The Heroes

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By Newsweek Editors

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Scott Paskewitz has always loved being a fireman. "No other job really piqued my interest," says the 29-year-old firefighter for Engine 58 on upper Fifth Avenue in Harlem. Growing up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, he got to know some of the guys in the local fire department. When he was in college, his dad encouraged him-- and his sister--to take the civil-service test (she's now a detective). He didn't really know much about firefighting, "but once I took the job I fell in love with it." And to Paskewitz, who's married with two kids and one on the way, it's really much more than a job. He plays outfield on the firehouse softball team, and after the games they always have a big barbecue. "I guess the camaraderie is the best part," he says. "It's like one big family."

Now that family is in deep mourning, after facing their biggest test on Sept. 11. "We were watching on TV when the call came in," Paskewitz remembers. "They announced over the PA that a plane had crashed into the Trade Center. We thought it was an accident." After the second plane crashed into the second tower, Engine 58 was called down. "We knew it was a huge fire," he says. "But we had no idea the World Trade Center was going to collapse. As a firefighter you get adrenaline going and you get excited and you're eager to do a good job."

When the firetruck got downtown, it couldn't get close to the site. So the guys hopped out and started on foot. "We were walking down West Street when people started jumping," Paskewitz says. "We saw the firefighter who got killed by one of the jumpers." He and his buddies went into the Marriott Hotel, which connected to both the North and the South Towers of the World Trade Center. For firefighters, the next moments were the most disastrous. "We heard rumbling and it was pitch black, and there was wind and shaking," he remembers. "It threw everybody on the ground. We were waiting for the ceiling to fall on us. Then it was like a panic situation--everybody was trying to get out. When we did find our way out, we realized we didn't have everybody."

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Paskewitz went back in with two of his fellow firefighters, Mike Fitzpatrick and John Wilson. There they found their lieutenant, Robert Nagel, trapped in the rubble. "We could see his hand and we could talk with him," says Paskewitz. "We had seven guys and he was worried about the other four." Nagel is a Vietnam vet and a 28-year veteran firefighter who "doesn't frazzle very easy," according to Paskewitz. "I'm in a tight spot but I'm all right," Nagel said to his men. Another company was there to help, and the captain sent Paskewitz to get a saw. "I ended up getting a gas-operated saw out of a rig that had been crushed and abandoned in the street. I had to pry open the door," he says. "Everything was covered in white. I looked up and the tower was gone. I couldn't believe it. I went back in."

About half an hour had passed. All of a sudden, everything began shaking again--the North Tower was imploding. "This time we knew what it was," says Paskewitz. "I felt the rush of air. I thought we were dead. When it stopped shaking, I found Mike. Now he was injured--he'd gotten his leg caught under the rubble. Our lieutenant had 10 yards of debris in front of him." They could no longer hear his voice. To get out of the building they had to climb a huge heap of steel. Paskewitz went ahead to get a chair stretcher for another injured firefighter they were going to carry out. He got to the top of the pile of twisted metal. "It was eerie because there were thousands of people standing around looking when we first got there," he says. "Now we didn't see another person."

A rescue company was just coming to the scene. Paskewitz and his friends wanted to show them where their lieutenant was, but they couldn't go back in--a fire had started. So they went to find the other men in their company, down by the river. Mike could barely walk. Scotty's eyes were killing him--he would turn out to have serious corneal abrasions from the dust and the acid it contained. When the company regrouped, he and his brother firemen just wanted to go back and get Lieutenant Nagel. Eventually two of them got to try. "Me and John were able to go back in with the rescue company," says Paskewitz. "They were trying to tunnel in. But the problem is, if you move things from the pile, more stuff collapses." Paskewitz and Wilson got more tools and went back in a third time. "We were trying to get to where he is but just couldn't do it. But we didn't want to leave--we knew where he was. I stayed six hours."

"It's hard," Paskewitz says now. "I don't think I was a hero. There's a lot of guys in there who were doing the same thing. I'm just lucky I made it out alive. Lieutenant Nagel is such a good person, such a great leader. I'm sure it would have killed him if it was one of us who was missing. Right up until his last communication to us, he was worried about the guys."

If the shades in the conference room had been open on the morning of Sept. 11, Navinderdeep Singh Nijher probably would have seen the airliners hit the World Trade Center. But the 29-year-old surgery resident at Brooklyn's Maimonides Medical Center was sitting in the dark with his colleagues, looking at slides of X-rays; not until an attending physician burst in with the news did they go to the window, raise the shades and look out to see smoke and fire issuing from the towers just across the East River. Nijher, a Sikh who wears his religion's obligatory turban and beard, came to the United States when he was a year old and grew up in Middle American Corning, N.Y. "He's been here ever since he can remember," says a fellow doctor. "He's more American than Indian." Since the disaster Nijher has had a chance to see both the best and the worst of his adopted country.

That Tuesday morning, Nijher was first dispatched to the nearby Lutheran Medical Center's Level 1 Trauma Center. They were prepared to treat as many as 700 patients who might arrive by ambulance through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel; not one, of course, ever arrived. So at around 11 o'clock, he answered a call for volunteers to go directly to the scene of the disaster, along with two Indian-born colleagues, Dr. Ravi Kothuru, a 34-year-old cardiothoracic-surgery fellow, and Dr. Ravi Pulipati, 26, a second-year general-surgery resident. "My first reaction," Nijher says, "was just, anything we could do, we wanted to do it. As soon as the idea surfaced, we immediately volunteered."

They were driven over the Brooklyn Bridge in an ambulance, and when they reached downtown Manhattan, Nijher says, the ash made the city look like "a cold winter after a nuclear holocaust." They walked from city hall over to the West Side Highway. "As we rounded the corner, it really hit you," Nijher recalls. "The main walkway connecting the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center was down, and you could see flames in the World Trade Center building. There was a completely different smell--it may have been jet fuel. A very nauseating, pungent smell."

As the collapsed towers continued to burn, the three doctors helped set up a triage center at the Embassy Suites hotel on Vesey Street. Most of the cases they saw were smoke-related; they administered oxygen and washed out burning eyes with saline solution. At 5:20 p.m., the nearby 7 World Trade Center also came tumbling down, and the triage center was moved a block closer to Ground Zero, to the east lobby of the American Express building. There they also set up a temporary morgue. If they could find even one survivor, they thought, this would all be worthwhile. And eventually they did: a dehydrated and disoriented man who thought he'd just taken a ferry ride and was in New Jersey. They treated a small cut, hooked him up to IV saline solution and got him to an ambulance.

Then came the bodies.

A person has to be pronounced dead before being sent to a morgue, and with few living people to treat, Nijher and his colleagues began opening body bags and looking inside. Not for long. Nijher stopped checking after the first few. "I've seen trauma before," Nijher says. "People run over by subway cars, et cetera. I've seen very bad things. But here, everyone was buried in that ash. When you see someone with a gunshot wound or run over, they still have their skin tone--African-American or whatever. Here everyone was the same color." A fireman came in, weeping and hyperventilating; his buddy was in one of the body bags. But he pushed away the proffered oxygen, got to his feet again and said, "I have to go back to help." Nijher never saw him again.

By around midnight, Nijher and his friends realized there was little more they could do. There were no more survivors, and few more recovered bodies. They hitched a ride back to Brooklyn aboard a small private boat--in order to get some sleep before they went back on regularly scheduled duty at the hospital at 6 a.m. "That next day," Nijher says, "was a weird experience. Everyone heard we were at Ground Zero and wanted to know about it. I kept thinking, 'It may seem great to you, but what I saw down there I don't want to ever see again.' I just wanted to keep myself busy the entire day, and I ended up operating till 8 p.m." But Nijher was also on call Wednesday night, which meant that he had to stay awake until his shift ended at 1 o'clock on Thursday afternoon. Only then did he go home, to his apartment in Manhattan.

Which should have been the end of this story. At the disaster site, Nijher says, "nobody cared about anyone's color, anyone's creed. Everyone was working for the same common goal, to find any survivors and treat anyone we could." Having been too busy to keep up with the news reports, Nijher was unprepared for any backlash--and anyhow, it had nothing to do with him, since Sikhs are neither Muslims nor Arabs. He'd taken pictures at Ground Zero--"for posterity, I guess"--and on Thursday he took the film to a photo shop two blocks from his apartment. "I said to the guy behind the counter, 'I'd like to get these pictures developed in an hour. Is that possible?' He said, 'Yeah, sure.' I said, 'How much is that going to be?' And he said to me, 'For you people? Five hundred dollars.' I looked at him and said, 'Well, maybe you should see what these are pictures of'."

Shirley Shum's fifth-grade class at PS 234 in lower Manhattan was studying the Constitution. Shum, an energetic 27-year-old who'd been spending her spare time training for the New York City Marathon, was helping the kids craft their own version of the document. "We the students of class 305, in order to form a more perfect and cohesive community..." began their treatise, written in black marker on a big piece of poster board. Among their 10 articles: "help someone whenever needed; be honest with oneself and others; do your best and try your best in everything you do." The bottom of the poster was left blank: that was where the 31 children were going to sign their names when they ratified their Constitution on Sept. 11. They never got the chance to do that.

That Tuesday morning was sunny and sparkling as parents began dropping their kids off in the schoolyard of PS 234, in the shadow of the World Trade Center just three blocks to the south. At 8:40 the teachers took each class inside, as they did every day. It was early enough that almost no one was outdoors to see the first plane hit the North Tower. But inside the school, people could hear it. "Quite honestly, I thought it was a car crashing," recalls teacher Elizabeth Keim, 38, who in the past had taken her first graders on field trips to the top of the World Trade Center. Some parents immediately came back to school to claim their kids. The principal, Anna Switzer, assumed at first that the crash was an isolated incident; then she went on the PA to tell teachers with classrooms on the south side--with a view toward the Twin Towers--to pull down the shades (so the students couldn't see what was happening). It wasn't long before Switzer knew there was a serious crisis.

What do teachers do when everyone's security is threatened? Like teachers all over lower Manhattan, those at PS 234 did their best to appear calm and look after their kids. As school administrators tried to phone parents to get them to pick up their children, the teachers evacuated their classrooms, first to the auditorium on the second floor, then to the gym on the first floor and finally to the basement. At one point the lights flickered and alarm bells went off. Still the teachers tried to keep their pupils occupied, reading stories or drawing. Waves of arriving parents brought details of the attacks--of terrorists, the hijackings, the debris and panic outside. Some of the parents were losing it. "One PTA dad who was a former Marine stood at the door and made sure every parent was calm enough to come into the building--and actually belonged there," says Switzer. The youngest kids didn't get what was happening but sensed something was wrong. "They didn't know if it was bad guys or if it was a fire," recalls first-grade teacher Robin Weiswasser, 32. "But one little boy turned to me and said, 'Do you think people died?' And I said, 'Yes, I think a lot of people died'."

About 70 of the 660 students were left around 10 a.m., when the school was ordered to evacuate. Teachers grabbed kids by the hand and rushed to the street--and found it clogged with acrid smoke, fleeing pedestrians and the sounds of screaming sirens. Second-grade teacher Mary Jacob, 26, got out with a 7-year-old boy just as the second tower collapsed. She didn't think she could outrun the thick cloud of blackness roiling toward them; when her legs gave out, she let go of his little hand and told him to run. "God forbid something was to happen, I didn't want it to happen to him," she recalls. "So I was like, 'Go, you'll be OK'." Then Jacob realized the black smoke had stopped its inexorable rush forward--and it was her turn to be saved. The little boy came back for her and said, "C'mon. Let's go."

The teachers had agreed to meet at PS 41, a mile north, and everyone met up there safely. Shum had walked with another teacher and five children. "Our kids were so brave," she says tearfully. Keim had helped a colleague who was eight months pregnant escape the building; then she saw another teacher struggling with a kindergartner, so she picked up the little girl and just ran with her. Weiswasser was among the last teachers to leave, when the cloud of ash was at its worst. She had a 6-year-old, Daniel, in tow. "I never imagined how bad it was," she says. "It was in your ears and eyes and all around. I told Daniel to pull up his T shirt to cover his mouth. He never cried at all." But Weiswasser did--her mom, Lois Weiswasser, is the principal of PS 41, and when she saw her there she burst into tears. Her mother hugged her and said, "Don't let the kids see you cry." The children had their lunch, and then got crayons, paper and blocks to play with until their moms or dads arrived. Some kids drew the Twin Towers with holes in them; some took the blocks and built skyscrapers.

New York City schools stayed closed for just one day, but the kids from PS 234, like other downtown pupils, are studying in temporary quarters. They're crammed into PS 41 for the time being, until the rescue and cleanup of the World Trade Center disaster has progressed enough to make their neighborhood safe again. Fortunately, their school building is structurally sound--there's just a lot of dust everywhere. And in Shirley Shum's fifth-grade classroom, a big poster is still pinned to the board. The Constitution is awaiting its signatures.

Back in 1970, Paul Gaulden, 26, lean and tough and fresh from a tour in Vietnam, managed to hook up with one of those Johnson-era affirmative-action programs that could get him into a trade school; he decided to become an apprentice ironworker simply because that seemed to offer the best pay. The first job site they sent him to was in downtown Manhattan, where Local 40 of the Ironworkers Union was helping to put up the second tower of something called the World Trade Center. "Now, I'm from the South Bronx," Gaulden recalls today, "and I didn't know where it was. I thought the boss was going to blow his stack. He said, 'Are you kidding me? This is the biggest job in the world!' I told him, 'Hey, just point me the way and I'll go.' And he said to me, 'Listen, you go downstairs, you get on the bus, and you get off when you spot the tallest building you've ever seen'."

The morning after the terrorist attacks took the Trade Center down, Gaulden, now 57, two years from retirement and a grandfather six times over, headed back to what was left of the towers he'd helped to build. If there were any survivors, the rescue effort would need ironworkers to get them out: cutting, handling and hauling metal is their craft, so hundreds of them went straight to the front lines. Gaulden is still lean and athletic--and he's still proud to let you know that his high-school basketball team once beat a team led by Lew Alcindor (who later, of course, changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). But his face is lined, his chin stubble has turned gray and he's seen enough over the years to make him a realist. He knew there was little chance they'd find anyone alive, despite a series of false alerts and imagined signals for help. "One time I was cutting some iron and some fireman ran over--they thought they heard something," he says. "They sent the dogs in to sniff around. But all they sniffed out was a body." Being back at the Twin Towers reminded Gaulden less of his first day on the job than of a day in Vietnam, when his helicopter unit touched down on a mountaintop after the Viet Cong had killed all the American troops stationed there. "When I got down to the World Trade Center, it was that same deathly quiet. Nobody talked. What were you going to say? People just did what they had to do."

Back when they were building the towers, Gaulden had started out as little more than a gofer. He fetched tools, bolts, cups of coffee--whatever the experienced tradesmen needed. He didn't mind: the work dazzled him like nothing else ever had, before or since. "Watching the building being erected was like going to the moon," he says. "They had four kangaroo cranes around the building. Those things could pick up 25 tons of iron just in one snatch." Most of all, he loved the guys. In those days, ironworkers were "the last of the cowboys. They did things their own way. They'd walk around with their wrenches around their waists and you could hear them going cling-cling. I made friends on that job that are still my friends 30 years later."

Last week that camaraderie may have come back again, but the cocky attitude was long gone. The ironworkers pulled desperately long shifts. They kept on working until relief showed up, and in the first chaotic days of the rescue effort their replacements had trouble getting through the police checkpoints restricting access to the site; eight-hour shifts stretched to 10, to 12 and sometimes more. And the work was dangerous. "They've got these big claws pulling that iron out and they're passing it right over our heads," Gaulden says. "Ironworkers, we don't pass things over guys' heads. There's a method to our madness. They had wreckers in there who only knew how to pull buildings down. We cut a building down, we don't just yank it out." Moreover, they lived in constant dread of explosions. "When I'm using the torch on a pile of metal, I have no idea what's underneath--and there's sparks flying everywhere. I could be over a gas tank, an oxygen tank from one of the buried firetrucks. Once I was doing some burning and a giant flame puffed up right in front of me. I thought I hit a gas tank, but it was 11 o'clock at night and I couldn't really see a thing. They've got lights set up but it's nothing like daylight. It singed my eyebrows. That close."

The voice you hear on Gaulden's answering machine still sounds warm, soulful, upbeat. "Hey, this is Mr. G! I'm not in, so leave a message. Peace and love!" But after five days of exposure to the soot and dust and ash from the World Trade Center, his speaking voice is now weak and grainy; he sits in a Manhattan diner wearing his blue Local 40 T shirt, an engineer cap, black jeans and scuffed work boots, drinking chicken soup and hot tea to soothe a throat infection. He says he's looking forward to his retirement, to spending more time both with his grandkids and working out in the gym. "If I have a day off, if I can spend four hours in there, I'm as happy as I can be." And he has no intention of moving out of New York. "Where else can you go out at 2 in the morning, have dinner in a Mexican restaurant, go listen to some jazz? There's nowhere else. I've been all over, but I love this town. I'll be right here." But if they choose to rebuild the Trade Center before he retires, he hopes they'll count him out. "My heart's not in it this time," he says. "I'd rather work on a bridge somewhere than go back."

Daddy, why is it snowing?" asked 4-year-old Daniela Pintabona shortly after the horrific collapse of the World Trade Center towers. From the roof of their house in Brooklyn, her dad, Don Pintabona, 41, collected flakes of debris and paper falling from the sky as the winds blew east from the tip of Manhattan. For hours he stayed glued to his TV; then, he recalls, he "needed to get off my butt" and do something. Pintabona is the executive chef at the chic Tribeca Grill, co-owned by Robert De Niro, which sits just 11 blocks north of Ground Zero. With the surrounding neighborhood closed by police, the restaurant couldn't stay open to the public--so Pintabona figured he'd use the kitchen to help make food for the masses of police, firemen and rescue teams who were working round the clock combing the rubble for survivors.

Though there were thousands of mouths to feed, the problem wasn't in cooking--there were lots of New York City chefs eager to help--it was getting the meals to the workers at the World Trade Center site. The obstacles were the tight security checkpoints and horrendous traffic snarls. "It was an absolute nightmare," says Pintabona. "We had food donated from every part of America, but the thing was, it wasn't getting downtown, it wasn't getting to the workers." When a fellow chef joked they should ship the meals by water, Pintabona thought, why not? "We're an island, surrounded by water," he recalls thinking. "Why's everyone trying to get down by road?"

Through friends, he got in touch with Spirit Cruises, which owns dinner-cruise vessels that sail the Hudson River. After getting the necessary permits, Chefs With Spirit was ready to serve three days after the attacks, aboard a 192-foot boat tied up at a marina at Battery Park City, just across the road from the devastation. "If you open a restaurant, it's really mass confusion for about a month," says Pintabona. "This operation we got up and running in 32 hours, serving up to 15,000 people a day." Hundreds of chefs and kitchen workers volunteered for the effort, including students from Manhattan culinary schools, plus famous names like Gray Kunz (former chef at Lespinasse), Daniel Boulud (of Daniel) and Charlie Palmer (owner of Aureole). Their restaurants also donated food and helped prepare dishes from the large quantity of edibles donated by companies around the nation.

The ship has four decks--one crammed with blankets and pillows so the emergency workers can grab some sleep--and two of the decks have tables and big buffets. At first, most of the food was prepared in city restaurants and then delivered to Chelsea Piers, where it was ferried down the Hudson to the main vessel--thus avoiding the downtown traffic jams. Soon the boat became such a popular place for rescue workers to take a break from their exhausting and painful tasks that Pintabona and his cohorts also relied on donations of meals from big companies like Stouffer's. So what have the heroes of New York's massive rescue operation been getting to nosh on? "What's working out best is pretty simple, homey comfort food," says Pintabona. "We try to balance it with one vegetable, one starch, one protein, maybe a pasta." But when celebrity chefs make mac and cheese, it's not exactly home cooking. One day Boulud, whose signature restaurant has five stars, made meat loaf with prime sirloin. The reviews beat anything the chefs ever got from Zagat. "A guy came up to me and said, 'Look, I gotta tell you, this is the best meal I've ever had in my life, and I've never been on a boat!' " recalls Pintabona. "It was so cute how he said it." A fire chief from Battalion 21 of the New York Fire Department left a note on a paper plate: "Dear chefs, thank you for a wonderful meal and a clean place to eat. It has meant more than you could ever imagine."

Small neighborhood restaurants have also made donations to the ship, including Chinese, Indian and Mexican cuisine. And ordinary New Yorkers have wanted to take part, an effort that's especially touched Pintabona. "One woman came with lunch bags, like my mother used to make," he recalls. "You know, a brown paper bag with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a candy bar and a folded napkin. A hundred of them. A guy came down the pier in his electric wheelchair and said, 'Please, please, please take the bag in back of me. I made these sandwiches--would you give them to the men?' It's just mind-blowing."

The ship has been so successful that the chefs have asked the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Operation to take over, and the floating restaurant and haven will stay open for now. Pintabona is back at Tribeca Grill, though he's dividing his time between the restaurant and the ship. Even when his life does return to normal, he won't be the same. The first evening the ship was up and running, Pintabona was working so hard he spent the night onboard. Yet he couldn't sleep, he was so in awe of the people on deck next to him. "On my right was a policewoman, on her right was a fireman, on his right was a National Guardsman. There was every branch of service, every type of uniform," he recalls. "I'll never forget this, just the effort of everybody--thousands of people with no purpose other than to help the relief and search for survivors and just clean up the mess."

Farooq Muhammad and his boss, New York City Fire Department Capt. Jay Swithers, had both grown up in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge. Swithers called him "Faroo," razzed him about the FDNY baseball cap he never took off--and until recently had somehow never put it together that Muhammad was a Muslim. He was born in the United States; in the 1970s his parents had come to Brooklyn from a part of Kashmir long under dispute between Pakistan and India. Muhammad's parents speak Urdu, Pakistan's national language, but they taught him their homeland's Punjabi dialect. Swithers knew none of this. "Bay Ridge has people from a lot of different backgrounds," Swithers says. "I really didn't care what he was. He was just another guy to me."

Muhammad is 26, an emergency medical technician who on Sept. 11 had been given temporary desk duty because of a painful shoulder injury. More galling than the pain was knowing that although he'd completed his paramedic training, he couldn't actually be certified until he got back on active duty. He was driving to work that morning on Flatbush Avenue when he noticed smoke coming from somewhere in lower Manhattan. He parked in his usual lot, got the hard-to-believe news that two airliners had crashed into the World Trade Center and, although no one ordered him to go--no one, including Swithers, was there to order him to go--he and four co-workers headed for the Twin Towers to try to lend a hand.

When they arrived at the site, the South Tower hadn't yet collapsed. Muhammad worked with paramedics and EMTs on the scene to set up a triage area. Most of the patients who arrived were on their feet and in OK condition: asthma, smoke inhalation, panic attacks. On the the other hand, the few burn victims they saw were in bad shape. "I remember a man whose whole face was peeled off," says Muhammad. "A black gentleman. All you saw was blood. Just as he came out, the building gave way." What followed was the most terrifying thing Muhammad had ever seen. "I looked up and I saw it coming apart like a banana, peeling. It looked frozen for a moment--it seems slow in my mind, but it was quick. When I caught my senses, I was screaming at people to run, to move. Then the cloud passed me and I was in it and suffocating. I thought I was going to pass out and die. I heard a voice say, 'Keep running! Keep running!' "

Eventually Muhammad found a safe haven in what he thinks may have been a fabric store, collected himself, went out again and wound up taking refuge in a kitchen. When he'd recovered from the smoke and coughed up some ash, he got back to work. He helped a hysterical woman with a broken leg to a place where she could be comfortable--and not spread her panic to others. He and a couple of men he'd just met got wet rags and bottled water and headed outside again--just as the North Tower collapsed. "I saw hundreds of people running toward us. When the debris came, I closed the door, then opened it and let as many people in as we could. Then it got so black you couldn't see the door."

When the dust settled enough for them to be able to see again, Muhammad and the two men went back out into the streets with their rags and water. And in about 10 minutes, he ran into Captain Swithers, "in a daze, pretty beat up. He said he had a ruptured eardrum, and his finger was all crooked. But he was alert and responsive. First thing I did was I hugged him, then I told the other two gentlemen I was going to stay with him." Muhammad and Swithers made their way through the crowds of limping, weeping, bleeding, ash-covered refugees to a triage center that had been set up at South Street Seaport. And it was there that he noticed people staring at his dark-skinned face and his Islamic name on the FDNY polo shirt he was wearing--even as he continued to wrap sprained ankles and bandage lacerations. "I felt ashamed," he said. "Looking back, I feel ashamed for feeling ashamed."

Meanwhile, back in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, a mob was gathering outside a mosque where Muhammad's father goes each day to pray. His parents wear traditional Muslim garb, and when Muhammad heard about the wave of angry attacks on American Muslims, he managed to get to a telephone and warn them not to leave the house. His mother still won't go out. "She's very frightened," Muhammad says. "She condemns those people who did it. And she constantly cries. I saw her yesterday; all she did was cry. She was crying when I left."

At 3 or 4 on the morning of Sept. 12, Muhammad finally got to bed, "completely depressed. So depressed. To this day, I'm so depressed." But at least he can reflect on what happened 10 days after the disaster, when he and Captain Swithers finally ran into each other at headquarters for the first time since the attack. "Muslims aren't like this," he felt compelled to tell Swithers. "They're peaceful people." Swithers simply said, "I know."

On the very last night of old New York, Jerry Hauer was going about the ordinary business of an extraordinary life. He lingered with John O'Neill, one of his oldest friends, over dinner at Elaine's, a favorite clubhouse of the establishment. By coincidence, until very recently the two had been among the most visible players in the United States' antiterror bulwark. Hauer, 49, was director of the New York City Office of Emergency Management, responsible for navigating the city through the dust of any sort of terrorist attack. He retired last year and now lectures and consults on terror preparedness as a managing director of Kroll, the global security firm.

For 25 years, O'Neill, 49, was a decorated FBI agent, most recently heading the bureau's national-security operations in New York. He probed the USS Cole attack, as well as terror campaigns in Nairobi and Tanzania. It was O'Neill who headed the bureau's investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In fact, before retiring a month earlier, he was among the government's most fluent experts on Osama bin Laden. Hauer helped him land his cushy private-sector job just two weeks before--as security chief at the World Trade Center.

They capped off their evening past 2 at the legendary China Club in midtown. Hauer dialed his friend frantically the next morning. "I was hoping and praying," he says, "that John was late getting to work." Not only was John O'Neill on time, but after smoothly evacuating his 34th-floor office, he was last seen racing back into the building to help others flee.

Driven by grief, Hauer leaped back in the saddle. He reached Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, who named him a senior adviser for national-security issues and had him look for evidence of biological warfare (none was detected). He has remained a strategic adviser since. Rudy Giuliani called upon Hauer--once dubbed "the Master of Disaster"--to relocate and expand the overflowing center where dazed relatives awaited any word from Ground Zero. "I told him I'd do anything to help," Hauer recalls.

Brandishing mementos and DNA samples, 4,316 grief-stricken families showed up at the passenger pier he commandeered along the Hudson River at 54th Street. Nobody got the answers they prayed for there. But they found ample Kleenex, translators, ministers and mental-health counselors, monks and rabbis, food and understanding. At Hauer's direction, a 75-foot-long wall was erected outside, and soon it filled with thousands of heartbreaking fliers, plaints and photos. The center, off-limits to the press, became a nexus of sadness and healing. Candice Bergen and Bette Midler sang "God Bless America" there. Bill Clinton visited three times. "We drove past the center and that wall is there," the former president said, "and I still can't bear to look at it."

Giuliani then tapped Hauer for an elite team of terror experts making top-secret contingency plans in case those responsible for the World Trade Center attack try a biological or chemical reprise. But as the veneer of city civility began to buckle, some branded Hauer an unwelcome interloper, an "extraordinary disruption" who "tried to inject himself in everything," according to Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota. The mayor himself cut ties eventually, furious that Hauer appeared at a press conference for Democratic mayoral candidate Mark Green--a sign that New York's unique disposition was rising again from the ashes.

Giuliani first hired Hauer following the 1993 WTC bombing and named him architect of the city's response to catastrophic tragedies. The plans he put in place, which were implemented on Sept. 11, were widely praised for anticipating everything from massive casualties to blood drives to the legions of volunteers who washed into town. New York City Police Chief Bernard Kerik respectfully suggests that the president's new Office of Homeland Security take a page from the city's playbook.

But there was one thing even Hauer hadn't figured on: his own emotional devastation following this assault. "What can I say? I lost one of my best friends," he says, knitting trembling fingers. "That loss is incredible. "

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