‘It’s a scar that’s always there’

IOWA CITY - Iowa City firefighter Glenn Pauley responded in January to a construction accident on the University of Iowa campus, where he crawled into an excavated pit to recover a victim crushed by a beam.

For those few minutes, Pauley was reminded of the four days he spent digging through rubble and searching buried voids at the World Trade Center site just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“As soon as I went in there, I was all the sudden under the Trade Center again,” Pauley, 40, said. “It just seemed like it was all right there again.”

Pauley, who lives in Solon with his wife and two children, said he thinks all the time of his days at ground zero. The experience stays with him, but he feels he can leave it behind when he needs to. He knows his New York firefighting friends don't have that option.

“Here these guys see it every day and are reminded of it all the time,” he said. “It's a scar that's always going to be there because those towers are gone.”

Pauley had just gotten off his shift the morning of 9/11 and watched the news all day. He was applying for a firefighting job in New York at the time, so he knew guys in several firehouses. He decided he needed to help. He took vacation time and drove non-stop with Jon Harding, another Iowa City firefighter, to Rescue 4 in Queens.

He and Harding were suited up in New York Fire Department gear and sent to ground zero. It was three days after the terrorist attacks.

“The closer we got, I could taste the Trade Center site, I could smell it,” Pauley recalls.

They spent their days digging through the rubble, marking the spot when they found something important, grabbing food or a few hours sleep when they could.

“We left because we physically had to,” Pauley said. “We had nothing left. I couldn't even stand up straight, because we were digging the whole time.”

Pauley keeps in touch with his New York friends, last visiting in 2006 for St. Patrick's Day. Some of his friends have retired or moved on from the NYFD, others are still there.

“Very rarely do we talk about the events,” he said, “but they're my friends. I like to know how they're doing.”

When he thinks about 9/11, most often he wonders what the point of it was. He reflects on what could have been for all the people killed. He admits it made him more wary, though he appreciates living in Iowa, where he feels safer.

He wants to someday take his kids to the Sept. 11 memorial.

“It's still a part of who I am and what I've been through,” he said.