America Stands Tall Back to home page

By MARC FORTIER

Staff writer

BEVERLY -- On the morning of Sept. 11, Rick Cushman was awakened by his wife, Karen, just in time to watch the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

As he sat quietly, watching the horrible scene unfold before him on the television in his Saugus home, Cushman, a former combat engineer with the National Guard, realized he was needed in New York.

He made a couple of telephone calls, rounded up a friend who used to be in the Marines, and hopped in his car, leaving his wife and 4-month-old son behind.

"I just took off," Cushman said. "I took nothing, just the clothes I had on and a change of clothes. I went to the bank to get some cash and left."

Around 10 p.m., some 13 hours later, he was in hell, smack in the middle of the confusing mess that was Ground Zero.

"It was overwhelming," Cushman said. "I had no idea how large it would be."

He and his friend hooked up with a Federal Emergency Management Agency team from Pittsfield, which was glad to have two extra sets of hands.

"At that point, nobody knew what was going on," Cushman said.

The team began searching through the rubble for survivors.

There were about 20 people in the group, mostly firefighters.

"Everything was still on fire," Cushman said. "And there were a lot of body parts. The top layer was just gruesome."

There was very little digging. Mostly, the FEMA team was just walking around, looking for signs of life. If they found a pocket, someone would crawl in it and look around.

That first day, he spent 22 hours just walking around and searching. But there were few survivors to be found.

The day after the terrorist attacks, a Wednesday, Cushman and the FEMA team were working with a canine officer from Canada when the dog caught a scent.

At the bottom of a pile of rubble, someone was alive.

After moments of waiting, a shout rose from the silence. "We've got a survivor!"

At that point, Cushman said, "You could have heard a pin drop."

The woman, a Port Authority secretary named Genelle Guzman, was in pretty bad shape, her leg crushed by the debris. But, Cushman said, "She looked pretty good for someone who had spent over 24 hours there."

As it turned out, she was the fifth and final survivor to be pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. She is now walking on her own with the aid of a brace, and was married in July.

"She was only one of five survivors," Cushman said. "It was an honor to be part of finding one of them."

He and his friend spent another few days in New York before going home on Sept. 16. After a couple of days at home, he returned on Sept. 18.

"I needed closure," Cushman said. "Because at that point I was still a mess."

He stayed for the rest of the week, returning home for good on Sept. 25.

When he got home, Cushman found out that he had lost his job as a chef at a Saugus restaurant.

"They told me they'd hired somebody else," he said. "But at that point, it was just another thing. It wasn't important. My wife had a good job."

The 26-year-old Saugus resident eventually landed a job as a customer service representative for his brother-in-law's company, Direct Marketing Concepts. He works out of the company's office at the Cummings Center in Beverly.

Cushman said he never considered whether he might lose his job or any of the other consequences when he left for New York on Sept. 11.

"That's the way I am," he said. "I'm the type of person who stops when someone's got a flat tire on the road. I knew I could maybe make a difference. I wouldn't have been proud of myself if I hadn't gone."

When he left New York for the last time, Cushman took few souvenirs of the terrible tragedy with him. One thing he did keep was a large 16-by-10-foot American flag that he had from his time in the National Guard. While staying at Ground Zero, he hung the flag on the side of the scaffolding that served as the FEMA team's makeshift base camp.

Today, the worn flag hangs in the Cummings Center lobby, serving as a reminder to the thousands of employees who enter the office park every day.

Cushman said he had no plans to return to New York to commemorate the anniversary of Sept. 11. Instead, he said he would probably take the day off from work and spend it with his family, watching the memorial service on television.

"I'm not going to go," Cushman said. "I don't think I want to be part of that chaos. I want to go down there, but I'll go down when it's quieter."