The Marine who found two WTC survivors

[Cees Binkhorst]

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An Unlikely Hero
The Marine who found two WTC survivors.
By Rebecca Liss
Posted Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009, at 5:28 PM ET

Of the many stories of personal heroics that emerged from the tragedy of
Sept. 11, 2001, perhaps none is as inspiring as the one of a former Marine
who put back on his uniform and drove to Ground Zero to search for
survivors—and found two. A year after the attacks, Rebecca Liss told the
story of Dave Karnes, who rescued two Port Authority police officers from
the rubble. The original article is reprinted below.

Only 12 survivors were pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center
after the towers fell on Sept. 11, despite intense rescue efforts. Two of
the last three to be located and saved were Port Authority police
officers. They were not discovered by a heroic firefighter, or a rescue
worker, or a cop. They were discovered by Dave Karnes.

Karnes hadn't been near the World Trade Center. He wasn't even in New York
when the planes hit the towers. He was in Wilton, Conn., working in his
job as a senior accountant with Deloitte Touche. When the second plane
hit, Karnes told his colleagues, "We're at war." He had spent 23 years in
the Marine Corps infantry and felt it was his duty to help. Karnes told
his boss he might not see him for a while.

Then he went to get a haircut.

The small barbershop in Stamford, Conn., near his home, was deserted.
"Give me a good Marine Corps squared-off haircut," he told the barber.
When it was done, he drove home to put on his uniform. Karnes always kept
two sets of Marine fatigues hanging in his closet, pressed and starched.
"It's kind of weird to do, but it comes in handy," he says. Next Karnes
stopped by the storage facility where he kept his equipment—he'd need
rappelling gear, ropes, canteens of water, his Marine Corps K-Bar knife,
and a flashlight, at least. Then he drove to church. He asked the pastor
and parishioners to say a prayer that God would lead him to survivors. A
devout Christian, Karnes often turned to God when faced with decisions.

Finally, Karnes lowered the convertible top on his Porsche. This would
make it easier for the authorities to look in and see a Marine, he
reasoned. If they could see who he was, he'd be able to zip past
checkpoints and more easily gain access to the site. For Karnes, it was a
"God thing" that he was in the Porsche—a Porsche 911—that day. He'd only
purchased it a month earlier—it had been a stretch, financially. But he
decided to buy it after his pastor suggested that he "pray on it." He had
no choice but to take it that day because his Mercury was in the shop.
Driving the Porsche at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour, he reached
Manhattan—after stopping at McDonald's for a hamburger—in the late
afternoon.

His plan worked. With the top off, the cops could see his pressed
fatigues, his neatly cropped hair, and his gear up front. They waved him
past the barricades. He arrived at the site—"the pile"—at about 5:30.
Building 7 of the World Trade Center, a 47-story office structure adjacent
to the fallen twin towers, had just dramatically collapsed. Rescue workers
had been ordered off the pile—it was too unsafe to let them continue.
Flames were bursting from a number of buildings, and the whole site was
considered unstable. Standing on the edge of the burning pile, Karnes
spotted 
 another Marine dressed in camouflage. His name was Sgt. Thomas.
Karnes never learned his first name, and he's never come forward in the
time since.

Together Karnes and Thomas walked around the pile looking for a point of
entry farther from the burning buildings. They also wanted to move away
from officials trying to keep rescue workers off the pile. Thick, black
smoke blanketed the site. The two Marines couldn't see where to enter. But
then "the smoke just opened up." The sun was setting and, through the
opening, Karnes, for the first time, saw clearly the massive destruction.
"I just said 'Oh, my God, it's totally gone.' " With the sudden parting of
the smoke, Karnes and Thomas entered the pile. "We just disappeared into
the smoke—and we ran."

They climbed over the tangled steel and began looking into voids. They saw
no one else searching the pile—the rescue workers having obeyed the order
to leave the area. "United States Marines," Karnes began shouting. "If you
can hear us, yell or tap!"

Over and over, Karnes shouted the words. Then he would pause and listen.
Debris was shifting and parts of the building were collapsing further.
Fires burned all around. "I just had a sense, an overwhelming sense come
over me that we were walking on hallowed ground, that tens of thousands of
people could be trapped and dead beneath us," he said.

After about an hour of searching and yelling, Karnes stopped.

"Be quiet," he told Thomas, "I think I can hear something."

He yelled again. "We can hear you. Yell louder." He heard a faint muffled
sound in the distance.

"Keep yelling. We can hear you." Karnes and Thomas zeroed in on the sound.

"We're over here," they heard.

Two Port Authority police officers, Will Jimeno and Sgt. John McLoughlin,
were buried in the center of the World Trade Center ruins, 20 feet below
the surface. They could be heard but not seen. By jumping into a larger
opening, Karnes could hear Jimeno better. But he still couldn't see him.
Karnes sent Thomas to look for help. Then he used his cell phone to call
his wife, Rosemary, in Stamford and his sister Joy in Pittsburgh. (He
thought they could work the phones and get through to New York police
headquarters.)

"Don't leave us," Officer Jimeno pleaded. He later said he feared Karnes'
voice would trail away, as had that of another potential rescuer hours
earlier. It was now about 7 p.m. and Jimeno and McLoughlin had been
trapped for roughly nine hours. Karnes stayed with them, talking to them
until help arrived in the form of Chuck Sereika, a former paramedic with
an expired license who pulled his old uniform out of his closet and came
to the site. Ten minutes later, Scott Strauss and Paddy McGee, officers
with the elite Emergency Service Unit of the NYPD, also arrived.

The story of how Strauss and Sereika spent three hours digging Jimeno out
of the debris, which constantly threatened to collapse, has been well-told
in the New York Times and elsewhere. At one point, all they had with which
to dig out Jimeno were a pair of handcuffs. Karnes stood by, helping pass
tools to Strauss, offering his Marine K-Bar knife when it looked as if
they might have to amputate Jimeno's leg to free him. (After Jimeno was
finally pulled out, another team of cops worked for six more hours to free
McLoughlin, who was buried deeper in the pile.)

Karnes left the site that night when Jimeno was rescued and went with him
to the hospital. While doctors treated the injured cop, Karnes grabbed a
few hours sleep on an empty bed in the hospital psychiatric ward. While he
slept, the hospital cleaned and pressed his uniform.

******

Today, on the anniversary of the attack and the rescue, officers Jimeno
and Strauss will be part of the formal "Top Cop" ceremony at the New York
City Center Theater. Earlier the two appeared on a nationally televised
episode of America's Most Wanted. Jimeno and McLoughlin appeared this week
on the Today show. They are heroes.

Today, Dave Karnes will be speaking at the Maranatha Bible Baptist Church
in Wilkinsburg, Penn., near where he grew up. He sounds excited, over the
phone, talking about the upcoming ceremony. Karnes is a hero, too.

But it's also clear Karnes is a hero in a smaller, less national, less
public, less publicized way than the cops and firefighters are heroes.
He's hardly been overlooked—the program I work for, 60 Minutes II,
interviewed him as part of a piece on Jimeno's rescue—but the great
televised glory machine has so far not picked him. Why? One reason seems
obvious—the cops and firefighters are part of big, respected,
institutional support networks. Americans are grateful for the sacrifices
their entire organizations made a year ago. Plus, the police and
firefighting institutions are tribal brotherhoods. The firefighters help
and support and console each other; the cops do the same. They find it
harder to make room for outsiders like Karnes (or Chuck Sereika). And, it
must be said, at some macho level it's vaguely embarrassing that the
professional rescuers weren't the ones who found the two survivors. While
the pros were pulled back out of legitimate caution, the job fell to an
outsider, who drove down from Connecticut and just walked onto the burning
pile.

Columnist Stewart Alsop once famously identified two rare types of
soldiers: the "crazy brave" and the "phony tough." The professionals at
Ground Zero—I interviewed dozens in my work as a producer for CBS—were in
no way phony toughs. But Karnes does seem a bit "crazy brave." You'd have
to be slightly abnormal—abnormally selfless, abnormally patriotic—to do
what he did. And some of the same qualities that led Karnes to make
himself a hero when it counted may make him less perfect as the image of a
hero today.

Officer Strauss tells a story that gets at this. When he was out on the
pile a year ago, trying to pull Officer Jimeno free, Strauss shouted
orders to his volunteer helpers—"Medic, I need air," or "Marine, get me
some water." At one point, in the middle of this exhausting work, Strauss
asked if he could call them by their names to facilitate the process. The
medic said he was "Chuck."

Karnes said, "You can call me 'staff sergeant.' "

"That's three syllables!" said Strauss, who needed every bit of energy and
every second of time. "Isn't there something shorter?"

Karnes replied, "You can call me 'staff sergeant.' "
Rebecca Liss is an associate producer at CBS's 60 Minutes.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2227969/

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