Glen Klein (NYPD ESU), Centereach
Glen Klein remembers working The Pile. He remembers the good days.
“At that point,” he says, “a good day was a day that we found a piece of flesh, a bone, anything that you could bring back to the morgue and have the medical examiner determine who the part belonged to and give closure to the family [of the person to whom the part belonged].”
Klein was a member of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit (ESU)—the toughest, most hardcore, most highly trained, most intense members of the force: the SWAT guys, the scuba guys, the Hazmat guys, the search-and-rescue guys. Now off the job for the better part of a decade, Klein still looks every bit the rock-hard, stone-cold tough guy he was during his days on the force: slicked-back hair; eyes like the barrels of a Beretta Silver Hawk; sleeveless Harley T-shirt showing off tatted arms.
Klein got to Ground Zero shortly before Building 7 came down. From that moment, he worked The Pile for nearly 800 hours, from Sept. 11, 2001 to June of 2002.
“In the beginning, it was every day, seven days a week,” he says. “We were put on 12-hour tours, which, by the time we would leave, was more like a 14- to 16-hour tour.”
For Klein, working The Pile meant sifting through debris, piles of dust, and looking for bodies or any kind of personal effects.
“On a daily basis, we were finding bodies, parts of bodies, flesh,” he says. Klein estimates he was there for the discovery of hundreds of bodies or body parts. He also knows that everyone out there was putting his or her health at risk.
“But we knew that we had a job to do,” he says. “We knew that we had to get those body parts out, to give closure to families. And we knew that we still had our guys buried in that rubble. So [safety] really took a backseat to what the task at hand was, and the task at hand was to recover bodies and body parts and even personal belongings: rings, jewelry of any kind, ID cards from people who worked at Ground Zero.”
By January, the ESU officers were told they could no longer be on-site seven days a week.
“It was becoming too much for most guys,” says Klein. “Emotionally and physically, there were days [that] if you got two, three hours sleep, that was a lot.”
Klein lost 14 officers from his unit at Ground Zero, when the towers went down. He says that at least three-quarters of them were never accounted for. Meanwhile, as time passed and 9/11 fell further into the rearview, Klein’s own health began deteriorating.
“I had come down with an intestinal bacteria called h-pylori, and I had to be put on heavy-duty antibiotics.” Klein believes the cause was contaminated food exposed to dust at Ground Zero.
“We were told that the air was safe at that point by the EPA,” he says. “I remember seeing EPA people with air monitors, and I had even asked them what the readings were, and they said, ‘Don’t worry about it; it’s fine.’ I was a HAZMAT specialist so I was curious to know what the readings were and what they were testing for, but they wouldn’t come out with it.”
Klein believes the EPA was given instructions not to tell anyone what the readings were, because he believes the readings were extremely high.
“In fact,” he says, “a few days after the EPA finished doing their monitoring, when they had told us the air was safe, I had seen signs put up saying, ‘Do not remove respiratory protection: asbestos levels are high.’” This was at Stuyvesant High School—where ESU was sleeping, eating, taking off their masks after working The Pile.
“We believed that it was safe,” says Klein. Just the same, he also says, “We knew that the dust from Ground Zero was a toxic mixture of all kinds of things: asbestos, heavy metals, pulverized concrete… It was a toxic stew.”
In 2003, Klein went to Mohegan Sun, to get engaged to his now-wife Carole. One night, at about midnight, he started experiencing severe abdominal pain.
“It felt like someone was putting a knife in my chest and twisting it,” he says. “I was on my knees in agony.” His wife and friends took him to an emergency room. However, “to this day they haven’t given me a definitive diagnosis.”
The pain continued to flare up for years (though Klein notes he has not had such a bout in nearly a year now, and knocks on the kitchen counter to help preserve his good fortune). Klein also found himself battling GERD, asthma and high blood pressure. Prior to this, he had been in perfect health. You have to be in perfect health to be in ESU. Worse, though, was his psychological state.
“I was an emotional wreck,” he says. Klein retired from ESU in 2003. Then, he started drinking. He had never been a drinker. But for Klein, alcohol provided an escape, to get away from the pain of losing his friends.
“Being that I was in ESU, we dealt with death and destruction on a daily basis.” Klein checks off a laundry list of horrors he witnessed as a part of his job: multiple shootings, car accidents with numerous deaths, a shootout where his unit had to kill someone. But nothing got to him like 9/11. He started drinking more. And more. He started fighting with his wife. He had no tolerance for his kids. He started punching holes in the walls of his house.
Carole, a nurse practitioner, diagnosed Klein with PTSD, and said if he didn’t seek treatment immediately, she would divorce him.
“I believe that, thanks to her, I realized I needed to get help,” he says.
He went for treatment, tests, started medication, was clinically diagnosed with PTSD. He took more medication. He couldn’t get out bed in the morning. He felt depressed. Didn’t care about anything. He let the bills pile up. Sold his business. Finally, he found medication that helped, somewhat. Today, the soft-spoken Klein works with Feal, as the Feal Good Foundation’s director of police personnel and Sergeant-at-Arms.
“I know that I will never be the old Glen Klein,” he says. “Because there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about 9/11 and the loss of my friends.”
Like Feal, Klein knows that he is one of the lucky ones. He knows there are others out there with cancer, people who have lost their families, their homes, others who have it so much worse. He still has his family. For today, at least, he still has his health.
“I don’t think there’s any 9/11 responder who would sit in front of you and say, ‘I know I’m going to live a long, healthy life,’” he says. “We’re not. We all know that. We’re not going to live as long as we would have lived if 9/11 didn’t happen.”