K9 search and rescue handler remembers Ground Zero: "...We did not leave our countrymen behind"

VERMILION — When body bags and buckets weren't available, recovery teams at Ground Zero put human remains in their pockets. "When we were searching the surrounding buildings, finding pieces that had been blown through the windows, they were our countrymen. We weren't going to leave them rot on a roof ledge or on a desk," Gary Flynn said. "I watched as my tag man ran out of places to put stuff." Flynn, of Vermilion, worked what crews called the pile for about 10 days straight. What were supposed to be 12-hour shifts often blurred beyond that as he and his dog Tascha spent countless hours navigating underground, searching for what was left of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "Twenty years ago we put them in our pockets so we did not leave our countrymen behind," he said. "Today we (expletive) abandon them behind enemy lines. Seem like 20 years? How about never forget — you see it everywhere, 'never forget, never forget.' Looks like we forgot." A founding member and former president of the Ohio Search Dog Association, Flynn was a member of the state's Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 1 when terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, flying both into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Flynn was working at Bioplastics in North Ridgeville when the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., killing hundreds on impact. His pager went off for a plane into the tower and a high-rise fire in Manhattan. He thought it was accidental until the second plane hit the South Tower less than 20 minutes later. "I had been to plane crashes before, I'd been to large plane crashes before. Plane crashes are very unique scenes," Flynn said. "Big planes, small planes. ... And I had been to building collapses — tornadoes and construction incidents. ... Nobody had ever combined the two." He called his wife, who started crying while they were on the phone. "She's like 'You're going?' I'm going," Flynn said. "She goes, 'We're being attacked.' (I said) I know." From there, he came home, grabbed Tascha and drove to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, running lights and sirens all the way. Once everything was loaded, drivers took the deployment from Ohio through the night, reaching the city at daybreak Sept. 12. "Right before we were going over the bridge as the sun was breaking we could see the smoke coming up from the pile," he said. "The pile was still on fire, it burned for weeks. Add to that that we don't work on top of the pile —-- well, we do only until we find a spot to go under the pile." Under the pile were office workers from the Trade Center, and New York's first responders, members of its task force that Flynn had trained with and knew their names. "We're going in after our own. … Our brothers and sisters are in there," he said. Ground Zero was more than just the pancaked towers, it was buildings blown over, mountains of papers and concrete dust so heavy crews were using snow plows to clear pathways through Manhattan. He said not including the debris field, the pile stretched across about 12 acres. "Every now and then a plow would be moving and the drivers would stop in front of us, just stop," he said. "They were like hey, the plows are turning up human remains on the way in. Get your dogs out in front of the plows. … We went in front of the plows — (body) parts." The pressure of the buildings ground concrete, office furniture, computers and telephones into unrecognizable powder. Perimeter buildings like the Merrill Lynch Financial Center had aircraft debris and human remains blown through the windows. No one in the original collapse survived, he said. Some parts were recognizable, others weren't. Like many of the plane crashes he'd worked before, they moved remains in 5 gallon buckets. Those found alive were trapped in vacant spaces from secondary collapses or in perimeter buildings. The dogs, like Tascha, sensed rescuers' feelings as the hours turned into days on site. They would take breaks to play with the firefighters, lifting everyone's spirits before getting back to work. Recovery efforts relied on the dogs and cameras, crawling carefully through gaps in the wreckage of hundreds of floors of office buildings and two aircraft that towered 20 to 30 floors high after the collapse. It a wilderness in the middle of the largest city in the country, he said. One of the buildings blown over was New York's Emergency Management Agency, destroying communications. "When you're doing something that the weight of the world is on top of you, the emotions, everything about that, you come back and now something else is supposed to be important?" he said. "Your perspective gets skewed very quickly and things that you would think were important weren't now. It's very tough and compartmentalizing only takes you so far." After the mission, Flynn and Tascha returned home. The small Belgian malinois slept for days, she had spots on her where fur never grew back from where she'd been burned in the pile. Flynn hated crowds and couldn't listen to the National Anthem without crying. He would wake up in the middle of the night looking for his dog, his helmet and his gun, he said. "It's tough — 'Hey I know you just spent the last 10 days crawling around in this, picking up body parts but you've got a sales call tomorrow morning," he said. "I didn't know if I'd be able to do my regular job." Asked if it feels like it's been 20 years, Flynn said it's almost not a fair question. Through his years in public service — in the Army, as a paramedic and in search and rescue — he said it's a "no hero zone." He's stood beside a lot of flag-draped coffins since 9/11. He checks in on a lot of the people he worked with, hoping he won't get another call because one of them committed suicide. Time has given him some ability to process, he said, but the distance doesn't make it easy to talk about. Defining himself as an "infantryman and a dog handler," and since he isn't needed to kick in any doors at 54 years old, he's turned to training dogs as his salvation, he said. Flynn is the owner of The Dog Advocate training, providing services for federal working and therapy dogs. "The dogs have really been a big part of how I manage," he said. "And like now obviously with it being 20 years and everything that's going on and just kind of the general state of where things are right now obviously for you it's pictures and movies. For me, I know what those smell like. It's different." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.