AN INTERVIEW
Glenn Stout: That’s the kind of question that assumes that we already know everything about the events of 9/11 and what came after. I don’t think we do. The impact 9/11 has had on this country is still unfolding, not just politically, but psychologically and emotionally, so in a larger sense, I don’t think we can ever learn too much about 9/11 and its aftermath. Nine Months at Ground Zero, though, is different in substance from any “9/11” book that has been written before. It’s an oral history of the cleanup and victim recovery effort at the World Trade Center, told primarily by Charlie Vitchers, who served as a general superintendent down there, and
That story has never been told in any detail before. Most press coverage focused on the police and firemen. Coverage of the construction workers was almost non-existent. If you didn’t work down there, like me, you had no idea what these people did. You night not have even realized they were there. At the time, like a lot of other Americans, I incorrectly assumed that all the work in the pit was being done by the Army Corp of Engineers, the National Guard and the firemen.
It wasn’t. Within minutes of the attacks thousands of New York construction workers – ironworkers, carpenters, steamfitters, electricians, operating engineers - dropped whatever they were doing and just went there. They knew before anyone else did that they were the only people who knew how to “unbuild” the
Glenn Stout: It is mind-boggling, almost impossible to imagine. Twenty-seven hundred vertical feet of buildings containing nearly ten million square feet of floor space was reduced to a pile less than two hundred feet thick. In that pile, from the two towers alone, there were four hundred million pounds of steel columns, trusses and reinforcing bars – most of it all tangled together and buried . More than four million cubic feet of concrete was broken down into dust and small pieces. Mixed in all this was 600,000 square feet of thick window glass, sixty-three million feet of electric cable and wiring, 198 miles of ductwork, 23,000 broken fluorescent lights – the list goes on and on. Untold numbers of chairs, desks, file cabinets, and computers were all crushed into unrecognizable dust and debris.
But that was just stuff. Somewhere in all that debris were nearly 3,000 human beings-father and sons, mothers and daughters. The workers down there, which included police and fire personnel, searched through all that material to find the people. They eventually recovered nearly 20,000 body parts. Of everything they did there, that was, really, all that mattered.
Earlier this spring I heard that body parts were still being found. How could that happen?
Glenn Stout: That’s correct. Bone fragments were recently found on the roof of
Glenn Stout: American Ground told the story of the cleanup from above, from the perspective of administrators and bureaucrats. That’s fine, because that’s part of the story, but only part of it. My only problem with American Ground is that the book tried to tell the story of the war without telling the story of the soldier. Except in passing, it did not include the people who were actually on the pile and in the pit, the people who actually did the work. Nine Months at Ground Zero is their story, the story of the people who were in the front lines, in the pit, getting their boots dirty, seeing, as
And as much as any fireman or police officer, the construction workers were intimately involved in the recovery of victims. That’s a genuinely moving story that American Ground overlooked. They took that responsibility very seriously and considered themselves “recovery workers” above all else – it’s impossible for me to overstate that. From the first page to the last, Bobby and Charlie and the other construction workers down there did their absolute best to recover the victims, to bring loved ones back to their families. They fought to insure that the recovery of victims, and not the removal of debris, was the first priority of the job. Unfortunately, not everyone involved down there shared that priority, and that’s part of the story as well.
Glenn Stout: Charlie, Bobby and I spent a great deal of time discussing this. I explained to them that there were basically three ways of doing this book – as a “third-person” narrative, as an “as told to” story, and as an oral history. We discussed the pros and cons of each, and collectively decided that an oral history was the best and most authentic way to tell their story. They were particularly concerned with making sure their experience was portrayed accurately and I think there is somewhat less “filtering” in an oral history than in other strategies. It also allowed them more control. They were absolutely adamant about two things; One, they didn’t want the book to be a self-aggrandizing account about themselves, but about the larger, collective experience of the construction worker. Secondly, under no circumstance did they want to be involved in any treatment that would exploit the experience and turn it into some kind of “tabloid” account, and if a writer told their story in third person, or as an “as told to” story, that would have been a risk.
I think it’s important for the reader to know that Bobby and Charlie aren’t making any money off this project – they are giving their share of the proceeds to charity. This is what I do for a living so over the two years I worked on this project I have earned money from it, but I have also donated a portion of that money to charity and will continue to do so. In fact, the publishing contract is structured so that the more copies we sell and the more money the book earns, the more Bobby and Charlie can give away.
In today’s climate, where so much journalism is distrusted, I think a book like this, about real people, told in their own voice, about their selfless devotion to a cause, should have some genuine resonance. This book isn’t some self-absorbed “memoir” by some person of privilege whining about a time in their life that was less than absolutely perfect, or just making stuff up to make money. It’s about a group of people who took on something larger for all the right reasons.
Glenn Stout: I’m a writer, period. Writers always look for the story that hasn’t been told before and I think that is exactly what I’ve done in this book. And no matter what I’ve ever written about, I’ve never been satisfied with the surface story, or what is already known. Most of my previous work is based in history, and this book is history, up close and personal. I’ve often taken on stories that are familiar and found something new in them, so in many ways this book is not that different from what I have done before.
Soon after the cleanup was over Bobby and Charlie were approached by a number of authors and agents who wanted to tell their story. They were very wary of the entire process, and had some very strong ideas about what they didn’t want the book to be, i.e. something that turned them into heroes, or a book that was focused on the wrong things. They wanted to make sure they didn’t get ripped off- I don’t mean financially–they didn’t want their experienced to be ripped off and twisted into something it wasn’t.
A mutual friend put us in touch because I was a published author who knew something about the industry. At first I simply gave them advice about the business and answered questions – how publishing contracts worked, what agents did, things like that. Over about six or eight months I just did my best to answer their questions and inform them about the process, and over time we got to know each other. Eventually they asked me if I would be interested in doing the project with them.
I had to say “yes.” I was honored. It was an important project, and by that time I was committed to Bobby and Charlie as people. They had become friends, people I admired and I wanted to make sure the project was done the way they wanted it done. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had turned them down and then they ended up having a bad experience. I promised myself-and them- that I was going to tell their story. Charlie and Bobby have been intimately involved with absolutely every aspect of this project, every draft, every sentence, every word.
The three of us are about the same age and share similar backgrounds and interests. Like Charlie, I started working construction while I was a teenager, and like Bobby, when I was in college I spent so much time working for the school maintenance department some people thought I was a full-time employee and not a student. It helped a great deal that I had experience in construction work. My father worked for a concrete company, and I have a number of relatives in the industry. Before, during, and after college I spent close to three full years as a construction worker, primarily doing concrete and form carpentry work, tilt-up and pre-fab slab work mostly, plus a little bit of residential work. That was important because from the very beginning of this project I had a basic understanding of what Bobby and Charlie did, and I knew the vocabulary, which also told me what aspects of their work would need to be explained. That was huge, because even with my background, the learning curve was enormous, both about the construction industry and about Ground Zero. But even more important was the fact that I think I already understood the emotional mind-set and motivation of construction workers. There is a camaraderie in the trades that is very unique, akin to that in the military or in sports. In many ways construction work is horrible – it’s dirty, dangerous, and physically demanding and mentally exhausting. Yet it’s also incredibly challenging and fulfilling – where nothing was, something is. But I think people stay in the industry because of each other, because they enjoy being around the people they work with. This book, at its core, is a story of people working together, committing to each other, doing something larger together than anything they could have accomplished as individuals.
Had I known nothing about construction, the book would not only have been a stretch, it would have been almost impossible. But I felt very comfortable both with the subject matter and the process. I had worked on complicated, research-heavy projects before, and at one level that’s what this project was. And although I hadn’t done an oral history before, I was familiar with the genre, and knew what I liked and what I did not like about the approach. One of the things I wanted to do, and I think succeeded in, is that I wanted to keep the distinctive voice of everyone I talked to–I think too many oral histories are so heavily edited they lose authenticity. My academic background isn’t in sports or journalism, but poetry. That was of tremendous help in editing their words. Because poetry is a spoken art I am accustomed to working with line and rhythm, to listening to the voice and the sound that words make. As I edited the transcripts I was acutely sensitive to preserving their plain speech, the actual vernacular of the experience, rather than translating it into something that read as if had been written by the English Department. As much as possible, I tried to leave their words alone and simply find the right structure to present those words in a way that allowed the reader to experience their intrinsic power.
Since I had worked in construction, I knew the people down there weren’t stereotypes. It is an enormous industry-there are about 7-8 million active construction workers in the
Glenn Stout: There were several. It was a challenge, initially, to convince a publisher to do a book about construction workers. That’s just not a topic publishing is very interested in. There aren’t more than a handful of books that have ever been published for a general audience about the construction industry. In general, publishers tend to see the world in broad strokes, and I think most believe construction workers don’t read, and no one will want to read about them, not even in the context of 9/11. In that world view construction workers are invisible. Publishers are accustomed to cashing in on salaciousness and celebrity, and Charlie and Bobby were neither celebrities nor salacious.
Fortunately, the power of the story and the personalities of Bobby and Charlie allowed us to overcome that resistance. Our agent,
On a more “nuts and bolts” level, working with tape transcripts and turning those transcripts into a coherent story was a logistical challenge. Over the course of the project I did about seventy hours of interviews and had them all transcribed by a terrific transcriber I hired, Debbi Bradley. Those seventy hours created nearly a million words of text. I had to know each of those million words intimately – to see and smell and feel exactly what the speakers were seeing and smelling and feeling. Charlie and Bobby both warned me ahead of time that working with this material would be intensely emotional, and it was. When I finally finished, it was weird. I was completely burned out, which is normal after finishing a book, but this lasted much longer and was more intense. For a couple months I was sort of mentally paralyzed. I couldn’t get anything accomplished. I’m sure it was stress. Even my body reacted, and I came down with this weird rash that eluded diagnosis for months before going away. This was all just from hearing people talk about those nine months, so I think I have some insight into the emotional hazards the men and women who worked there encountered. I can’t imagine what it was like to have actually lived that experience, and to have to live with it for the rest of your life. It’s funny, but Bobby and Charlie say they never dream about Ground Zero. After living with their words, I do, yet I was never there during the cleanup.
When I first interviewed Bobby and Charlie I started the process by looking at photographs of the site and asking them to explain to me what was happening, why and how. That gave me a framework of reference which was enormously important, because at the start every picture of that pile was, to me, unintelligible, a total mystery. Yet by the end I could look at a picture of almost anything and know exactly what was taking place, where and when. I joked with Bobby and Charlie that I spent more time reading their transcripts and writing the book than they did working at Ground Zero. I tried to let their story evolve organically rather than make the words fit an artificial framework.
Of course, in retrospect, there are people who worked in the pit that I wish would have agreed to speak with me, and did not, and some who I wish would have spoken more. But the story had to be confined to an intelligible group of people – in many oral histories, I think there are too many speakers, and you lose any sense of character. In this project, if someone didn’t want to talk, or didn’t want to talk too much, we tried to respect that. Re-living those days can be very painful for them. After all, it was their experience, and they have that right whether to share it or not. For the same reason, I allowed everyone I interviewed to review their transcript, both for accuracy and for comfort level. If a speaker said anything that for some reason they had second thoughts about, we withdrew those statements.
Poetry isn’t any “easier” to write than prose, and writing an oral history isn’t any “easier” than writing a narrative. It’s just as demanding, perhaps even more so, because at a certain point you have to work with what you’ve got – you can’t force anyone to remember details they don’t remember, or to remember them a certain way. Everything they said, of course, was edited for readability – you take out all the “uhs” and redundancies, and make sure the verb tenses make sense, that kind of thing - but I didn’t put words or ideas in their mouths. Any wisdom or poetry in the book is theirs. In many instances we went over the same events a number of times and in the end created sort of a composite account, but every speaker in the book said everything they said.
This isn’t a bullshit memoir like “A Million Little Pieces.” We never compromised the facts to tell a “better” story. As Charlie often said to me in the midst of an interview, “You can’t make this shit up.” He’s absolutely right. The truth ALWAYS tells the best story, and we tried to be as accurate as humanly possible. I confirmed events and dates by checking them against documents, videos, pictures and other sources. But the work down there took place 24/7 for nine months. No one really had the luxury of writing things down in any detail – they were all working. Incredibly, no one kept a comprehensive timeline of activities at Ground Zero during the cleanup. I actually had to create one in the book, because for the guys who worked there, the timeline got real hazy. At one point Charlie told me that working down there for nine months was “like one big long day.” He told me a story about when he first met Gordon Haberman, a man from
Another time I asked an engineer when they started building a pre-fab bridge in the pit. Now if you have ever spoken to an engineer, they are about the most precise people you’ll ever speak with. They keep track of everything. If you ask them for a particular date, they generally give you the hour and second. But Ground Zero was different. This engineer told me that they were doing so much work, so fast, that it was impossible for him to put a date on just about anything, including when they started building that bridge. From beginning to end, working at Ground Zero was unlike any other job that’s ever been done, anyplace, any time, any where. And no one should ever have to do anything like it again, either.
By telling this story as an oral history I think it has a sense of intimacy and immediacy that is very unique, very powerful, very emotional. I am not ashamed to say that every single time I either read through the transcripts or read through the manuscript - something I’ve done dozens and dozens of time by now - I have been moved to tears.
But in the end it’s a very uplifting story – the people who worked down there gave of themselves in a very inspiring way. In an era in which everything seems compromised, this story is genuine. I think Nine Months at Ground Zero is a book that can change your life. It renews your faith in regular people, and whenever I feel overwhelmed by something, I just think about what everybody who worked down there had to go through. All other problems seem small and achievable in comparison.
Glenn Stout: Foremost, I think this book is for the thousands of people who worked at Ground Zero. It’s their story. Some of them have a difficult time talking about it today. In some small way, perhaps this book can speak for them and help them communicate their experience to others.
I hope the 9/11 families also find some comfort in the book, because I don’t think they all realize just how much the people at Ground Zero cared, how badly they wanted to find everyone, and the respect they brought to that task. They did the right thing and acted with honor. The people that were lost at Ground Zero were found by people who had their heart in the right place, by people who were down there for the right reasons. Obviously, I also think the book will be of interest to New Yorkers who lived through 9/11 and the aftermath, and anyone anywhere touched by the events of that day. I also think anyone who ever worked in the construction industry will be drawn to the book, because it’s about regular people, men and women who rose to the occasion when they were needed. My father was like that. He didn’t read many books, but this is precisely the kind of book he would have read.
But the book is larger than that. I think we are all drawn to literature in which we recognize ourselves. Elements of this story are so universal that I think most readers, no matter what their background, will find much of this book very familiar. Leadership, courage, and commitment are universal concepts that everyone can relate to and that come up all through the book. I think we all hope that, as individuals, if we are ever called to act, we will act righteously, with honor. Bobby, Charlie, and everyone else who served at Ground Zero are an inspiring example of that. In that way, even though the book is a document of history, it doesn’t look backward. It inspires us as we face the future.
Glenn Stout: With the right subject, and the right story, for the right reasons? Sure. But Bobby, Charlie, and everyone else who worked at Ground Zero have set a pretty high standard.
(Copyright 2006 by Glenn Stout. All rights reserved.)