The September 11th attack
Trooper worked in rubble, sorrow
By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer
Jay Curry has the rugged look of a New York state trooper who moonlights as a Marine reservist. From posture to haircut, he's all business.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
But his eyes say something else when he speaks of the five days he spent at the mountain of rubble that was once the World Trade Center, searching for survivors.
Maj. Jay Curry, a reservist from Lowville, N.Y., will help the Marines in Kane'ohe with their heightened security measures.
A Marine reservist with the rank of major, Curry arrived at the Marine Corps base in Kane'ohe along with a handful of other reservists as part of a nationwide deployment in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
He did duty in Hawai'i before, but it's different this time. While in Hawai'i for the next 179 days, he will help Kane'ohe Marines with heightened security measures.
What he saw in Manhattan changed the 36-year-old father of four.
"When you're on the ground, the magnitude is unbelievable," he said yesterday. "It's enormous. The smells of stuff burning. ... You can feel the sorrow, as thick as the smoke and dust in the air."
As a trooper, Curry has served on the search-and-rescue team. He has searched for lost people and fleeing criminals, rappelled into ravines, helped lead a drug bust. He spent four years as a Marine and served in the Gulf War. He has been a reservist for eight years and a trooper for seven. It did not completely prepare him for what he experienced.
Curry arrived at the World Trade Center ruins — "ground zero" — three days after the terrorist attack.
"We were digging through the rubble, doing bucket brigades, looking for voids or spots where someone might be," he said. "We would go down into those crevices where people could be."
He didn't know anyone in the buildings, but that didn't matter.
"As soon as you got there, early, early in the morning, you worked until you couldn't work anymore," he said. "You did what you could do, and even if you were tired, you kept going. There were a lot of people counting on you."
Curry found no survivors. But he found that certain remnants of lives lost were harder to confront than human remains.
"The pictures were hard," he said. "You learn quickly. You try not to connect with them. If I looked at a picture, it was quickly. The wedding pictures were tough. But you know somebody was looking for that."
Beyond the barricades, people were reduced to tears as they waited for news about the missing. In the face of it, Curry struggled to maintain self-control.
"I may not have shown it, but I was crying on the inside," he said.
Curry said that when he returned to his Lowville home in upstate New York, he spent as much time as possible with his wife and children. His oldest child, a 9-year-old boy, "wanted to know why" the terrorists did it.
"I told him I didn't know why."
