We must also remember 9/12
When Patrick Dowdell said goodbye to his father on Sept. 9, 2001, he had no idea it would be the last time he would ever see his dad.
A decorated lieutenant from the New York City Fire Department’s Special Operations Command, Kevin Dowdell spent his 21-year career saving people — passengers on a downed helicopter in the East River, a waitress trapped in a collapsed diner, victims of the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Patrick vividly remembers his father, driving him to a Little League game, stopping to pull someone from a vehicle in a car accident. He idolized his father, who taught him the values of hard work, duty and patriotism.
They spent that early September weekend together as a family, celebrating his brother James’s birthday and working on Patrick’s application to the U.S. Military Academy. Patrick had applied to West Point right out of high school but did not get in on his first try, so he enrolled as a freshman at Iona College. But Kevin told Patrick not to give up on his dream. That weekend, they went over his essay together and discussed all the steps he needed for reapplying to the academy. Patrick recalls that his father dropped him off at school, saying, “Love you. See you soon. I’ll talk to you next week.”
Two days later, Kevin Dowdell raced across the Brooklyn Bridge with his fire rescue unit to the burning World Trade Center — and never returned.
After the attack, Patrick spent months at ground zero, digging through the rubble with the men from Kevin’s firehouse, looking for his dad. “I have to be down there if we do find him,” he thought. “I want to be the one to carry him out.” But the only thing they recovered was Kevin’s Halligan, a fireman’s tool. “It was just amazing that something he was literally holding that day made it back to us,” Patrick told me this week. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get anything else.”
Patrick was admitted to West Point. After graduating in 2006, he went on to serve with the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country where the attacks that killed his father were planned. But revenge was never a factor in his decision to serve, Patrick said. Rather, it was the sense of duty his father instilled: “Someone’s going to go,” Patrick told me. “And why not shoulder that burden with them if I’m capable?” He noted that he graduated in the first class that signed up to serve after 9/11. “These guys saw what happened to my family and families like mine and said, ‘I want to go serve the country and make sure this doesn’t happen again.’ ” He felt a calling to do the same.
Watching the events of the past few weeks in Afghanistan has been “very confusing to a lot of veterans,” Patrick said. Seeing the Taliban regime back in power is “a tough pill to swallow.” But for those who served, “We don’t understand why, first of all, wasn’t there a plan on this? Has anyone discussed how we’re going to do this at some point? And then what’s the plan on how to do it going forward, now that we’re in the situation that we’re in?”
He doesn’t understand how we could leave Americans trapped behind enemy lines. “There are Americans left in country, and we’re like, ‘Sorry, we’re not able to — not able to get them out. Sorry. We’re done’? … We’ve never seen that … If there’s anyone left anywhere, we always go. We always go get them.”
Patrick said he is most concerned about the loss of unity and resolve here at home that existed after 9/11. “Man, I remember driving down the West Side Highway heading towards ground zero to go work,” he said, and along the road there would be “these strangers standing out there with poster board and American flags,” chanting “USA!”
“That sense of community as a nation is something that I think is missing” today, he said. We need to recover the spirit we had in the weeks and months following 9/11 when “we came together as a country for the greater good. Not just for America to protect Americans, but also to protect the innocent lives of people in other countries, Afghanistan included.”
His mother, RoseEllen, still lives in the house his father built. “My brother works in the same firehouse that my dad worked in for many years … He chose to follow in my father’s footsteps and carry the torch.” On Saturday, the family will gather at that firehouse for breakfast with Kevin’s rescue unit, like they do every year. “For us as a family, the 19-year reunion or the 21-year anniversary, it’s all the same,” he said. They think about 9/11 every single day.
For the rest of us, Patrick said, “My parting wisdom, if you will, is remember 9/12.”