The Chronicler

This story originally ran in August as part of Patch's stories on locals affected by 9/11.

In Rob Schrader’s Barnegat home is a gray plastic tub that rarely sees the light of day. This week, nearly 10 years after he began filling it, he set it on his kitchen counter and sifted through its contents.

Inside are notes from school children decorated in bright magic marker.

“Ground Zero workers are the best,” wrote Daija in Ohio. “If you wanted money there would not be enough to pay you.”

“We’re sure that what happened made you sad, just like it made us very sad,” said a poster-sized note signed by a classroom of children in Florida.

Next come a few artifacts collected by Schrader during the three months he worked at the site where the World Trade Towers once stood. An American flag napkin he plucked, pristine, from the rubble pile and stashed in a Ziploc bag. A small chunk of chalky concrete, surprisingly light in his hand.

“That’s what all that dust was made out of,” he said.

Finally, there are compact discs full of scanned photographs. Schrader had made a habit all his life of taking pictures everywhere he went, he said. The early fall of 2001 was no different.

Each piece of paper, each image is a reminder of what everyone lost that day. Little wonder, then, that the box doesn’t come out often. It's a testament to a changed world, and a changed life.

“You’re never the same person,” Schrader said.

***

On Sept. 11, 2001, Schrader, a Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, watched with the rest of the world as unthinkable scenes unfolded on his television.

“That night I got a call to come in, and I was on active duty,” he said. He put aside his job with the Department of Environmental Protection and left Barnegat, where he's lived with his wife since 1984. “That’s the way it works.”

His team of 45 special strike team members from Fort Dix reported to the smoldering chaos of Ground Zero and quietly began working 12-hour shifts, taking on vital behind-the-scenes roles.

For several weeks, Schrader escorted representatives from financial firms into the abandoned office buildings around the remains of the towers, climbing endless sets of stairs to recover computer hard drives.

He : abandoned conference rooms where thick gray dust drifted over still-full coffee cups and shoved-over chairs, evidence of a terrified flight.

“The weird thing was going up those steps, all you saw was women’s shoes,” he said. “You can’t run down 55 floors in heels.”

The debris-blasted buildings had lasers trained on them to monitor any movement that could foretell an impending collapse, he said. One day, he and his teammates watched from the 45th floor of the Deutsche Bank building as a siren blared and workers below them scattered.

“We were looking down going, ‘Why is everyone running from this building?’ ” he said. “And then we realized it was because the building was moving.” They were safe, as they discovered when they finally got down; the shifting was from the wind moving through blown-out windows. Still, “It was a long run down.”

Over the next three months, he and the other Coast Guard reservists took on other assignments. They decontaminated dust-covered workers entering the dining tents. They monitored air quality everywhere, from the ghostly train station below the World Trade Center to the landfill in Staten Island where, day after day, people sifted through truckloads of debris for human remains.

Everywhere he went, his camera went with him, capturing haunting images. A shoe on a 54th-floor balcony. Fire escapes choked with debris. A subway car, half crushed and blanketed in dust.

While the rest of the country mourned and discussed what would never be the same, they worked.

“We didn’t talk about it,” Schrader said. “We had a job to do, and we had to get it done.”

The quiet moments were the disturbing ones, he said. When remains were found, silence fell on the pile.

“Everybody – everybody – stopped what they were doing and lined up, and they walked out with a stretcher, and everybody saluted,” he said. “It happened a lot.”

It got to everyone, Schrader said. He remembered the words of a weeping police officer who sought comfort from a priest at the site of the towers’ collapse.

“He said, ‘There’s no God after something like this.’ The father goes, ‘Yes, there is. He’s up on that pile crying.’ That still tears me apart.”

The notes from kids helped. They had been posted to the various stations where they worked, and he and a few others began writing back. The next round of letters were addressed to them by name, thanking them and wishing them comfort and peace.

“A couple of the guys were crying when they saw them,” he said. “It was touching what the kids would say to you.”

***

Schrader's box of mementos is going away once more. It might be a long time before he pulls it out again. But that doesn't mean the attacks and their aftermath aren't on his mind. It will always be with him, he said.

He and the others from his team still keep in touch. Every year on 9/11, they call each other, he said.

Remembering what happened and honoring the anniversary is important, he said, but not because they themselves need recognition. It’s about the people who died, the ones who simply went away.

“It’s not for us, the guys that worked there,” he said. “We’re the lucky ones.”