Two men, one driving a minivan and the other a fire truck and on their way to North Carolina, decided to take Exit 9 off Interstate 77 Thursday afternoon and have some food at a nearby Arby’s.
“We were eating a sandwich and then looked into the parking lot,” said Cordell Tjaden of Fort Wayne, Ind. “It was full of other fire trucks.”
That’s because the fire truck Tjaden’s friend Tim Carey was driving is no ordinary fire truck. It has a special meaning to them, and everyone else in the country.
It is Rescue 4, and was based in Queens, New York City, on Sept. 11, 2001.
A volunteer from the nearby East River Volunteer Fire Department saw the firetruck, Tjaden said, and called his friends.
The truck drew a lot of attention, and for good reason.
On that fateful morning, the fire station in Queens received a call of a plane slamming into the World Trade Center. Rescue 4 was dispatched to the scene with eight firemen along.
None returned.
The truck was damaged, but unlike 100 other fire trucks on that day, was intact enough to save.
Called Remembrance Rescue Project, the truck, along with one on the West Coast, is now used to travel to fire stations around the country and keep the memories of those firemen, along with 335 other firemen, and 2,300 civilians who were killed on that day, alive.
“The purpose is to have a remembrance of 9-11 and a rolling memorial,” Carey said.
“Being retired from the U.S. Army, I don’t want anybody to forget that we are still in Afghanistan,” Tjaden said. “I did three tours there. And we don’t want anybody to forget about 9-11. We want to keep that memory alive.”
The memories of those firemen who road this truck are being kept alive as well, with their names on it.
“We have eight that perished (who were) with this truck,” he said. “This one served in Queens.”
A door on the side of the truck actually says Rescue 3, but that was a replacement for Rescue 4’s door that was heavily damaged, he said. Rescue 3 was too badly damaged to save.
Six firemen with Rescue 3 died.
“Basically, this truck was peppered with debris,” Carey said. “With the door from Rescue 3, it actually represents two trucks.”
Rescue 5 is the one serving the West Coast.
Tjaden said Rescue 4 actually went back into service a year after 9-11 and was used until it was retired in July 2011.
It was then sent to Chicago and became part of the Remembrance Rescue Project.
Besides the names of those firemen on the truck, one other special memory is literally encased inside.
The fireman who sat in the front passenger’s seat, Kevin Dowdell, always left his everyday (baseball) hat with the FDNY logo on his seat until he returned from a fire scene.
The fire station gave it his family, who donated it back to the station.
The hat is now enclosed in a case and sits behind and above the seat.
Volunteers drive the truck to fire stations and events.
Tjaden and Carey, who is a retired firefighter, volunteered to take the fire truck around starting in May.
“We have been mainly in Indiana and Ohio and now we are heading to Advance, N.C., just west of Winston-Salem,” Tjaden said. “We have been on the road seven days a week with different fire departments hosting it. There is usually a set of events associated with the visit.”
When the fire truck is dropped off in Advance, where it will tour that area for a month, Tjaden and Carey will head home and turn it over to two other volunteers.
“We work as a team,” he said. “Tim does the driving and maintenance, I do the event planning and paperwork.”
But Tjaden said the stop in Princeton was not at all planned, and he was impressed by the reception.
“We had not intended to stop,” he said. “We were going to try to make it to North Carolina and spend the night there. But we just got a hotel room here instead. This is a great place with great people.”
“It’s been a very interesting summer,” Carey said. “The receptions we get are great. We can stop to get fuel and people often gather around.”
“We’ve even been grand marshals of parades,” Tjaden said. “But we do this because we have a passion for keeping those memories alive. We are honored to be a part of this.”
The Remembrance Rescue Project is an educational effort focused at society, especially youngsters who were too young to understand the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and how that history forever changed the country as a whole, the project’s website says.
It’s a national campaign, and is operated by firefighters from across the country volunteering their time. Donations are used only for fuel, repairs, travel and educational programming.
The website is remembrance.co.
— Contact Charles Boothe at cboothe@bdtonline.com
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