As you know, when I’m writing a book—which I’m usually doing—my interactions with the outside world are sometimes limited to what comes into my life through my email account, that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. (The last would be those phony AI-manufactured literary praise messages that keep wanting to introduce me to non-existent book clubs everywhere even when the title in question isn’t one of mine. I believe I’ve mentioned those on more than one occasion!)

But often the real email exchanges, the authentic ones, give me a lead into that week’s blog topic, and that’s the case here.

This past week I heard from one of my LTR’s (Long-Time Readers) who happens to be a retired brigadier general from the US Air Force, and what he sent really moved me. It’s like what Paul Harvey used to call “the rest of the story”—the part that happens after the headlines go away, leaving the general public totally in the dark. Usually my blog consists of something that I’ve written personally. This week’s post is an exception to that rule. I’m posting verbatim what was sent to me.

And in case you’re wondering, Fresh Kills isn’t the topic of a new book about some random serial killer—at least not to my knowledge. It’s actually the name of what was once the world’s largest landfill located on Staten Island.

Fresh Kills The part of 9/11 you were never told — out of respect for the fallen

After September 11th, more than a million tons of material from the World Trade Center was taken by barge to Staten Island.

Th place was called Fresh Kills.

For 50 years it had been the largest landfill in the world. It had just closed for good on March 22, 2001. New York was finally done with it.

Five and a half months later, at 2 a.m. on September 12th, the director got a phone call at home. Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the towers.

He drove back to work. He later said quietly — if Fresh Kills had not just closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The site was empty when America needed it to be empty.

And that is where the towers went.

Here is how it worked. At Ground Zero, crews loaded debris into trucks. The trucks went to a pier on the Hudson. There, it was loaded onto barges — 600 tons at a time. More than 1,500 barges made that trip, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island.

At Fresh Kills, the material was sorted by size. Then it went onto long conveyor belts.

And along those belts stood hundreds of Americans in white protective suits. NYPD detectives. FBI agents. Port Authority officers. Medical examiners. Sanitation workers.

Hour after hour, day after day, they watched that belt as the towers slowly rolled past.

When they saw something personal, they reached in and placed it in a white bucket at their feet.

A wedding ring. A badge. A photo ID. A set of keys. A family photo.

Those white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue. Everything was cleaned, catalogued, and whenever possible, returned to families who had nothing else.

In mid-September they were processing 1,750 tons a day. By October, 17,500 tons a day. Around the clock.

That 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months. It did not close for weather. It did not close for Christmas. It ran until July 2002.

One supervisor, Barry Asnes, said what kept him there for 16-hour shifts, 7 days a week: “We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal.”

A retired detective wrote about what a shift was like. Wake at 3 a.m. Drive two hours in the dark to Staten Island. Put on the white suit. Stand at the belt. Look. Drive two hours home. Do it again tomorrow.

By the end, the teams on that hill had recovered thousands of remains and tens of thousands of personal effects — wallets, wedding bands, badges — all returned to families.

When they finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section, 225 feet high, and covered. It is a park now.

Many of the men and women who stood on that hill now have breathing issues, health conditions, and trauma from the air they breathed for 10 months. Some have passed away. Almost nobody knows their names.

2,753 people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified. Every one of those identifications, every ring returned to a widow, every badge returned to a firehouse — came from someone in a white suit, at 4 in the morning, on a landfill hill, who reached in and sent someone home.

They did it for ten months. Nobody was watching. No one was applauding.

They did it anyway. Because it was the right thing to do.

Never forget them, too.

I hope this story touches you as much as it did me, because I had no idea of the hundreds of people who put in all those countless hours attempting to locate some physical trace of a missing loved one or some personal token or trinket left in the rubble so it could be returned to the grieving families of those 2,753 people.

As far as I’m concerned it’s a story well worth repeating.