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Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumb. This our guest in this edition is Rob Riggle. You know him as an actor and comedian, but he's also a US Marine Corps veteran who served in both Afghanistan and Kosovo, and he also served in the immediate aftermath of the nine to eleven attacks at Ground Zero in New York City. And Rob, it's always great to see you.
Thanks to see you, Nice to see you. Well.
We talked with you last year and we heard a lot about how you joined the Corps and how the Corp actually was a major factor in your success as a comedian and actor. And one of the things that we touched on, but I think we need to go into more detail, is your role as a reservist in New York City on nine to eleven, and so explain what you were doing leading up to that day, what was your assignment, and then how that day unfolded.
So I had just left active duty, not more than I have nine or ten months prior to nine to eleven happening. I had joined a Marine Reserve unit in Manhattan MTU seventeen, Marine Training Unit seventeen, and I was, you know, I had a day job and at night I was pursuing comedy and I was staying in the Reserves because I love the Marine Corps and I wanted to stay connected and I wanted to just still be a part of it. But I also wanted to be a comedian and actor, and I needed to stay in New
York to make that happen. So when they got me new orders on active duty, they wanted me to go to Fort Meet and teach journalism or something, and I was like, so, I said, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and get out of active duty and join the reserves and stay in Manhattan and keep pursuing comedy and acting.
And then within nine months of.
That happening, nine to eleven happened, and.
We were attacked, and everybody remembers that day.
If you were an adult and an American, you'll never forget that day, just like the generation before us will never forget Pearl Harbor. You know, the shock and the surprise, and we had so much you know, obviously times have change, so we have such graphic video and such recording of it that it affected everybody deeply. And I was obviously in Manhattan on nine to eleven. I was at work.
I had gone in. It was a beautiful day. I had just gotten back from vacation.
I think it was a Tuesday morning, and so I was kind of it was getting back into the swing of things at the office, and I had just spent a lovely vacation with my with my wife and family, and we had come home and it was gorgeous, and I remember walking to work and thinking, what a perfect day, you know, it was wonderful and got to my office and my assistant at one point came in and said, Hey, I just heard a plane hit the World Trade Center.
Then I'm a pilot, you know, I have my pilot's license, and I thought, well, that's interesting, you know, and I kind of was behind on work, so I went back to work and then I started thinking about it. I was like, well, how did that happen? Because you know, this is a perfect day, you know. So I jumped up and I said, hey, tell me what happened, and she was like, I don't know, it's all happening right now.
And so we turned on the television and we found the coverage and you could see smoke coming out of the World Trade Center and I remember thinking, well, that looks too big to be like a little cess now or a little private plane to make that much in a smoke, and we were debating it and talking about what it could be, and you know, and that just doesn't seem possible on a day like today for a commercial pilot. So you know, all this is happening, and
nobody knows anything yet. Like the remember that the phone the phone lines weren't bursting out. Nothing had really unfolded. We were still waiting for the other shooter drop, I guess. And I called my my wife at the time, and she was working closer to downtown. I worked on forty second in Park Avenue and she worked down probably around thirtieth and seventh Avenue, so she was down in the garment district a little closer and she had big windows on her facing south, and she said she was watching
it live and I said, are you seeing this? And we were talking and then I heard big screaming from her office and I said, what happened?
Hap, what happened?
And she said, another plane just flew into the to the other World Trade Center. And I remember thinking, what that doesn't add up at all, And immediately I was like, I think we're under attack, which sounded crazy to say, but I you know, you can't. It can't dispute it. Something's going on. So I said, I think we're under attack. I ran back out to my office. They were all watching in shock because it happened live. So I had my X on the phone and I said, stay there,
I'm coming to get you. So I left my office and ran down to where she was, and I remember when I got out on the streets. It was a very surreal moment because I think the trains had stopped at that point, and I just remember everybody was on the surface, so you had the sidewalks were packed, but the traffic wasn't moving. I mean, the hostital bustle of New York City. You know, it's it's legendary, it's phenomenal. But for whatever reason, you had all these people on
the surface. Nobody was underground. Everybody was on the surface. The traffic had stopped, but there were no horns, there was no talking, and it was just this very eerie quiet. And I remember I was going down Fifth Avenue. I had cut over from Park to Fifth and I was headed down Fifth to get over seventh, you know.
Thirtieth or whatever.
And I remember going down Parking and you could see smoke all the way downtown. You could see it, and there was a state of shock. It was this, you know, this is happening, but no one knows what it is yet. Nobody knows what it means. Nobody knows what's next, nobody. It's very confusing and shocking time. Obviously that's what happens in a surprise attack. So I remember getting down to
my again, my wife at the time. I remember getting down to her office, getting her, and then we walked back to our apartment, which was up like forty fourth in Lexington, So we got back up there and then we just did what everybody else did, hunkered down in front of our television and tried to figure out what
was happening. And we watched, like everybody else in horror, as the towers fell and people were running for their lives, and this was happening just you know, less than a mile or a mile away from us, in a place that we were very familiar with My wife at the time, you know, I the night I proposed to her, I took her to Windows on the World, which is the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center, and we had gone there a couple of times for one or
two of our anniversaries, and so we were very familiar with the whole downtown area and we knew people up there and the World Trade Center, so you know, we were very concerned and it felt like a sucker punch, just like everybody else. That night of September eleventh, pretty much that afternoon evening, I got a call from my commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Brozak called and said, hey, listen,
our unit has been activated. So I thought, wow, that was fast, but you know, it made sense because we were the only marine unit. We were on the reserve unit in Manhattan, and all the bridges and tunnels were closed, and you know, they didn't know what they were dealing with. Everybody was still trying to figure a lot of things out there, a lot of questions, a ton more questions than there were answers at that time.
And so I said, what was that? What does that mean?
He says, we'll put on your boots and utes, utilities and boots, and that means for a lot of cami, your cami uniform camouflage.
And so I did what he said. I put it on.
Next morning, reported to Ground zero one police Plaza, which was very close to ground zero, and we formed up and they said, okay.
Well.
Nobody knew what was going on, but it was like it's search and rescue, so let's go find a place and we're going to start moving rubble by hand because of the time it was search and rescue, because we still thought there could be hundreds, maybe thousands of people trapped in this rubble. There was six stories of rubble.
So you know, these these the towers collapse and when they collapsed, they gutted other buildings, They smashed out foundations of other building, they smashed out windows of all the surrounding buildings. So those had collapsed into six stories of rubble and twisted metal and iron and pulverized concrete, which that pulverized concrete was kind of a moon dust. You know, you'll never forget it, you know, you step on it,
and it was these clouds and it was everywhere. I mean it was a huge radius and papers, papers like just everywhere, paper everywhere for blocks in every direction because you know, when it came down, it just compressed it all out and pushed it out.
So you got six stories of rubble.
You've got this powder, which a couple of days later it rained, and then that turned into a paste, and you had burnout cars and all these fire trucks that were burnt out, but there are skeletons of the trucks and skeletons of cars, and it was very surreal when you walked downtown.
It was.
It was it was surreal. That's the only way I can describe it, because it looked like a movie. It felt like it smelled, you know, that of burning whatever it was, metal concrete, pulverized concrete, that wet pasty concrete.
You know, you can it's a very distinct smell.
And so our unit we went down to one of the corners.
Of the towers.
I don't know which tower was Tower one, maybe it's the one further south, and there was a Burger King across the street kind of and the windows had been blown out, and you know, all those businesses were just you know, devastated, but the burger King, I just remember, that's where we staged our gear. That's where we put
our backpacks and our and canteens and whatever. We would stage our gear there and then we literally just formed a bucket brigade all the way up this hill like ants going up a hill of this rubble, and then we were handing buckets up and buckets down and just moving the rubble off the pile and down out to the outskirts of the you know, the blocks away because you couldn't bring any heavy equipment into the area because
we were afraid of cave ins. And again we thought it was you know, search and rescue, so we're trying to We're thinking there's bodies under here. So you're picking up chunks of rocks and putting in buckets and you're sending them up and down, up and down. And from the twelfth until the eighteenth, I think we worked, you know, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, twelve hours on, twelve
hours off, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. And you know, they gave us a little eventually, like day two or three, they gave us a little surgical mask because that moon dust was all over the place, right, and so we had the little surgical mask on. It wasn't much. It was literally just a little paper. I think I had more protection at COVID, but we had those. Eventually. Nobody liked them because they just it was harder. It was so hard to work, you know, trying to breathe through
that thing. And then our unit stayed there until the eighteenth. And then after the eighteenth the word came down that, you know, it was no longer search and rescue, that it was more search and recovery. And so they started bringing in heavier equipment and started moving things with bucket loaders, and they started making better progress. And then we were pulled off the rubble piles at that point and they left it to the firefighters and more to the first responders.
And our orders were from the September twelfth to the September thirtieth, so, and then from the eighteenth or whatever, I went over to one police plaza and then just tried to help coordinate civilian military efforts whatever that means, you know, equipment, cadaver dogs, you know, whatever was coming in from military. I would liaison with the NYPD and try to work with them. I was a captain at
the time. I just remember, like everybody, wanting to do something, you know, feeling the as every day that ticked off, you got more and more upset, more and more angry. You couldn't believe this happened, you know, that first couple of days. I remember F sixteen's flying around Manhattan very low, and you know, it was that shocking moment of oh my gosh. I never thought i'd ever see a day when I'd have to have F sixteen's flying cover in
New York City. You know, it just seemed impossible. And if you remember back, everybody was hurting, everybody was angry. It was a sucker punch, and everybody was couldn't get their head wrapped around that. They couldn't understand the evil. They were searching for answers. They they didn't know what the answers were. They you know, they just a lot of people when they're in shock, they can't process. It's natural, that's fine. But I and people wanted to help. I
remember so many times in New York. The people in New York were so great. They wanted to help, and any way they could. They were bringing clothes and food and waters and you know, down to the as close as they could get to ground zero and just stay right there so that the first responders and anybody down there could actually just walk out to where the boundaries were and grab water and grab you know, at night,
if they needed a jacket or whatever. You know, they could grab those things and people were donating blood, and you know, they just they needed to do something. And I was a thirty one year old captain in the Marine Corps. I had a pretty high security clearance. I knew they were going to need people that I knew what this meant. This is not something that you just on that scale. You just don't batch your eyes at and walk away from. This is going to be We're
getting involved now. So I called my COO and I just said, listen, I know, I've got a green badge, which is a TS top secret with a skiff clearance. I'm like, they're going to probably need me or they're gonna want me, especially for my job at the time, which was public affairs. So he h, I said, put me back in if you can, you know. And he called Central Command down to Tampa and said, hey, I got a young captain up here. He's got a green badge,
if you know, and he wants to get back. In November tenth Marine Corps birthday, I got my orders to go back to active duty. Down to Central Command. I jumped. I rented a car in New York and I drove because I didn't have a car at the time, and I drove down to Camp La June and I had to in process back into active duty.
From there.
My parents met me in Camp La June. They were in Kansas. They drove out from Kansas and met me in Lea June. I turned the rental car back in, they gave me their car, and then I drove their car down to Tampa and they flew back home, and that way I had a car. Got to Tampa on the seventeenth of November, checked in to the Public Affairs office there and then sent Coome got briefed up on what was going on, what we were doing. And then the colonel came to me and said, all right, yeah,
don't unpack. You're going to you know, you're going to Afghanistan. So I said, okay, And I was on a plane I think the thirtieth of November, and I headed over to Uzbekistan to k two, landed there, spent a couple of days there, tried to get into Afghanistan a couple of times, tried to go over the mountains in a Chinook forty seven and that was a harrowing experience. We
couldn't make it over the mountains. We were flying at night, Snow's coming in through the gunner report, you know, So you got snow and the fuselage and it's the roughest ride ever had my whole life. And so we had to turn back halfway and it was I mean, that was the longest night. So we didn't make it in that night, but I did kiss the ground when I
got back to Uzbekistan. And then a couple days later we I got into masarish Reef and joined up with a unit there, an army unit, and started working with them and at public affairs and civil affairs capacity and stayed with them till early February and then mid February, I don't know, somewhere in that February frame, and then they had stabilized their mission a lot. We had started doing more operations in the south, and so Sentcom called
me back. I went back, and I got back just in time for Operation Anaconda, which I worked at SINCAM from the Joint Operation Center out of the JOCK and did that and then ended up going back to Afghanistan in the summer of two thousand and two for just a couple months to two maybe three months tops and then came back and my year was up. And then I went back to New York and stood by because they were gearing up for Iraq, and I didn't know if I was going to be involved in that or not.
And then a year after that, I got on Saturday Love and then you know, things started happening on the entertainment front. But that's kind of the the story as I you know, as I remember it.
From nine to eleven, there was one story when you were working on the rubble pile where you were almost seriously injured with life well.
Because the buildings were all unstable around us, Like even a day or two after the nine to eleven you had a whole another building collapse like you know World Trades hour six or something, you know it was there was another whole building that collapsed, and there was another building that the Brooks Brother store was it. I remember the Brooks brother was down low, but it was an office building up top. But it looked like Godzilla had just clawed out the front of those building because there
was just this gash missing. So there's its buildings run stable. So with the winds, you know, everybody just didn't know what we were dealing with another building could fall, it could collapse, and we were working against the clock because again we thought there were survivors, so we had to be down there.
We couldn't just leave it.
And so they had an air raid siren, one of those old wirlwater and when that sounded, our job was to get out of there, get out, because they were afraid of something, a cave in, a collapse, something. So that was the only instruction we had was just get out. If you hear that, exit, get away from get away from ground zero. So yeah, I remember I was down closer. I wasn't way up high. I was down closer to the base of the pile. And they fired up the alarm,
so we all start. You know, anytime you start moving quickly, it can turn into a route very quickly. You can turn into everybody's just running because they don't know, you know, it's a panic thing, you know, you know, why why are running?
Why are we running? And then everyone just takes off running.
And I came running around the corner and they had a generator with one of those big lights on top of it for night work, and you know, it was set up around this in this alleyway and so naturally everybody's like ants trying to find their way out. And so I came around the corner and ran into this generator where the trailer hitch extended out and it was right about shin level, and I remember I hit it and no problem. You know, I've thought, okay, I'll just
get it, but the body wave behind me. People just kept stacking up on me, and I couldn't necessarily get my legs out, and I could feel the pressure, and I thought, oh god, I'm going over, but my legs aren't. So I thought I'm gonna break my legs here. So I remember I had to use my old low post skills, give me the old Charles barklay and just drive my butt back into everybody.
And I did.
I got enough that I could get a little room for myself and get up on top top of it, and then I just pointed it out to everybody, so as people didn't stack up, you know, keep stacking up or tripping over it, and I don't think anything happened. You know, they sounded the safe to.
Go back, so we all went back.
But just you know, those moments, he just didn't know what was going to happen next, and so there was a tremendous amount of anxiety and sadness. Anxiety, sadness hurt, tremendous emotions.
You know.
I was thirty one at the time, and you know I heard the story about all those traders at Caunter Fitzgerald, and you know, these guys are my age, you know, and the guys that led the revolt on flight ninety three, you know, that guy was my age.
I remember the name of the lead guy. Do you remember Beamer?
He was my age, He was my exact age. And I remember thinking that could have been me, could have been me, you know, And so everybody was hurting, everybody was sad. It's a tough time.
You mentioned wearing the mask and the smells that were going on there. Obviously now we know about the long issues that the folks working down there were dealing with. Did that cross your mind at all about some of the toxic elements that might have been around you?
No, I didn't think about it, And when we finally heard stories about it, it was years after. For us, it was, you know, a couple of years later. And I don't think I was down there long enough to be honest, you know, we were down there six days, probably actually all on the pile, So I don't I don't know. For me, I have I've been very blessed.
I haven't experienced anything. But you know, I think if you were down there for a sustained period of time, I think, sure, yeah, there could be all kinds of problems.
Rob, thanks so much for your time today.
We appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it.
Rob Rigel, retired at US Marine Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Rob Rigel. That is as well, of course as an actor and comedian. I'm Greg Corumbus. This is Veteran's Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at
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