by LESLIE PALMA-SIMONCEK
As they suited up to head into the World Trade Center, the 11 firefighters of Concord's Rescue 5 encountered a Catholic priest on the street. One firefighter, still pulling on his oxygen tank, "asked for a quick prayer," recalled the Rev. James Hayes, pastor of St. Andrew's R.C. Church, located just a few blocks from the Twin Towers. Father Hayes asked God for "protection and guidance" for the rescue workers as he stood with the firefighters and some Port Authority and NYPD officers on Church Street. When he finished, a firefighter behind him yelled "Let's go. Let's go. 5." It was several months later that Father Hayes learned the fate of Rescue 5: All 11 men perished. In a story by Father Hayes published in December 2001 in the National Catholic Reporter, the priest wrote that after the prayer, "We headed toward the bookstore on the corner of Vesey and Church streets at the base of the Towers. We walked single file toward the building to the only entrance of the complex. With pieces of glass showering from above, I recall thinking that I should have grabbed a green hard hat.... "As we entered the complex, the security cleared a path for us to enter on the street level. We then went down the escalator on the right hand side as many people were dashing up on our left. The survivors were on the way up the escalators and running out of the building to safety." After following the firefighters into the buildings, he parted company with them, heading to the north tower as they went into the south. "I didn't know if they even knew there was a mall downstairs, so I went down there to check the stores." He never saw Rescue 5 again. Back out on the street later, Father Hayes checked to see if he could be of help at a triage center set up in front of the Millennium Hotel. Ten minutes later, he said, a man yelled " 'the building's coming down' and everyone started to run up Broadway." The priest dove under a car as "a waterfall of debris," began to fall around him, accompanied by "the sound of a freight train," he said. "As the tower started to lean, it had that screeching noise," he recalled. "It was almost as if time stopped. Then black, black ash enveloped the whole area. It seemed to take all the air out of the atmosphere." Father Hayes and other clergy spent the ensuing weeks blessing remains as they were found in the rubble, but he sees now that he was working "on automatic pilot for many, many months," suffering from post-traumatic stress. In January 2002, a National Guard member who was working at Ground Zero started attending daily mass at St. Andrew's. He was the one who delivered the devastating news about Rescue 5 and showed Father Hayes a picture of the unit. "It was a very quick prayer in the middle of the street," he said. And yet it was a prayer he'll never forget.
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