PARADE Magazine, July 21, 2002.
by Gail Sheehy

On Sept. 11, the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) lost 37 of its own–the largest loss of police officers in a single incident in U.S. history. For the next eight months, a band of grief-stricken survivors from the PAPD went to Ground Zero with the mission of bringing out their remains. The crews–all men–worked 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, in an extraordinary experiment in the human capacity to endure unceasing exposure to traumatic stress.

And they became a family.

But what would become of them after their work was done? The ravages of traumatic stress are slow in surfacing but can be more difficult to “cure” than physical injury. I went to Ground Zero to meet the recovery team, expecting the worst. I came away inspired.

The father of this team was Lt. Bill Keegan, the night commander for the PAPD at Ground Zero. This slight Irish-American with the face of a choir boy bore on his shoulders not only the weight of the souls of 37 friends and comrades but also the physical and psychological well-being of his 40 to 50 men.

“To be able to do this, day in, day out, takes a mental toughness,” said Keegan, 47, a 16-year veteran of the PAPD, which has jurisdiction over many airports, bridges, transit stations and tunnels in the New York City area. “Not to have contact with the outside world or much contact with your family. You’re here for 12 hours. It takes you an hour to get home. You sit around for an hour or so, go to sleep, get up, eat and go back to the pit.”

In good weather and bad, under the grinding din of heavy machinery and the bright glare of stadium lights, his men dug. Sometimes, a smell wafted over the ashes. The smell of death. A call would sputter over Keegan’s radio: “Think we got some legs.” That would be a good day. A bad day was when even the cadaver dogs slept.

How to begin?
Keegan faced the first challenge for himself and his crew on Sept. 12. Overwhelmed by helplessness and rage, he had stood immobilized in the ruins of the towers he’d watched being built as a kid–towers where his Police Academy graduation was held, where his precinct was housed–towers that had swallowed the lives of some of his best friends and ablest officers.

Finally, Keegan said to his men, “OK, we gotta start small. Let’s put together a plan. Let’s move some equipment in. Let’s clear this one little area.”

“You’re looking at 1.8 million tons of destruction,” he told me. “Maybe that night we only moved a couple hundred pounds, but we got set up. The next day we were ready to start.”

Terrible choices.
In the next eight months, Keegan and the crew would be tested over and over. One night, two of their comrades were found, but their bodies were pinned beneath steel so unstable, it looked as if it was breathing. One team tried to extricate the bodies, but the still-smoldering metal was unbearably hot. “I had to ask myself, should I send in my men again and risk more lives?” Keegan recalled. “If I waited and the steel shifted, I’d risk losing the remains of my brothers. If I were in the families’ shoes, what would I want done?”

Keegan sent in another team, led by Sgt. Kevin Devlin. They brought out one body, but only the legs of the second man were visible. A surgeon offered to sever the body. The PAPD chaplain, Father Baratelli, saw Keegan agonizing.

“Father,” Keegan appealed, “how can I order my friend cut in half?” The priest said if he could bring out the man’s head and heart and return them to his family, that would be enough comfort. Keegan had to tell him, “That isn’t the half we’d be getting.”

The priest put his arm around Keegan and said, “I can’t help you, son. Whatever decision you make, God will support you.”

Keegan sent his men in again. Somehow, the torso deflated and the whole body slipped out. “I took that as a sign,” Keegan recalled. “Some things are going to work out here.”

On angel’s wings.
The men grew close as they ate, joked, wept and risked injury together. Keegan knew, though, that the trauma was taking its toll. Hundreds of “mental health people” had descended on the site, but Keegan shooed them off. Instead, he reached out to a police widow who would know what his men were feeling.

Donna Lamonaco, 51, had lost her husband, a New Jersey state trooper, 20 years before when he was shot by a domestic terrorist bomber. In those days before grief counselors, the traumatized widow was treated like a mental case. “I’m not nuts, I’ve just lost my husband!” she recalled wanting to shout at the psychiatrists. Since then, Lamonaco has devoted her life to taking police survivors under her wing and serving as national president and currently New Jersey president of Concerns Of Police Survivors (COPS).

“We recognized in Donna’s eyes that she’d dealt with immense loss,” said Keegan. “That allowed her to connect with us.” At Keegan’s invitation, Lamonaco piled her 21-year-old daughter and another police survivor into her Jeep every Friday night. They arrived after midnight and hung tight until after sunrise, making a point to seek out every one of the men.

For the first weeks, the men’s faces were stony, their eyes bloodshot, and they moved like robots. “I’m just here to be with you,” Lamonaco told them. “You don’t have to talk. And I’m not taking names.” Gradually they gave up their first names, then consented to hugs. Eventually, Lamonaco got them to stop for a few minutes in the middle of raking through grit. “We gave them 20 minutes of laugh therapy,” she said.

Slowly, the men saved up their feelings to spill on her. A man who couldn’t sleep described the sound of falling bodies as they hit–the sound of watermelons bursting. How could he make it stop? Lamonaco suggested that, as he watched the bodies fall, he should imagine angels being there to catch them and take them home. The next time she saw the man, he shouted over the machinery to her: “You! I’m sleeping! It’s cuz of you!”

The final days.
At the end of May, Keegan and his team finally were pulled off the site. Then came the official “walkout,” with its bagpipes and funereal procession behind a flag-draped stretcher that symbolized every unfound body. Crewmen like Rudy Fernandez, who helped run the temporary morgue, felt honored to be a part of it: “There is nowhere I would rather have been. I’ll carry this the rest of my life,” he said. But when the men stopped back at the command trailer and stared at the final score, only slightly more than half of the 37 names on the board had a star beside them, indicating that a body, or part of one, had been recovered. “Not enough,” lamented one officer speaking for them all.

How to go on.
Apprehension ran high among the men in June as they were sent back to their old jobs of directing traffic or patrolling a bridge, tunnel or airport. How would they cope with the dullness of everyday life? Most fearsome of all, how would they get along without each other? Without the Ground Zero family?

“It’s my understanding that a lot of the trauma won’t hit for months to come,” Keegan told me. “It’s going to take us a while to break down the defenses that have enabled us to work here.”

Keegan himself got an inkling of that when he took his first days off in May to speak to a victims group. “I’d never had time to catalog the emotions,” he reflected, much less time for his family. He hadn’t spent more than an hour a day with his wife, Karen, and less with his three children. “When you have to go through those feelings, that’s the time that you start to fall apart.”

But thinking back on his time at the pit, Keegan did find a glimmer of hope. “As we started to try to reconcile this, we got the sense of so much good going on here,” he said. “So much brotherhood and sisterhood–we’ll probably never experience it again in our lives.

“The dichotomy of such evil, and then such goodness–you could see it in almost everything. The huge devastation is gone, and now there’s the emptiness. It’s almost like what’s been happening to us. That mountain of anger and hate you take into yourself, and then at some point you empty. Then you can start to build. What are you going to build? Hate? Or goodness? Somehow, out of all this, goodness has to win.”

Now They Must Go On…
The dismal story of rescue workers IN Oklahoma City points to the difficulties now facing the PAPD crew and their families. Starting 18 months after that terrorist bombing in 1995, many police and firefighters began reaping the whirlwind of survivor guilt–isolation from friends and family, divorces, alcoholism, gambling, suicides.

Bill Keegan is well aware of those lessons. So, in addition to the PAPD’s Cop-to-Cop stress program, he won the commitment of a team of psychologists and social workers to work with his men and their families for at least a year. The men will learn that there is a reason they don’t remember what their wives told them five minutes before. If they snap at their families or forget to pay their bills, that too can be related to post-traumatic stress. They will be taught how to spot the signs of suicidal behavior. Already, less than a month after the recovery ended, a Fire Department medic who had worked at Ground Zero took his own life.

Bill Keegan is committed to his new mission: not allowing any of his men to drift away into isolation. Donna Lamonaco intends to continue making the rounds of her “boys.” Between them, they will do all they can to keep the Ground Zero family together.