Mario Costagliola was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Staten Island. Mario was attending a Memorial Day parade as a high school senior in 1981, at the peak of the Iran hostage crisis, when the sight of a tank from the local Staten Island National Guard Battalion made him want to enlist. He joined the National Guard and did ROTC while attending college. He later served in the Army. After nearly thirty years of service, Mario retired in May of 2006 with the rank of colonel.
My two-year-old daughter wakes up crying. She’s sick.
I turn on the TV so she can watch cartoons. I’m debating whether I should go to work or take her to the doctor when the house phone rings. My brother Tommy is on the other end of the line.
“They’re bombing us,” he says, his voice filled with terror. “They’re bombing us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard a jet go right over the building. I think it hit us with a rocket.”
My brother works at the World Trade Center. He was there during the terrorist attack in 1993, when a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower.
“Where are you now?” I ask.
“Inside. I heard the jet and the explosion, but I can’t see anything and—”
“Get the hell out of there right now.”
I hang up my phone, about to go to the TV when I get another phone call, this one from one of the noncommissioned officers (NCOs) leading my Staten Island training unit.
“Hey, boss,” he says. “You better put on the news.”
I hang up and see that the news is on every channel.
One of the towers is burning, just like in a story I heard when I was a kid of the B-25 bomber plane that crashed into the Empire State Building during the early forties.
Has to be an accident. That’s the only explanation.
A second plane slams into the building.
Then I find out the Pentagon is burning.
Oh, my God, this is it.
We’re at war.
I put on my uniform. I grab my two 1911 45s and just start loading every magazine I have. Then I use the phone to call up my guys in the unit.
I can’t get through to anyone. All the phone lines are down.
The buildings fall.
I know deep in my soul that my brother is dead.
The news is advising everyone to stay inside. Cell phones and landlines are basically down. All roads and bridges are closed. Screw that. My daughter can stay home with my wife. I’m going to try to get into the city. It’s almost 10:00 a.m. when I hop into my little red BMW.
When I hit the road, all the traffic is pulled aside to make room for first responders. I follow, doing 120 mph.
Cops have set up a barricade. As soon as they see me in my uniform, they wave me through. When I get to the bridge, the toll guy says, “It’s about time they called you guys up.”
I’m on my way to my unit when I remember that my brother’s wife also works at the World Trade Center, at Cantor Fitzgerald on the one-hundred-something floor. I don’t have a cell phone, so I can’t call her—and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to get through.
She’s dead, too, I think. She’s a workaholic, never takes a day off. There’s no way she made it out of there alive.
I veer off the road and drive to my brother’s house.
I’m frantically ringing the doorbell when the door opens.
I feel like I’ve just seen a ghost.
Tommy’s wife is standing there. She knows what I’m thinking and says, “It’s the kids’ first day of school, so I took it off. Tommy’s all right. He got away. As soon as the first plane hit, he took off. He wasn’t up high, so he was able to get out. He’s on his way to the ferry.”
Back in my car and driving to my unit, I’m wondering how I’m going to call everyone in.
When I get there, I realize it doesn’t matter that the phones aren’t working. I didn’t have to make a single call. My unit has already arrived—and they’re not alone. Military guys from all services home on leave, veterans—everyone has shown up, ready to help.
September is a big time for people to go on leave because, until the end of the month, it’s use your time or lose it. A lot of key players are at a global training conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. My division, the 42nd, is at a conference at Fort Leavenworth for Warfighter, our major training event. The headquarters is in Albany, New York. A lot of those people are out of town—and now they can’t call in.
We wind up getting limited communication with some of the higher-ups. Each one says the exact same thing:
“Don’t do anything.”
The two battalion commanders and I say the opposite: “Hell, no, we’re going.” It’s been a long time since there was a major National Guard event, and the senior leadership is afraid of making a decision.
We end up losing communication with higher headquarters.
It’s the best thing that can happen. It allows us to focus on search and rescue. These buildings fell, there’s a bunch of people alive in all that rubble, and we’ve got to dig them out. We muster supplies and then head out to the local Home Depot.
The manager comes over to us and says, “What do you guys need?”
“Listen,” I say, “I don’t have the authority to authorize purchases—”
“We’re donating. Just tell us what you need.”
The Home Depot guys empty the store of gloves, rope, eye protection, chain saws, pry bars—everything we could possibly want. They load up two box trucks full of supplies.
“God bless you all,” the manager says. “Go do great things.”
Two firemen walk in the front of the store.
During fire season, these guys have to deal with their fire trucks getting stuck or sinking when they go off-road to fight brush fires on Staten Island. We’ve helped them out using our HEMTT wreckers and an M88, which in civilian-speak is a tank recovery vehicle. We’ve developed a good relationship with these guys.
The two firefighters are distraught. All their buddies are missing, and as I listen to them talk, it’s the first time I realize the magnitude of the loss we’re dealing with.
“Here’s the plan,” one of the firemen tells us. “The ice-skating rink on Staten Island is located right next to the ferry terminal. We’re going to set up a morgue there and we’ll do triage at the baseball field next door. Can you give us all your medics, anyone with any medical training?”
Our unit has a medical platoon, and we have guys with civilian jobs as nurses and EMTs. We round them all up and send them down to the baseball field.
We were expecting to head into the city, to dig people out of rubble. What we end up doing is organizing first responders—firemen and cops—to help deal with the people coming off the ferry. We set up a field-expedient morgue to collect the remains.
By early afternoon, the fire department puts out a call for generators because lower Manhattan has no power, and darkness is coming. When the ferries and volunteer boats drop people off at Staten Island, we put the generators on the boats to be brought back into the city.
I’m still trying to figure out what higher command wants me and the other units to do when I get a call from Brigadier General Ed Klein.
“Get your guys and get in there,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going on down there. But if you do nothing, I’ll fire you.”
That’s all I need to hear.
Our vehicles are already loaded up and the whole battalion is ready to roll.
A few hours earlier, one of my guys sent forward a captain to the city. He comes back and gives me a full report on the crash site. “There are body parts everywhere, people dead,” he tells us, “and the fires are still raging.”
Less than twenty-four hours later, at first light on the morning of September 12, we roll in a convoy into the city.
The rumor mill is saying that what happened yesterday is just the opening salvo. The cops are telling us that twenty EMT uniforms were stolen from Brooklyn and that they found an ambulance on the Verrazzano Bridge that was loaded with explosives. I’ve got everyone armed with weapons. The Humvees we’re driving have mounted machine guns.
Growing up in New York, I remember watching the World Trade Center—we called it the skeleton building—getting built. When I drive over the Verrazzano Bridge in the lead Humvee, all I see is a burning crater and black smoke.
That’s when it really hits me: the World Trade Center is gone.
I break down crying.
When we come through the Battery Tunnel, it looks like it’s snowing. A gray ash is raining down, covering everything.
It’s nuclear winter.
I link up with a police command post. They give us the perimeter of Ground Zero. We relieve the artillery guys who were there the night before, the medics, everyone. I’ve got a 113 tank parked in front of New York City Hall and a guy on a .50 caliber watching the Brooklyn Bridge.
The area around Ground Zero…it’s like time stopped. All the people are gone, and everything is covered with that gray ash. There are shoes on the road and cars and taxis with their doors hanging open. Everybody got out and just ran.
The next shock comes when I see several blocks of twisted, destroyed fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances. The technique to fight a high-rise fire is to set up a command post at the base of a tower. All the cops—specialized high-building rescue, command post guys, all that talent in the fire department—they prepared their whole lives for the day when they’d respond to such a fire, and they were there at the base of the towers when the buildings collapsed.
Everyone loves the military presence. Mayor Giuliani does not. He goes berserk about the tank parked in front of city hall and sends down one of his guys.
“What is this, The Siege? Get that tank out of here!”
I move the tank to Battery Park, where no one can see it.
As far as search and rescue, it starts to become a bucket brigade of tiny little body parts: a foot, a rib cage, or a hand, a piece of meat you can’t identify. That’s all that’s left.
Every night, we sleep in Battery Park. Every night, my last conscious thoughts are of my daughter, wondering what news she might have accidentally seen or overheard. We’re in this little isolated bubble—no newspapers or TV, limited phones. It feels like the whole world is coming apart around us, and mentally, that preys on a lot of guys.
In the beginning I’d thought, Hey, we’re going to find these people buried in the rubble. We’re going to get them out. It takes about a week for me to realize that nobody is coming out of this thing.
My fellow battalion commander says to me, “You know, we’re lucky that we’re in the right place at the right time. Everybody in America wants to be here helping, and we’re here actually doing it.”
I realize he’s right.
It also gets me thinking about two guys in my unit: a first sergeant and a mortarman named Tommy Jergens. They work together at the state courts office. When the planes hit, they ran down to the World Trade Center.
Tommy went down into a subterranean level of the World Trade Center to help some people get out. The building collapsed and he was killed, never seen again. The first sergeant got buried in some rubble. He dug himself out, drove home, took a shower, put on his army uniform, and reported to the unit.