In early 2001 I was hired to work on a project for TLC about two elite Rescue units, Rescue 1 and Rescue 2, in the New York Fire Department. It was to be an action show, like "Cops" with firefighters. The men who were to be the subjects did more firefighting, according to statistics, than almost any other fire units anywhere. They were experts not only in battling blazes but also in special operations such as scuba, rappelling, and building collapses. A particular specialization was rescuing other trapped firemen, and they were proud to tell you that they were "the last men out" of any fire situation. One of the producers was the nephew of the Rescue units' fire chief, and one of the production's selling points was unprecedented access. A small crew would live in the firehouses and ride on the "rigs" as they tore through Manhattan or Brooklyn on the way to "a job." It was my first TV or documentary project as an editor, and I also filled in and did some shooting because there were only a handful of us working on it.

So for a number of days in the Winter and early Spring of '01I had the rare opportunity to ride on a fire truck, trying to operate a little PD150 DVCAM in one hand and hold on for dear life with the other. Or hang out with some of the FDNY's finest in their firehouse kitchens, trying not to take too much verbal ribbing. They called me "River," apparently because of a likeness (which I've never gotten) to a particular tragically deceased young actor. I suppose River is better than Luke. On one day, I rode with Rescue 2 through the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel as they responded to a fire in the PATH train station at the World Trade Center. The fire turned out to be totally inconsequential and was out by the time we arrived. But the Rescue units were called, as well as what looked like half of the entire New York Fire Department, because of what I was told was the city's special "sensitivity" about that location. Amid the chaos of pedestrians, police and firemen, I think I was trying to get a shot that would convey the hugeness of the FDNY response, just to have something that might be at least potentially usable in the show. I got separated from my guys and the other cameraman/producer and the rig took off without me. This was a source of much amusement back at the firehouse.

But, anyway, the irony was that there wasn't really much to edit because somehow we kept missing the big jobs. If an action-packed fire happened in the city during those months it almost always seemed to fall on days that no one was shooting. So we stopped trying to cut and I came back to LA that Summer, planning to return in the Fall after the producers had gathered more action-oriented footage.



Then, of course, 9-11 happened. Every man from Rescue 1 and Rescue 2 who was on duty on that morning, plus some off-duty members who had gotten into the city in time, totaling roughly half of the firemen who had been filmed and mic'd for our show, were killed. They were in the North Tower when it collapsed. It's thought that they had made it to near the top, where the fire was. We'll probably never really know.

What happened next for me is a long and mostly boring story. To sum up, I returned to New York to work on what would become a very different kind of show. It would tell the story of the firemen before and after, the ones who died and the ones left behind. We re-examined everything that had been shot, because now the "dull" material of guys hanging out in the firehouse kitchen had a lot more meaning. Formal interviews, which would never have been part of the "verite" style of the originally-intended show, were shot with the survivors using the new Sony 24p HD. Panavision New York donated the rental, which made it possible. It took the better part of a year to create "Still Riding," which aired on TLC on the one-year anniversary. It's a film which I'm really proud of, and in my biased opinion it deals with the firefighters' experience of the event, and even with experience of being a firefighter itself, better than any of the other 9-11 docs. I would love for it to be seen more, but that's not up to me.

My personal involvement with the 9-11 atrocity is quite insignificant compared to the tens of thousands of people who lost loved ones. I try not to make a big deal of it. But there is some emotion in having known, if briefly, a dozen or so of those guys. And not just because of how they died, but because of who they were and what they did. They were extraordinary people. Colorful, certainly. Very typically not "politically correct." But they risked their lives, for strangers, on a daily basis. They had the kind of courage that most of us have no direct understanding of. That's humbling.



I've made an effort to avoid a lot of the recent 9-11 movies. Mainly, I'm not so interested in all of the miraculous survivals or the rescues from the rubble that seem to be such popular subect matter. At the risk of sounding morbid, I don't believe they fairly characterize the World Trade Center Disaster. A few miracles happened, certainly. But that day was about massive loss of life -- on the part of people who went to work on a Tuesday morning and the heroic public servants who worked to save them. An immensity of death, carnage, and suffering. Hollywood makes a movie like Oliver Stone's because stories of survival allow for happy endings. "Still Riding" doesn't have a happy ending. The world we find ourselves in today, which has been so affected by what happened on that morning, hasn't had one either.

The best thing we can hope for now is to learn from this.

I've been thinking. I try to avoid politics here, mostly, because that's not ostensibly what our little nook of the blogosphere is for. And I don't really want to put off anybody who doesn't agree with me/us. I feel strongly, however, that a responsible and important part of commemorating 9-11 is thinking clearly and carefully about everything that has resulted from it. What has resulted from it has been a lot more death and a lot more destruction, most of it just as senseless.

On September 12, 2001, world sentiment was, "we are all Americans." This changed rapidly, of course, as the world watched what came next. A "War on Terror" sounded like a necessary thing back then. Like everyone else, I was angry, I felt that old reliable and familiar human impulse -- strike back. Fight fire with fire. Kill the bad guys. The nation cheered when the president stood on the rubble and proclaimed, "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

The military mission in Afghanistan made sense, because that's where the bad guys were. Al Qaeda, harbored by the Taliban regime, had a bona fide network of training camps and bases from which to launch more terrorist attacks. Removing their capability to do so certainly required the use of military force. And the U.S. forces succeeded in driving Al Qaeda from its hideouts and ousting the Taliban from its rule. For a time, it seemed like we were winning in Afghanistan. For a time. Now, ironically, we know that the administration did not commit enough resources to doing it right. It failed to prevent Osama Bin Laden from escaping during the war there, and now Taliban/Qaeda forces have regrouped. Most of the country is controlled by tribal warlords. What accounts for our failure to stabilize Afghanistan? Many have claimed that the needs of the Afghan campaign were neglected, specifically because resources were rerouted to the planned war in Iraq.

How did the horror of 9-11 lead us, as a country, to the invasion of Iraq?

I think it's a fair statement that only the delusional still see the Iraq war and occupation as anything less than a massive, tragic debacle. Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had no connection, no history of or plans for cooperation. Hussein had no nuclear or chemical weapons with which to attack anyone, largely because the U.N sanctions had been successfully keeping him in check. (The Senate Intelligence Community is the latest official body to once again affirm this.) These are facts, not matters up for debate if one lives in the "reality-based community." Furthermore, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Bush Administration knew these things, but pushed ahead with plans to invade Iraq while using the threat of terrorism to justify its goals. Their true reasons for taking Iraq likely relate to oil supply, Israel, China, and a frightening, imperialistic geopolitical scheme about which we have only hints. But that's a whole other story. In the meantime, they've squandered hundreds of billions of our hard-earned tax dollars, many of which have enriched war-profiteering coporations with no-bid goverment contracts like like Dick Cheney's Halliburton. And that's the least of our problems.

OR

More than 3000 people, mostly civilians, were killed on 9/11. As of today, more than 2600 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths vary. 40,000? 100,000? More? These numbers force us to ask difficult questions. Osama Bin Laden and his kind are unquestionably a hateful and murderous bunch. They're responsible for mass murder under the banner of religious perversion. But who is really the greater terrorist? Who is the greater killer? Who is responsible for more death and more suffering -- Osama or George W?

There's a sick irony in Donald Rumsfeld lecturing us about Moral confusion.

If the United States had moral high ground after 9/11, we have long since lost it. The "War on Terror" has certainly eliminated people who wanted to do us harm, but it has galvanized and created far more. George Bush went to war based on lies. Today he's up to his eyeballs in the blood of innocent children. Sorry to say it that way, but it's true.

Who's safer?

Martin Luther King once said: "Man's proneness to engage in war is still a fact, but wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. No nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil and political disillusionment. . . Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problems, it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it."

In memorializing 9-11 we should remember that violence and war themselves are the real enemy. How do you stop terrorism? How do you eradicate war? Nobody really knows the answer. But it sure ain't dropping more bombs.

-jw

P.S. What do you think? Disagree with me? Leave a comment or email me!