The Burger King on the corner of Liberty and Church streets looked like it had been bombed. Emergency workers gathered, silent, sheltering from dust and smoke. Shattered windows offered little protection.
A doctor ran in, screaming that firefighters found someone. He begged the roughly 50 people in the restaurant for a hard hat. Everyone had one, but no one offered. Chris O’Brien, shocked that no one would help, handed his over. He never saw it, or the doctor, again.
Outside, fires burned. Black smoke blocked out the morning sun. Grayish dust filled the air. It was so thick that one of the first ambulances on the scene broke down because its engine had become too clogged to run.
O’Brien knew right away it wasn’t safe to breathe. When his platoon docked at the Manhattan ferry terminal, he had one box of masks and one on his face.
From the darkness emerged two children, covered in dust. One had a mask, one didn’t. It took the Coast Guard reservist only a minute to empty his box into the hands of New Yorkers running towards the river, so he gave the kid his own.
Venturing further into Lower Manhattan, O’Brien saw what they were running from.
Fire trucks lay overturned. Twisted ladders clattered to the ground. Chunks of buildings fell. Structural girders landed on sidewalks, ripped apart. First responders swarmed the rubble, searching for survivors.
“They called it the pile.”
——————————
Just after eight, on the morning of September 11, 2001, O’Brien reported to the St. George Coast Guard Station on Staten Island for his annual two weeks of duty as a Marine Inspector. When the planes hit the World Trade Center, he and seven others used the Staten Island Ferry to evacuate people fleeing Ground Zero.
Battling fire, smoke, and dust — dust that would later sicken nearly 10,000 people, and kill more than 2,000, according to Mount Sinai Hospital — O’Brien and his fellow servicemen worked for hours. They built a triage center in the terminal, searched nearby office buildings for casualties, and dug through the ruins of the Twin Towers, “looking for miracles.”
Though he saw “mind-blowing” destruction that day, in the years after, O’Brien didn’t discuss his experience, until finally opening up to his wife in 2021. He only publicly shared his story in September, at an event commemorating the attack’s 21st anniversary.
“Probably a mistake, but I kept very quiet about it, the whole experience, for 20 years,” O’Brien says.
That night, when the platoon returned to base, sweaty and covered in dust, a senior lieutenant “took one look at us, told us to get in the showers right now.”
All day, O’Brien was in shock; he didn’t feel hunger or thirst, let alone stop to eat. “It was a strange feeling, kind of felt like I wasn’t ready to wash it off of me.”
When he met his family at his mother-in-law’s house, uptown enough to avoid the smoke, his wife asked him about work. He didn’t say much. She and her mother wondered what groups were responsible: “Their perspective was getting into the who’s and the why’s,” he says.
“I was still in the, ‘what had happened to me’ frame of mind.” Chuckling, he admits, “The two didn’t come together too well.”
The next day, “still a little bit numb,” O’Brien wrote down everything he did at Ground Zero, in an essay he described as “a matter-of-fact memory of what I saw.” He sent this essay to family and friends, then didn’t speak in depth about his experience again for the next two decades.
In that time, O’Brien had another child, left the Coast Guard, moved uptown, and got a job in data analytics, helping the intelligence community “find the needle in the haystack.” Not elaborating on the nature of his work, he adds “it was because of the 9/11 experience that I ended up there.” He quit after 12 years, having become critical of the American military response in the Middle East.
Shortly before the 20th anniversary of the attack, O’Brien’s son was assigned a college paper about 9/11, and asked his father about his experience. “He called and asked, and I did share with him. That kind of cracked the seal a little bit.” When the day came, he spoke, and his wife listened. This listening was, and is, very important to him.
“It was like when you go into confession,” he says. Although, at least according to his Irish Catholic upbringing, confession implies wrongdoing, “I don’t think I did anything wrong, but it felt foreign coming out of me.”
——————————
Soon after arriving at work that sunny September Tuesday, he noticed “a shadow passed over the bullpen.” He and his coworkers looked across the river to see smoke rising from the North Tower.
“From the distance, it didn’t look like much,” he says.
In the moment, O’Brien remembered the 1993 attack on the WTC: a comparatively smaller bombing in the towers’ basement perpetrated by Al-Qaeda terrorists, killing six. Chuckling, he admits he first thought, “Aw, that kinda sucks.”
Moments later, the office heard the report that it wasn’t a simple fire, that a “Cessna” had crashed into the building. “Very soon thereafter, the second plane came in, and everybody went into military response mode.”
O’Brien and seven other servicemen were sent to take “military control” of the Staten Island Ferry and sail to Manhattan.
“About three-quarters of the way across, right off Governors Island, that’s when the first tower came down,” he says. O’Brien remembers a cloud of dust and smoke blanketing the river. “We stopped, dead in our tracks, we couldn’t see anything.”
When the wind shifted, they kept going, reaching the ferry terminal. O’Brien says “hundreds and hundreds” of people had rushed to the river, trying to escape the smoke.
“Tugboats and passenger boats and ferry boats were pulling up wherever they could alongside the waterfront to take people off. It was school kids, it was business people, you know, everybody.”
When they docked, O’Brien realized, “we were at war.”
The group turned the upstairs lobby of the terminal into a triage center. Large wooden benches were pushed aside or used as “makeshift beds.” Paramedics from the broken-down ambulance walked over with all the medical supplies they could carry. Though the air was better inside, the dust sifted in anyway. It was on people’s clothes. In their hair. Caked in the tracks and grooves of their shoes. O’Brien remembers the early morning sun shining through a high window. “It was dust-eerie.”
Through all of the shock, danger, and uncertainty, O’Brien was never afraid. “I’m not sure what I felt, actually, time kind of stood still, and it kind of ran at the same time.” Unconcerned for his own safety, he worried only for those around him: children coughing; a injured pregnant woman; doctors coming in off the street to help.
The waterfront evacuation ended around 2 that afternoon, so, leaving two men at the terminal, O’Brien and five others approached Ground Zero. First they combed the surrounding office buildings for stragglers, and finding them empty, joined rescue efforts on the pile.
Though they discovered no one living, “we did manage to find a couple of people who were recovered and taken out.” When firefighters evacuated the pile due to a gas leak, O’Brien got through jammed phone lines to his commanding officer, who ordered them back to base.
After working nearly 12 hours non-stop, he left Ground Zero. “I caught a tugboat back to Staten Island at sunset.”
——————————
Just after eight, on the morning of September 11, 2021, O’Brien stood on the boardwalk in Carl Schurz Park, just a few blocks from home. In an emotional speech, at times halting to keep tears from falling, he told his harrowing story to a few dozen community members, gathered in remembrance.
Speaking publicly about his 9/11 experience for the first time — 21 years to the day after it all happened — felt like “I had just opened a firehose, I felt what I was saying really flowing out of me, I wasn’t exactly sure how to slow it down or turn it off,” he said, reflecting on finally opening up. Standing on cobblestones between a state assemblywoman and a local restaurant owner, O’Brien’s grayish curls slowly danced in the light wind. Microphone in one hand, he used the other to gesture the scale of calamity he saw that day, and what he’s felt since.
After “keeping the vault locked” for 20 years, talking about that day has been healing for O’Brien. It felt like “closing a book, not turning a page or [going to] the next chapter.”
As for the personal impact of the attack, O’Brien says, “I see the world in a very different way than I did back then. I’m not the same person I was back then, I’m somebody different.” Unburdening himself to a small crowd of neighbors and friends was relieving. “I can close the book and move on.”
He remains close with many he served with, though he hasn’t heard from the seven men he rode the ferry with that day since 2002. Given the opportunity, he would love to catch up.
A memory from that day forced a laugh; the hardhat he gave away. Bearing his name on the back and the Coast Guard emblem on the front, “it was nice and broken in.” Its white shell was covered in scratches from years of inspecting Navy ships and oil rigs across the world. Given away that morning and not seen since, each scratch told a story.
Now, at 55, O’Brien says he’s “always thought it would be an amazing experience to meet up with that doctor and ask for my hard hat back.”
