A World Gone Mad
chapter 2211 September 2001
THIS CHAPTER IS IN OUTLINE FORM
Remember I said earlier that 60% of people die in their first confined Rescue, and that I had been inside 894 collapsed buildings? Well, there will never be an 895th, because building number 894 broke my back, and left me dying by slow degrees. I met my nemesis on September 11th, 2001. The World Trade Center has, in all probability, killed me. My doctors are astonished that I have survived this long.
I was living in New Mexico, so for me it was 7.15 am when the first tower got hit. I did not have the TV or radio on: I had no idea it was happening, until I got a phone call. 1
The more bizarre your life, the harder it is to introduce yourself to people. For me, that makes introductions damn near impossible. But the impossible is what I have done every day for the best part of twenty years, so what the hell, here goes.
My name is Doug Copp. I am generally considered to be the most experienced Rescue person in the world. What I do is this: whenever there is a serious large-scale disaster somewhere in the world, I find a way to get to it – somehow, anyhow – and when I am there, I try to save lives. I find survivors, and I pull them out. At least, I used to; but since the World Trade Centre I can barely even walk across my bedroom. I started in Rescue in 1985, and since then I have saved lives at more than a hundred major disasters around the world. My Rescue Name – the name given to me by my fellow rescue workers – is la Cucaracha, the Cockroach. They call me that because I can crawl into the wreckage of any ruin building, and because they think I am impossible to kill. Until recently, I believed them9-11, it was looking like they might even be right – and there were statistics to back me up.
The proof is in the numbers: 60% of all rescuers who go inside a collapsed building to search for survivors never come out again. More than half of all rescuers who go in, are killed in their first attempt. Knowing the statistics, very few rescuers ever take that first risk. Fewer still will risk it a second time – and there are only three or four rescuers in the world who have been inside ten collapsed buildings or more. I personally have crawled inside eight hundred and ninety-four. That is around eight hundred and fifty more collapsed buildings than any other human being on the planet.
I have wrestled more than three hundred people away from certain, gruesome death in the aftermath of major disasters. The team I put together has saved several hundred more. Plus, if you count lives saved through education, prevention, and the fact that my team stopped dead an outbreak of bubonic plague after a quake in India, then I reckon that between us around a hundred and twenty-five thousand people who are alive today would otherwise have died. That is a lot of people. It turns out that I have a gift for rescue. I discovered that gift by accident, and I have used it – because if I do not, then no one will – and people will die who could be saved. I do Rescue because I can, and because others cannot. There is a need I can fill: I fill it. A hundred and twenty-five thousand lives saved indirectly, or three hundred directly, take your pick. Either way, what could possibly be more important?
But there is one life I may have failed to save: my own. I am dying – or perhaps just barely surviving, I still do not know which. It has been this way for almost two years. My doctors are all astonished I am alive at all; they all assure me that it is just a matter of time. At the World Trade Centre, the Cockroach finally met its match.
Actually, in one way, I was dead already. At least, that is what Hartford Life Insurance told me. In 1989, my fourth year in Rescue, I approached them about life insurance. I had just got remarried, and I wanted to make sure Paulina would have a secure future despite the dangers of my work. They patiently explained that they were always prepared to quote a price wherever there was a quantifiable risk – a chance of death and a chance of survival – but according to their analysis, I should already have died, within two months of my first Rescue job. From their point of view, there was no risk involved at all – I had long-since passed the point of actuarial certitude of death. For me, the extra fourteen years I have has since then are pure bonus.
And fuck death anyway. I have faced death before. Death is an old friend. We have seen a lot of each other over the years. At those same disasters where I saved the lives I saved, there was death almost beyond measure. Six hundred and fifty thousand people have died in the buildings and cities I have crawled through. I have not just seen dead people – I have seen Death itself. I know Death. Death holds no fear for me at all. And, in any case, a sick Cockroach is not the same thing as a dead Cockroach. On my good days I still think that just maybe I can even get out of this one alive.
But it is the bad days that have made me want to write my story down. On the bad days I cannot even suck in enough air to sit upright. On the bad days, the deadness in my legs spreads up across my back and fans out into my arms, and eventually even my fingertips are numb. There are days – weeks, months – when pain clamps itself hard across my skull and I can feel myself fading. Sometimes, I am almost tempted to let go. These are the days that make me want to tell my story.
You see, I don’t see why I should stop saving lives just because I am probably dying. There are things I can tell you, things that could one day save your life. Disasters do happen, after all; and there are things you should know. For example: never duck and cover during a quake; it will almost certainly kill you. Did you know that? I bet you were taught exactly the opposite.
And there are people I need to warn you about, too. Many of those who flock to the scene of a disaster are profoundly evil. As you would expect, any large-scale disaster is horrific. There is chaos, a stink of death so you thick you can barely breathe, desperate survivors searching for their loved ones in a sea of chaos. There is rot, rats, corpses everywhere, shit flowing freely through the wreckage from ruptured sewers. The aftermath of disaster is a meaningless mangle of concrete and ripening pestilence.
But all that physical horror is trivial: the real horror at any large-scale disaster is less tangible. It is the horror not of natural forces, but of political ones.
When America sends a government rescue crew to help with a disaster in another country, it is members of their internal disaster agency FEMA… Except that, if you care to check, you will discover that FEMA has never heard of these people – these are people who are not even rescue engineers at all. In fact almost every country that sends a Rescue team sends mostly spies. I mostly do not care about this – after all, if they are actually doing the Rescue work that needs doing, then who cares if they are spying in their spare time? Some of my best friends are spies from various Rescue teams, and it does not bother me, why should it? But the Americans do not bother with Rescue at all. The American spies neatly peg out the area they are supposed to be searching – and then they disappear into the night. They will not even let anyone else attempt Rescue work on their patch, because it would show up the fact that they are not doing any; if you are alive under the rubble in the patch allocated to the American FEMA team, you are going to die – you are going to die – because they will not even try to find you. The CIA is not interested in lives, it is interested in how countries respond to chaos and emergency. In the name of the American people, these Americans let people die – this, from a country which they regularly ask God to bless… Well, I hope God has a sense of humour.
There is more. I have seen a country’s president halt all rescue efforts for five hours until the media were there to film him walking through the area caring; his own citizens were dying right under his feet – for a photo opportunity[1]. I have seen Japanese bureaucrats prevent foreign teams from doing rescue work, because they wanted the credit to go to their own team – and by the time that team arrived, all that was left to pull from the ground was corpses. I have seen FBI investigators looting stores after the World Trade Centre disaster. I have seen the greed of the American Red Cross kill people – they used vitally needed respirators as fund-raising props while half a mile away Rescue workers were suffocating in toxic smoke.
And I have seen another president[2] announce that the American people are forever in the debt of those who risked their lives in the aftermath of 9-11, in the hope of saving others. Debt? I am bankrupt! I am dying! And it took them a whole year just to issue the form to apply to the 9-11 fund; and when it arrived it was a pile of paper six inches thick, requiringrequired $250,000 of expensive depositions from doctors, lawyers, economists – and a stamina that is generally kind of hard to find while you are busy dying. It took me five months to complete enough of it to apply for an emergency medical payment. As I write, they still have not actually got around to looking at the submission. Debt?! I wish I could laugh at that – or shout – but my lungs are too fucked. Not to mention my liver, my kidneys, my eyes and my broken spine.
I have debts. I owe my doctors tens of thousands. I owe my lawyers. I owe rent, I owe the supermarket for the food I eat. I have to take a hundred and twenty-five separate medications every day just to have a chance of seeing tomorrow – and that costs me $3,000 a month. It is all money I do not have, because while I was even half-alive I put every penny I ever earned into Rescue. Debt?!! Hey, Dubya, come live with me for a week; because right now you do not even know the meaning of the word.
OK, so I think we have probably established that I am a tad bitter. Who would not be? But the bitterness is only partly from self-pity. True, the neglect of people like George Dubya Bush is helping to kill me, and that does tend to piss me off; but I am mostly bitter for all the lives these people could have saved – could still be saving – but choose not to.
Disasters have a kind of magnetism to them. They draw both good and evil things towards them. In my life in Rescue, I have seen miracles many times – and just as often, I have seen monsters. In the aftermath of any great disaster, when the normal rational world is in ruins, dark souls appear – and they revel in the destruction and the pain and the endless, overwhelming despair. But in twenty years of Rescue, I have met very few ordinary people. I have yet to meet anyone who has not actually been at a disaster who can grasp what it is really like: how intense, mystical, nonsensical, horrifying, and downright funny a massive disaster can be. Laughter and near-mystical experiences and horror are strange bedfellows: I think perhaps they are the only things in a shattered world that remind you that you truly are still human. So if anything in these pages seems strange, or so comic or so obscene that you cannot quite accept it, please remember: my only reason for writing this book is to tell the truth. And the truth of my life has been so strange that I could never have invented it.
This is the story of a life spent saving lives – and of how saving lives has killed me. I hope it will be an education and a warning. For me, it begins one night in Mexico City in 1985, in a primary school.
1
document word count – 4623page
A World Gone Mad
2
At least, it had been a primary school until just over a day ago. Now, it was just a pile of rubble, two hundred feet across, perhaps eight feet high at its tallest point. Each storey was pancaked down to two feet, a four-storey school collapsed into an eight foot sandwich. Three hundred kids in there, the French guy who brought me here had said. So I asked him if he thought we'd save many. He stared at me. Then he laughed.
Whatever it had originally been, now it was just a mangle. Slabs of concrete eight feet across at crazy angles. Boulders of concrete, concrete grit, grey concrete dust coating everything in a slippery film that clogged your eyes and choked you. Tangled shards of metal window frames, shattered chair legs, tiles, glass that had shattered into powder. The moonlight smeared it all to grey and black.
In the middle of it two slabs had collapsed together to form a triangle, maybe two feet high and one and half wide, a gaping triangle in all the grey, blacker than the darkest moon-shadows. This was the moment I had to choose: die inside there – 60% die their first time in, Doug, that’s more than half of them, Doug, don’t do this, Doug – or else stay safe, but die somewhere inside myself.
As I walked towards that gap, the world slowed down. It was just me and this building, the slow crunch of my boots in the rubble, the black hole waiting for me. I was scared. There was fear in my mouth. It was in there with the concrete dust, caked, packed-in, dry. This building could kill me. So I let my legs do the walking while my thoughts had the debate.
Hey, Doug, you're not serious, right? Right, Doug?… Doug?
Crunch.
I gotta do it.
Yeah, but we're gonna die.
Gotta do it.
You're gonna die, Doug.
Crunch.
Dead anyway. If I don't. Dead inside.
But you got a life.
Lucky me, right?
A good one. What about Natasha?
Hey, I care...
Crunch.
You don't. You can't.
I do. For real.
You're insane, dead man.
Crunch.
I'm scared…
Oh, you're scared?
Crunch.
I'm scared. Oh God...
Crunch.
How could the French guy be so sure anyway? Maybe there was someone alive. I mean, that was the whole point. It was why I had come to Mexico while everyone else fled the chaos and the aftershocks. I had to go in there: it was why I was here.
60%, Doug. Just walk away. Just leave, Doug, we can do that.
Dead inside… Remember?
I freely admit that I was scared as all hell. There was this huge split inside me: one half had all the purpose and determination, and the other half was absorbed in a reality-check – aware of the insane risk, worried how this would affect my daughter Natasha, my girlfriend, me… And if I let that part come inside a collapsed school with me, 'he' would get us both killed without a doubt. So what I did that day is what I have done every time since: I temporarily ignored the part of me that held all the fear, the part of me that is beset by care, horror, imagination, love... Because to rescue effectively, you have to become a kind of machine; that is the only way you can function. And if you fail to function, you die, and you take with you whoever you were trying to save. The only thing that has saved me all these years is Purpose.
Don't, Doug. Listen –
I leaned forward, settled onto my elbows and knees, and snaked in between the slabs, my shirt and jeans slithering on grit and fine dust.
*
I made my first turn before my feet were even inside. A jagged edge of a slab stuck out at me at an angle, with twisted ends of steel bar sticking out from it. I shifted my torch to my mouth, kinked my upper body round to the left, careful to keep my hips and lower legs absolutely still – because brush something and you die. There was nothing obvious stopping the ceiling a few inches above me from collapsing – leftovers of cinder block, crammed-in rubble, what remained of wooden door supports, splintered and dangerously leaning. Catch yourself on something, and it will almost certainly trigger further collapse. With five concrete floors above me, if that happened I would be paste. I could see for maybe three feet in front of me, after that the mangled remains of the school obscured my line of sight. There wasn't an obvious path through, not even one with twists and turns. I just edged forwards, inch by inch, careful – careful! – to make sure my whole body followed the exact path set by my head and shoulders. And eventually I reached my three-feet-distant goal – a slab, maybe, or the twisted ruin of an aluminium window frame – and I wrenched myself around, back muscles groaning, until I saw another tiny void that might move me a few feet further in. It wasn't a path, there was no certainty that the next turn would not leave me with no way forward; I just kept going, inch by inch.