A new beginning at ground zero
6-30-02
By EDWARD CONE
News & Record
Monday was Quentin DeMarco's first day of a new assignment at ground zero in New York City. "Even now, walking to work, I thought that all our guys who went in there and died, they wouldn't believe what happened over their heads," he says.
Thirty-seven members of the Port Authority police died on 9/11. Lt. DeMarco -- my wife's cousin Quentin -- was almost No. 38.
Quentin was rushing to the scene that morning when he met his friend, Sgt. Bobby Kaulfers, who was putting on an air pack to lead his team into the burning buildings. "I said if you have another pack, I'll just go in with you," says Quentin. "He said we should check in first at the command post on West Street."
Quentin headed off to get his orders, and Kaulfers led his men inside. None of them made it out again, and no bodies have been recovered. "There is not a day since then that I don't think of Bobby," says Quentin on the phone.
It's strange to think of Quentin, 39, as a hero, and he is quick to say he doesn't see himself that way. He is still the trash-talking cousin I have the Montana vs. Marino argument with every Christmas Eve at Bea Bea and John's house, the good-time dad down the shore every summer. But now he is something else, too. He is a survivor, a keeper of memories that need to be preserved.
The memories of that day, and the month of 12-hour days that followed, are fresh for him. Working downtown again -- he's been transferred in as the staff lieutenant for the World Trade Center command -- just brings the details of the disaster and the grisly recovery work that much more to mind.
"Seeing the towers in the distance as we drove in that morning was surreal," he says. "But as soon as we got there, the sights and the sounds and the smells made it very personal and very real."
In his mind he sees the jumpers coming down. "At first it was like they were floating, it was mesmerizing," he says. A Marine veteran who served in Lebanon and has seen his share of horrors as a cop, he was still overwhelmed. "I had to avert my eyes."
He can see a corner of one of the towers sliding slowly outward as the building began to collapse, and the wall of dust chasing him up the street as he ran for his life. He can picture a cop and a firefighter staggering toward him, choking, and recall the desperate (and successful) effort to clear their mouths and let them breathe.
But nothing has stayed with him like the sounds of that morning. "The auditory memory is so clear," he says in a wondering voice. "The clothes of the jumpers sounded like a flag or a sail in a windstorm. I can hear it right now."
And then came the clean-up. It was clear quite early that there was no rescue work to be done. He toiled without hope on the mountain of rubble that was removed piece by tiny piece, working in the strange burning odor of the concrete dust from the fires below. For the first week he would wake up in a sweat at night, but after that exhaustion took over and he slept again. On the days he didn't work, he went to funerals.
His wife, Chris, helped Quentin through the worst times. "She was my pillar," he says. Chris says Quentin has become more verbal about telling their three kids how much he loves them.
And now he has come back to downtown Manhattan to help plan security for the site's future renovation. It's a new job, lots of responsibility, lots of meetings. But moving on doesn't mean forgetting. "There are days when out of the blue, coming to or from work, I end up crying," he says. "A lot of those guys I was close with, I think of every day. And it's not just cops and firemen -- it's 3,000 people, all those families."
I asked Quentin if the Fourth of July will mean anything different to him this year. "The flag has always meant something to me, so it's not a newfound thing, but yeah, we're all more patriotic," he said. He will be working on Independence Day, while Chris and the kids are at the shore. Soon he will join them there to fish from the boat he finally bought for the family this year. Even heroes need a little time off.
Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com, www.edcone.com), a magazine journalist and Greensboro native, contributes a column to the News & Record each Sunday.
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