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

The way I personally look at it, I've been to calls with the New York Police Department and the New York Fire Department. To me we are all public servants, and that day at Ground Zero it showed. We all went in there, and we were all wearing the same color made out of the same cloth. We only have a twelve-hundred-man police force in Port Authority, but we all wear shields, we all wear uniforms. We all had a job to do.

Judy Jonas, Wife of Captain Jay Jonas
Ladder 6

An installer from the cable company came in to change our cable, and he said he was listening to the radio and heard a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. My first reaction was to call Jay and ask him about it because he works down there, in Chinatown. So, naïvely, I called the firehouse, and the line was busy. And a few minutes later my nephew, Jeremy Cassel, called—he's a firefighter with Squad 61—and said, "Are you watching this thing?"

I said yes, and was pretty calm. "Is Jay there?" I asked. I thought, The line was busy, and maybe he wasn't.

"Yeah, he's there, but it's a fire, and Jay is a pretty good firefighter."

I had a Cub Scout leaders' meeting scheduled, for a den mothers' conference, and Donna McLoughlin and Lynne Bachman came. We are all den leaders in Cub Scout Pack 63 in Goshen, New York. Donna's husband, John, is a Port Authority police sergeant, and he had actually set up the evacuation plan for the twin towers after the bombing in 1993. John was at work as well, in the twin towers. We sat in my kitchen with the television on, and Donna said, "I know John's not there. If he's there, he's working on the outside."

A neighbor called, who's in Rescue 3, and assured me that Jay was okay. It was just a fire. And I was okay until the first building came down. When I watched that, all of a sudden it wasn't just a fire anymore. I think I fell apart when that building came down, for I knew that my whole life could be falling apart with it.

Jeremy has asked me if I wanted him to go down, that he would go right away, and I thought, He has a wife and two children; I didn't want him to go. But the department had a recall, and he called again and gave me his cell number.

Donna and Lynne kept saying, "Oh, they evacuated that building. Everybody must be out." Jeremy and three other firefighters came into my kitchen on their way down, and he said, "Don't worry, we are going down to get him." Jeremy was a lifeline for me, for if Jay was in there, they would know what to do to get him out. They did calm me down a little bit before they left. In the next hour I had at least twenty-five calls, from family and friends, and then looking out of my window I see that a police car and the local fire chief's car are pulling into my driveway at the same time. This made me panic for a second. How could they know? But it was two of our friends stopping by to give me their numbers, and to say they are available for anything.

Then the second building collapsed, and I don't know why, but it wasn't affecting me the way it did when the first building did. I was upset, but it wasn't changing anything.

We have three phones, and they were all going at once. Someone called and said that Car 6 had called over the airwaves, and Jay used to be the volunteer chief here and he had Car 6, and I thought he was sending a message that he was okay. I said, Oh my gosh, this is great, reassuring. I called all three schools to find out what was happening with our children. I was concerned with Jennifer, who is 15, because they would have the television on in her school. I called the nurse and said just find her and tell her that her father is okay. And I was going to call John's school, he's 9, and Jane, who is 5, but the phone rang again, and I was told that it wasn't him, it was someone else. That made me feel very upset. Because now we're back to not knowing.

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