Emerging From the Wreckage Not a Hero, but a Better Man

It’s just an old cardboard box wrapped in duct tape. Built to carry a shipment of toilet paper, it’s etched with a diary of past moves. “Knickknacks,” it says on one side, “and ribbons.”

Ron Bechtel mailed it to himself.

And he wants nothing to do with it.

The Toluca Lake sales manager was at a breakfast meeting across the street from the World Trade Center when America came under attack.

Bechtel, 46, escaped and then, hours later, talked his way back to the twin towers site and joined the bucket brigade. After two days, he headed home, but not before packing up the experience--gloves, filthy jeans, a robe borrowed from a gutted hotel--and shipping it to Los Angeles.

Now, weeks later, Bechtel is on his knees in his living room, staring at the sealed box.

There are smells in there, he’s sure, of ash and jet fuel.

There are memories in there too, of the rubble and of the leg he found, wrapped in khaki pants still sharply creased.

And there are questions in there, because that, more than anything, is what he brought home.

“There wasn’t anyone to save,” he says. “Why did I go?”

In the months after that terrible morning in September, Bechtel would learn that he wasn’t meant to save the world, only to find his place in it.

Sept. 11

New York heaved and shuddered, like a dying man fighting for one last breath. Bechtel, tall and lean, a man who has a 5 o’clock shadow by noon, ran outside with the rest of Manhattan and squinted toward the sky.

It was mesmerizing. The debris cloud was 1,000 feet high, and it seemed to float at first, as if gravity itself couldn’t take it all in.

“Everybody just stood there, transfixed,” he said. “Nobody had any sense that they were in danger. There was no sense of that at all.”

Then reality started to land at Bechtel’s feet, first with the pitter-patter of glass shards, then the booms of concrete blocks and finally the sickening thud of the first bodies, people who had jumped from 90 floors up.

Bechtel ran north with thousands of others. He had made it about a mile when the first building fell.

“In an instant,” he said, “day became night.”

Bechtel caught a train to Philadelphia, where he was born and where his parents still live. From there, he went to the airport. He waited in one line after another, trying to figure out when he could catch a flight back to Los Angeles.

At the airport, he glanced up at a TV set. A reporter was interviewing a firefighter preparing to join the work crews at what would become known as ground zero.

“I had an overwhelming guilt, and an uncontrollable urge to get back,” Bechtel said. “Either I should have died or I had abandoned people who needed help.”

So he rented a car and drove toward New York, stopping once, at a Payless shoe store, to buy work boots. He talked his way past several checkpoints, he said, and made it nearly to Wall Street. Then he parked the rental car and walked toward the smoke.

At a firehouse, Bechtel spotted some workers who were preparing to hop in the back of a pickup. He asked if he could join them.

“Who sent you?” a firefighter asked.

“God. I think.”

“Good enough. Get in.”

At the site of the attacks, a man who seemed to be running things handed him a hard hat, saline eyedrops and a flashlight, and sent him to join a bucket brigade.

So he began the improbable job of sifting through the remains of the World Trade Center.

Hours later, he found a man’s leg, still dressed in the uniform of the financial district--starched trousers, black sock, black shoe.

“I just sat there looking at it,” Bechtel said. “Until that point, I didn’t conceive that there were any people in there.”

He worked for two days.

“We recovered pieces of lives. Parts,” Bechtel said. “That’s all there was.”

On the second night, a cold rain made the pit even more miserable. Bechtel took refuge in a hotel that had been damaged by the attacks but was still standing. A firefighter had written “REVENGE” in the ash on the lobby mirror.

Bechtel napped briefly on a couch inside. Someone had found hotel robes, still in their wrappers. That was his blanket. Several firefighters found a piano near the lobby, covered in ash but still in tune. One man sat down to play, wearing his red hard hat and a dust mask. Bechtel captured the moment with a disposable camera.

They sang “Amazing Grace.”

It was his 46th birthday.

Early October

Back in Southern California, Bechtel wasn’t sleeping.

He forgot to shower for six days until, mercifully, a friend at work told him he was “ripe.”

He stopped opening his mail, stopped returning phone calls.

“I just don’t feel like talking sometimes,” he said on Oct. 10. “Nothing I can say can come close to what I experienced.”

Sept. 11 infiltrated his dreams. Shortly after he watched the Miss America contest, he dreamed that pageant contestants were buried under a shattered building. And there was nothing he could do.

His days were no better.

Bechtel had been in entertainment for 14 years before discovering his talent in sales. He works for a Chatsworth company that sells shipping supplies.

“Somebody once said that if your wife asks you to take out the garbage, that’s sales,” he said. “Everything is sales. What’s key for me is an unusual ability to empathize with people. I can almost tell how a call is going to go by the way someone says hello.”

A big part of his job is managing a team of about 30 telemarketers. In October, he found he couldn’t do that.

“My job is to motivate and to make people feel good, to be high-energy--and that’s been difficult,” he said. “At first I thought I was OK--unusually OK. As each day wears on, I get more depressed.

“I thought I was leaving it behind, but this has become a part of me, and there’s nowhere I can turn to get away from it. You can’t quite put your finger on it. But nothing is the same. Everyone has been affected by this, either directly or indirectly. There is a lot of collateral damage. Maybe that’s what the terrorists wanted all along.”

Late October

A salesman is a fixer. A facilitator. Of course this is the right product for you. Of course you can afford it. A salesman never shows his hand. Those are the rules. But Bechtel was finding they no longer applied. He decided that he needed to share his story with a group he felt might understand: his choir.

On a chilly October evening, Bechtel folded his frame under the basement door of the Church on the Way in Van Nuys. He was there for choir practice. A soprano stopped him and asked, “Are you going to tell your story today?”

“I am,” he said.

The white cinder-block practice room smelled of stale coffee and echoed with old-time religion. It was sparsely decorated, adorned with a few posters. One is the “Ten Vocal Commandments” (No. 1: Open Your Mouth).

“C’mon children, let’s shout!” commanded Rose Stone, the choir director and the sister of Sly Stone.

“Let’s shout!” the choir echoed.

Bechtel was in the back row, altos to his left, sopranos to his right. After warming up, the group began a series of prayers and testimonials. One woman thanked the group for praying about the discipline problems at the junior high school where she teaches. Another said her father was on life support.

“We’ll pray for you!” an alto shouted.

Then it was Bechtel’s turn.

He sat alone on a stool in front of the group. He told them about the firefighter he saw on TV and the piano and the leg in the trousers.

He’d told the story so many times, he said later, that he feared he was glamorizing it--something that had not concerned him in the past. He added new details that he was only then remembering--such as the tense minutes he spent huddled under a glass canopy as chunks of building fell around him.

“There was not one crack in the glass,” he told the choir.

A smattering of quiet “amens” echoed through the room.

Bechtel had a look of recognition and satisfaction. Suddenly, he seemed less impressed with his own heroism than the notion that someone seemed to be looking out for him.

“It was like being at the gates of hell,” Bechtel told them. “But it reminded me of this group. We are studio executives and plumbers. We have big bank accounts and small bank accounts. But we are one unit--one group of people.”

November

Work had become a disaster. He’d been unable to concentrate, wasn’t putting in the hours. He worried about losing his job.

Bechtel decided he needed to secure a new account--to seal “a close,” in the vernacular of sales. So he hopped on the telephone with a prospective client--a manufacturer that needed palettes and shrink wrap--and nailed it.

For a salesman, there is no better tonic.

“I wasn’t sure how [Sept. 11] was going to change me, and what changes were going to be long-lasting or permanent. That’s scary,” Bechtel said. “I needed to know that I could do what I used to do.”

For weeks he’d been thinking about opening the box he’d mailed to himself from New York, but he’d procrastinated. Now, he thought, it was time.

A cool breeze swept through the screen door. Autumn had arrived, and leaves on some of the trees in the San Fernando Valley had started to change. Bechtel was on his knees in his living room, a long, jagged knife in his hand.

“It’s freaking me out,” he said, staring at the box. “But I better do it.”

He ripped it open. It smelled like ash and jet fuel, like the industrial waste that still litters 17 acres of lower Manhattan. And there were memories in there. But the questions, it seemed, were gone.

Bechtel had put together a cautious peace.

The changes are subtle, but important, he said. He has thrown himself into the church. He sings louder, works harder, walks taller. He doesn’t have to try to sell himself. Not anymore.

“The purpose of going back was not just to help the people who were there. It was for me,” Bechtel said. “I’m a better person today than I was the day I went up there. This has defined my life.”

As a salesman, he said, he’d spent years arranging tidy deals that could be settled over the telephone, summed up in a memo.

In New York, Bechtel had tried, he said, to “stand tall.” He had thought he could “fix” his feelings--bury his emotions by talking his way into the Trade Center ruins, and emerging a hero.

“Everything is supposed to have a first act, a second act, a third act. Everything is supposed to come full circle,” he said. “But maybe some things . . . maybe they just never stop affecting you. Maybe there is no resolution.”

December

On Christmas Eve, Bechtel did some last-minute shopping. He saw a book of newspaper front pages from Sept. 12. In it was a photo that showed a chunk of the World Trade Center falling toward the hotel he had been in.

“Thirty or 40 stories of that building were falling, and the hotel was right there,” Bechtel said. “It fell away from the hotel, but it could have just as easily fallen right into it. It’s confounding. Everything just looks so fragile. I was standing there staring at the picture.”

It was the first time he’d allowed himself to cry.

Bechtel has skipped many of his holiday routines this year. It’s hard to be festive when memories keep flooding back, he said. One in particular--a moment he had forgotten until a few days ago--has been eating away at him. It was an exchange with a firefighter who ushered Bechtel and two strangers into the safety of an alcove at the hotel minutes after the attack.

“He turned around and looked at me, and he said, ‘You take care.’ I said the same to him. And then I saw him walk toward the buildings,” Bechtel said. “I keep thinking about that guy’s family.”