A lesson in service and sacrifice for Rand Paul

Everybody knows about Sept. 11. Everybody knows how the buildings fell, how thousands were killed, how emergency responders ran in, and how those emergency responders died. You know that day, Rand. That’s the day you talk about never forgetting.

But you don’t really know about Sept. 12, Sept. 13, Sept. 14. You don’t understand the October, the November, the 2002, the beyond. You don’t know the cost we paid for all those days past 9/11.

I’m here to make sure you do.

On Sept. 12, 2001, after working 18 hours the day before, I woke up and went to work. Every single cop in this city went to work. That’s 40,000 of us.

Add in every firefighter. Every EMT. Every one of us who could walk or crawl went to work, because we had to, because we wanted to.

As the city was in ruins, as the world was in slow motion turmoil, we went to work out of duty, not to our departments, but to our fellow man.

We didn’t worry about the cost.

Then, after work, after we’d spent 16 straight hours answering calls from scared New Yorkers and standing guard on foot posts and supporting distraught families and looking for missing people and investigating anthrax reports, those of us who could took off our uniforms and hung our shields around our necks, and went back down to Ground Zero as volunteers.

The world was falling down, and people needed help, help that we could give. We were willing and qualified, and we were told it was safe.

In 2001, I was 28 years old. I was young, I was lithe, and I was smaller than most of the men on the bucket brigade. I wasn’t as strong, or as knowledgeable, or as experienced as them. But I did what I could, because I could. I carried buckets, I dug holes, and when the cadaver dogs took a break, I crawled into the smaller spaces, my nose touching the ground, checking for life, checking for the remains of life.

For those of you who have