A field trip from hell

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What a difference a day makes – especially if that day was September 11, 2001.

On the 10th, David Handschuh was a hard-driving, street-savvy photographer for the Daily News, the heralded New York tabloid newspaper, a newspaper made famous by its gritty approach to news and its photography.

After a near-death experience while covering the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, he has traded his cameras for a laptop computer, showing the harrowing and horrific images of that day and crusading for greater awareness of the trauma and stress faced daily by frontline reporters and photographers.

“We are affected by the things we cover. Post-traumatic stress is a reality,” Handschuh told a gathering of senior editors November 13 at the Executive and Managing Editors Seminar at the American Press Institute in Reston, VA.

One of the first journalists at the scene after the first of two hijacked jetliners slammed into the New York skyscrapers, Handshuh was thrown a city block and buried in rubble when the first of the two 110-story buildings collapsed and pancaked to the ground.

“The fact I am here,” he said. “I was blessed a million times over that day.”

Handschuh recalled for editors the fateful events of the morning and afternoon of September 11.

He was in his car, dressed in a new pair of slacks and shirt, en route to New York University, where he was to teach an advanced class in photojournalism.

“Put on some nice things. Look like a college professor,” his wife had beseeched him before he left his New Jersey home. Little did she know that those clothes would be torn to shreds and covered in building debris the consistency of “powdered cement” with her husband in a Bayonne, NJ, hospital by day’s end, said Handschuh.

Rolling down the West Side Highway, Handschuh saw a cloud of smoke emanating from the direction of the Twin Towers. His police radio told him a tower had been hit, and a fire was raging. “ ‘A Cessna or a Piper … Some damned fool hit the tower in some crazy accident,’ I thought,” he said.

But sensing a good story, the 15-year veteran photographer for the Daily News managed to tuck in behind a New York fire truck traveling toward the Twin Towers at high speed in a line reserved normally for traffic traveling in the other direction. “I just hung on and stayed close,” he said, noting that he recognized the firefighters who waved to him while adjusting equipment and readying to fight the blaze.

The truck’s entire company, some close friends, would be dead by day's end.

Handschuh, often the first at a crime or fire scene in New York City, immediately began shooting photos after arriving at the Trade Center. It was shortly before 9 a.m.

“The second tower had not been struck. For some reason, it was eerily quiet. There was no inkling of more danger,” said Handschuh, who immediately began to make images of the fire, debris in the street, body parts strewn about.

In 1993, when he arrived at the Twin Towers and the site of an earlier terrorist bombing, he immediately went inside the bowels of the buildings. This time he held back. Something was different this time. Maybe it was the crackling fire. Maybe it was the frantic victims jumping from the top floors to avoid being burned – only to die in an equally dreadful way on the asphalt below.

He kept shooting and shooting. Then, several minutes after he arrived, he and others at Ground Zero heard a tremendous roar. Handschuh likened it to that of a natural gasline explosion.

There was a fireball and more debris, glass and smoke. A second jetliner had struck the South Tower. Now, both were ablaze.

“We never saw it hit,” said Handschuh. “ I looked up and it was still such a beautiful, blue sky….But I knew it was a brutal act of intentional hostility.” The quiet had now become, in Handschuh’s words, a “field trip from hell.” Of the horror: “Some of the images I took at that point I will never look at again,” he told the seminar participants.

Handshuh was within yards of the second tower when it began to fall. “My first instinct was to keep shooting, but the voice in the back of my head said “run, run, run.”

Which he did.

He was fast enough to escape the cascading glass, cement, steel and debris. But not fast enough to avoid being lifted off the ground and thrown about by the intense wind created by the collapse of such a large structure.

Handschuh, now in pain, covered with debris and with severe injuries, somehow had survived. “Don’t worry, brother, we’ll get you out.” It was a group of firefighters. They freed him, but left him on the street momentarily while focusing on others closer to Ground Zero and in greater need.

He eventually was carried away (just in time as more debris covered the spot where he lay, writhing in pain) to a nearby deli, which housed a number of public safety workers seeking a respite, and other injured. He was given a Snapple and then carried away to a police boat, for the ride across the river to safety. He had managed to get his camera and film to a colleague during all the confusion.

“As I was going away, I still saw that beautiful blue sky, and the smoke of lower Manhattan. I reached down but I had no camera,” he remembered.

Things moved quickly after that. A visit to the hospital. Major surgery to his leg. A reunion with his wife and two kids. And time to relive the horror of it all.

And time to help his colleagues, journalists who have gone through similar experiences. Their cause is now his cause.

“We are not made of metal,” Handschuh said to the API group. “We need to grieve.”

wwatson@bsu.edu