WONDER LAND

Honor the Dead With a New National Cemetery

Fresh Kills: From swamp to landfill to latter-day Arlington.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER Friday, September 28, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Soon the bulldozers will start pushing away the pile that was the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. A friend of mine in Ohio, who has been watching it on television, wrote to me earlier this week to say, "God did not give us imaginations large enough to hold this event." She is right.

The fact of the matter is that 6,300 souls are in that rubble. It is hard to imagine. In the U.S. Revolutionary War, from 1775 to 1783, the total number of American dead in combat was: 4,435. At Antietam Battlefield, the thousands who died in a day were spread across miles. These 6,300 fell in two funnels straight down, and the buildings' weight returned them to dust. About 300 bodies have been recovered. But they aren't going to find any more. And of course there are the 125 surely lost at the Pentagon and 266 in the airplanes.

This week I went down to look at the site before the heavy equipment begins to disperse it. It's been over two weeks and I still haven't been able to figure out exactly what to call this place. The "rescue zone"? The attack site? Ground zero? This is the language of bureaucracies. Nothing seems to fit.

When I watched the towers fall September 11, the scale of the event--the two outsized buildings and all the people--drove any sort of understanding out of mind, and maybe just as well. Looking at the remains this week over several hours, the strongest sense that returned was the same one felt years ago when some of us buried a close and young friend, who had served two tours in Vietnam, at Arlington Cemetery.

In most ways, the two places could hardly be more unlike each other. Arlington is beautiful, and this is not. Arlington is settled and at peace; this is not. But above all else, Arlington is a hallowed place, and I do not think you can be near what remains of the World Trade Center for long and not feel, physically, that this rubble is hallowed. But it is not at peace.

The site is a steady cacophony. The streets leading to it are clogged with trucks, machines, generators, power lines, light stands, chain-link fences, workers, cops, firemen, soldiers and dirt. There is nothing the slightest bit beautiful, redeeming or inspiring about it. Rubble is the right word. It is debris. What once had shape, structure and purpose is now just girders, pipes, stone, stuffing and dust. A piece of the familiar steel facade, seen often in photographs and on TV because its torn edges formed a triangle striving toward the sky, up close was just torn, stained steel and ripped pads of insulation. Some people thought it should remain as part of any eventual memorial, but yesterday they cut it up and took it down.

There are holes and crevasses, and a gray, demonic smoke rises from the pile and sits above it. It never seems to move, but you know it is moving because all around the area your nose fills with something sharp and bitter. I watched two firemen at the end of a crane's arm, pouring an arc of water down into the hole by the broken facade, but this is 17 days later, and that smoke still won't stop rising from the pile. There is one black stand of floors still standing. Like the rubble itself, it goes up about four stories. As you stare at it, reflexively your eyes look up; it is odd how often one seems to have to reaffirm that this space is, in fact, empty. I talked to a police sergeant who said he had worked for years nearby at City Hall, and he remarked on the dislocation: "I just can't get my bearings down here anymore."

Broadway, close to the site, is now open to pedestrians, but it is hard to see much by looking down Liberty Street, Fulton or Maiden Lane. The tough red granite of Old St. Paul's Church fills one block, with its dusty courtyard of graves going back to the Revolution. The tall surviving buildings close by, such as the beautiful old Woolworth Building or Liberty Plaza, now loom high over what's left of their taller, fallen brothers. They look like protective sentinels, unwilling to give the gawkers a look.

The police are the same way on Broadway. They're sick of the people with cameras. At Maiden Lane, which offers the best sightline, they've parked a city bus and stretched a piece of blue plastic to hamper photos. I saw a man a block down try to position his two friends against the higher rubble for a shot, and a policewoman said, "You can't take that picture, this isn't a tourist attraction, it's not right, move on."

The government says there is over one million tons of rubble. The pieces are large and heavy, too heavy for the rescuers to move very far by hand. It really is time to bring in the heavy equipment. The current plan, over the next six to nine months, is to take it by truck or river barge to a place on Staten Island called Fresh Kills. It's a large landfill, which was closed in March. It's a dump. That fact may be a gift from God.

I would like to propose that when the removal of this material to Staten Island is completed, it should be plotted off from the nearby land, and landscaped into a new national cemetery for the workers, firemen and policemen who died as one at the World Trade Center on September 11.

Landfills are landscaped into other uses all the time. It would not be hard to turn this land into a handsome national cemetery, like Arlington or even the cemetery near the water at Normandy.

The new cemetery would give each of the dead an identified marker or headstone, one holy place, a plot, for families and friends to visit and honor and pray for these innocent who right now share only that rubble. Normandy, where 9,383 Americans repose, has a Web site at www.abmc.gov/no.htm. It has an aerial photograph of the cemetery, which is simple, merely a large rectangle of graves. These 6,300 deserve the same.

-- Anonymous, September 28, 2001