Excerpt from Report From Ground Zero by Dennis Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The whole time we were both awake, and a couple of times he began to fall asleep, but I yelled to him, "Sarge, stay awake!"

So we were all alone now for hours. It is dark. I worry about fire because I can see flames every once in a while, and then they go away. I can see some light, off a way. I don't know what it is, but I hope it is a void someone will come into. The sarge says, "Look, they are going to go by the book. They won't come until morning because everything is unstable, and they will need daylight."

I say, "Hey, Sarge, I don't know if we can make it overnight." I am thinking of my wife, Allison, and my daughter, Bianca. She's just 4, and I want to see them again. And my wife is having a baby, a girl. We're going to call her Olivia. I ask God to let me see my little unborn Olivia, and somehow, in the future, to let me touch the baby.

Suddenly, now I hear a voice. "This is the United States Marine Corps. Is anybody here; can anybody hear us?" This is Staff Sergeant David Karnes and a Sergeant Thomas. I start wailing, "PAPD Officers down. 8-13."

Before I know it, he is on the pile above us, and I ask him, I say, "Please don't leave us. This is Officer Jimeno, who has a little girl and another on the way, and Sergeant McLoughlin is down here; he has four kids. Please don't leave us!"

And he says, "Buddy, I am not leaving you."

And I believed him, he just stayed. He got on the cell phone and made some calls to his wife, and his sister. His wife is in Manhattan, and his sister is in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and he told them where he is so they can send people to us. Rosemary, his wife, couldn't get through on the phone lines, but luckily Joy, his sister, got through from Allegheny. That was so smart to use both family members to call for help. He's an accountant, and he put on his Marine Corps clothes and came down from Wilton, Connecticut, to help. About a half hour later, the cavalry came. We are forty or fifty feet south of the golden globe in the middle of the plaza. There is a raging fire on top of us, and because everything is so sharp, the hose gets cut and they begin sending buckets of water up. There is a firefighter, Tommy Asher, who's at the front of the fire, and he gets so mad when one of his water cans, the CO2 cans, gets empty, he throws the can at the flames.

It takes them almost three hours to dig me out. I think my body just shut the pain off, but once they got the concrete off me then I really started to feel it. I had severe compartment syndrome, a crushing injury where the body swells up and the blood has nowhere to go. When they touch my leg, I am in such pain. The wall had fallen on my left side. My left leg is severely crushed, and my right foot has a very bad sprain, and is still swollen.

It takes about eight hours to dig Sergeant McLoughlin out. He's about fifteen feet back from me, but I keep talking to him all the while. He was completely pancaked. The ceiling came straight down on him. He wants more than anything for them to take the weight off. I hear him saying again and again, "Can you please relieve the pressure?" When I was on the Stokes basket and going up the hole, I said, "John, just hold on, they're getting you out." About a hundred firefighters and cops passed me out from group to group.

They take me to Bellevue, and I am in intensive care. They start doing tests, and connecting me to machines. Then they bring in Firefighter Tommy Asher. He was right there in the middle of all that smoke, and I guess he must have collapsed himself. I find out he's in Engine 75. But Asher checks himself out the next morning and goes back to fight the fires. I don't see John McLoughlin until two or three days later, and then only briefly, the back of his head, because they were taking him to the operating room. It was a week before I saw his face, and we really didn't talk for weeks. He is hurt bad, and it is all hard work for him.

Copyright 2002 Dennis Smith. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Viking.