yet knew how many? - and of the plight of people trapped above the fires high in the towers.

Few of the horrified, and certainly not the rescue teams, would have known that the structural sinews of the buildings were their steel-ribbed outer walls and that the burning floors would soon collapse, their weight compressing the floor below, causing the whole edifice to implode, floor by floor, faster and faster, straight down.

The firemen making their way up through the building became particularly poignant casualties of the collapse. But Americans, or their leaders, or their media, needed more than poignant casualties. The firemen, they decided, were heroes.

And the firemen did not demur. By the time President Bush got to ground zero and flung a sympathetic arm round the nearest fireman, they were playing the part to the hilt.

Langewiesche writes: "A few of them reacted embarrassingly by grandstanding on television and at public events, striking tragic poses on television ... Even at the site, where people generally disliked such behaviour, you could find firemen signing autographs at the perimeter gates or, after the public viewing stand was built, drifting over to work the crowds."

The firemen were in charge of body retrieval. Police and demolition workers became steadily more soured as they noticed "the flag-draped ceremonials the firemen accorded their own dead and the 'bag 'em and tag 'em' approach they took to civilians".

There was the day, for example, that a rare intact body of a Port Authority policeman was uncovered and one leg was pinned beneath a heap of heavy steel. It would take hours to remove it and all other work in the vicinity would have to cease.

Firemen sensibly suggested amputation. The police fiercely objected, knowing no dead fireman would have his leg cut off. In the end the police prevailed, shutting down the site for eight hours while they removed their corpse.

Of nearly 3000 casualties, 343 were from the Fire Department. And not all the heroes had been bravely ascending the twin towers before the collapse.

Langewiesche describes the glee of a construction gang digging into the base of the South Tower ruins one autumn afternoon when they found a buried fire truck. Its cab contained not the bodies they feared but dozens of pairs of jeans, all neatly folded, labelled and stacked, just as they had been on the shelves of The Gap in the World Trade Centre shopping mall.

"The construction workers went wild. It was hard to avoid the conclusion the looting had begun even before the first tower fell ...

"This was not what the firemen wanted to hear. An angry fire chief tried to shut the construction workers up. He offered an explanation: that the jeans (tagged, folded, stacked by size) had been blown into the crew cab by the force of the collapse ... "

As winter approached, Mayor Rudi Giuliani ordered "safety" measures to reduce numbers in the shovel gangs and move them back from the machines, mainly to speed up work and get surrounding streets moving again.

The result was an incident that became known as the battle of the badges. The firemen's union called a protest rally on the streets nearby. Hundreds poured in from the suburbs.

Langewiesche watched as a union official with a bullhorn encouraged them to chant for the TV cameras, "Bring our brothers home". He says the union had promised that the demonstration would be orderly and remain outside the perimeter.

"But the firemen proved difficult to control. As the crowd swelled to nearly a thousand, it grew louder and more confident and suddenly surged through the first police barricades towards the Trade Centre ...

"As the demonstrators shoved through a second line of defence, the police shoved back, and some of the firemen started to swing. I saw one policeman go down with a roundhouse punch to the face ...

"The crowd kept pushing through, with fights breaking out where the two groups met. These were big physical guys and they grappled in ungainly dances, straining hard, cursing each other and toppling to the ground in aggressive embraces."

Five days after the riot, the union apologised to the police and Giuliani relented, increasing the size of the shovel gangs and dropping all charges against arrested firemen.

But the heroes were still unhappy and demanded the mayor meet dead firemen's families. The meeting took place the day an airliner crashed into Queens, killing 265 people. City officials came from that disaster to speak behind closed doors to the firemen's widows.

Langewiesche describes the medical examiner telling the gathering that no more intact bodies were being found. "A woman stood up and yelled, 'You're a liar! We know what you're finding! You're a liar!"'

The more he tried to explain, the more women took up the chant, "Liar".

When the demolition manager began to speak, someone called out that the widows did not want to hear "Mr Scoop and Dump" and the others took up the chant, "Scoop and dump, scoop and dump".

Like the heroes, the widows seemed to be playing a part expected of them in real-life tragedy. They were the victims, and in their gracelessness they were, as the author puts it, "victims of victimisation itself".

The heroes served a similar purpose. "The United States was shaken and people in their insecurity felt the need for heroes," he writes. "As the initial reaction to the first shock of war, the hero worship was probably a healthy thing, as long as it was confined to the dead.

"But when it spilled over indiscriminately to the living, problems arose, particularly at the centre of attention, on the Trade Centre pile."

For the firemen, "the sudden popularity became a disorienting thing. Even those with the strength to resist the publicity - who stayed off TV and did not strut in public - seemed nonetheless to be influenced by this new external image of themselves as tragic characters on a national stage.

"The image of heroes seeped through their ranks like a low-grade narcotic. It did not intoxicate them but it skewed their view."

Yet the author constructs heroes of his own, two city officials in particular: Kenneth Holden and Michael Burton of the Department of Design and Construction.

They took charge of a clean-up of a type and scale that the city did not seem prepared for. Holden, Burton and others, engineers mostly, went in with a can-do calm, called in earthmoving firms they trusted, organised the work, set up routines in the ruins and, not the least of their worries, dealt sensitively with the heroes.

Langewiesche never admires them more than after the meeting with the widows. The two men had taken hell - Burton had been Mr Scoop and Dump.

They had a long beer together after the meeting and their talk turned not to disgust at those who make a nasty performance of grief, but to a reappraisal of their work, particularly the needless haste to clear the site.

The World Trade Centre fell, rather neatly, into a tomb of its own foundations. It filled a slurry-walled box six storeys deep and piled to a height of up to five storeys above ground.

It became probably the most photographed pile of junk in history, but the cameras seldom went close enough to convey the magnitude of the twisted, mangled remnants.

And Langewiesche's description of the "unbuilding" does not convey it either. "Unbuilding" because in a place as dense as Lower Manhattan, that is how it had to be done, piece by gigantic piece.

The book is much more than a story of petty tensions. In the course of the clean-up there were potential disasters averted. For example, the slurry-walled box into which the buildings collapsed had been buttressed by the underground floors, now crushed.

If the walls had collapsed inwards, a widening crater could have threatened buildings and streets for blocks around. That seemed all too likely the day cracks appeared in Liberty St near the south wall.

Then there was an underground railway that looped through the Trade Centre basement from Jersey City across the river. If the line had ruptured, or groundwater had breached the slurry walls, water would have flowed through to central Jersey and back under the Hudson to flood the West Side subways.

Langewiesche had a gripping story to tell. Unfortunately his book is poorly organised, dealing with incidents as they come to mind rather than in a clearly sequenced narrative.

But if you are weary of the whole cult of the phony hero, this is a tale you will enjoy.