Actor Rob Riggle, a retired U.S. Marine officer, is recalling the days he spent searching for survivors at Ground Zero in Manhattan after the September 11 terror attacks, describing a scene he called “apocalyptic.”
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Riggle said the destruction was difficult to process even as he stood in the middle of it. “It was so unreal that it was surreal,” he said. “I was looking at skyscrapers that had the front of the building clawed out from the falling of the towers. They had gouged out other buildings. They had knocked other buildings over. They had weakened buildings to such a state that they would collapse.”
He remembered the Brooks Brothers store across from the World Trade Center site looking as if “Godzilla had scratched out the front” of it, gutted by falling debris.
“Then you had burned-out fire trucks and police cars and there were pictures and paper debris, and it was just, it was surreal,” he said. “It was surreal to see that much of Manhattan laying in some sort of apocalyptic ruin. It was shocking, and it was hard to process for sure.”
Riggle was serving with the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve based in Manhattan at the time and worked alongside firefighters, police officers, other military personnel, construction workers and volunteers who cleared debris by hand, passing it along in buckets rather than risk using heavy machinery that could injure anyone trapped below.
“Everybody was spread out, so when we stopped, you didn’t always know necessarily what was going on,” he said. “Were we dropping a listening device into the rubble? Did they find someone? Did they find someone alive or did they find remains? You just never really knew what it was, and so when they blew the whistle to stop moving and stop working, you would pray, you would just put your head down, and you would hope that it was somebody who was still alive.”
When remains were found, he said, workers would pause to pray both for the victim’s family to find closure and for themselves, to keep the strength to continue the search.
A rare unity
Riggle said what has stayed with him most from those days was a sense of national unity he had rarely witnessed. “It was a unification that I hadn’t seen maybe in my entire life,” he said, adding that political differences seemed to disappear. “It didn’t feel like there was anything separating us.”
“I remember seeing the Senate and the House of Representatives out on the steps of the Capitol singing ‘God Bless America’ together. I remember, nobody asked any questions, no one looked at each other and judged down at Ground Zero. Everybody worked. And we were unified in trying to figure out what happened and then figuring out a way to help.”
Twenty-five years on, Riggle said what first comes to mind when he thinks of Ground Zero are the firefighters who arrived from across the city, whom he called “heroes” — a deliberate choice, he said, to focus on them “rather than the terrorists.”
He said 9/11 forced a sobering realization for many Americans that “there’s people out there that are willing to commit evil acts and do harmful things,” but that he prefers to remember that “for every one terrorist, there were literally thousands of people out there trying to do the right thing.”
To Riggle, the phrase “never forget” carries a specific meaning. “It means don’t forget those innocent people who died. It means, don’t forget that there are people in this world that are committed to hurting us. It means we have to be vigilant always. We can never just take a break,” he said.
He added that it’s also a reminder of the people who serve in uniform — police, firefighters, EMTs, and members of the military — “so that we can not have more 9/11s.” “That just reminds me that we have to be vigilant. We can’t be naive. And it also reminds me, don’t ever forget that there are more good people than bad people,” he said.
