Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [91]
One day, she was working the chow line, when who came through but somebody she knew—Governor Christie Todd Whitman from New Jersey. She recognized Terry and said, “What are you doing here?” Terry went, “Shhhhhh.” Christie moved on.
TERRY: I worked at the coroner’s site, mostly in food and also seeing people who had come to receive their benefits. At the four corners, there were little tents set up, and they were still bringing out bodies. The workers could come in and get masks and socks and gloves, eye drops, nose plugs, goggles, hand cream. And teas and coffee and granola bars and aspirin, and bandaids and mercurochrome. Anything they might need out there that they couldn’t just run and get.
I remember this one guy came in—I was all alone at the time—and I said, “Would you like some coffee or soup?” He said, “Yeah, maybe some soup.” Basically, his job was driving a little truck that had pieces of people that they’d found. The people in there identifying body parts—they’d work twelve or fourteen hour days. Sometimes they’d come up to me and just start spilling their guts. They’d get overwhelmed by it all. It was just so terribly, terribly sad.
We set up a huge toy shop. Kids could come in with their parents and get free toys and gifts for their families. It was all donated. They had buses bringing people in. The lines were tremendously long. As we would run out of toys, some mothers started stealing from other mother’s baskets.
But the Salvation Army taught me a huge lesson. When people would come to receive their benefits, they needed two pieces of identification, including a bill from their apartment. This one guy had nothing and he kept yelling at me, “I’d better get some money or I’m going to the press, I’m gonna say the Salvation Army is cheating everybody!” I got really furious. I said, “Just a minute. I have to go talk to my supervisor, because I don’t know how to answer your question.”
I told my supervisor, “This guy is clearly a scam artist, somebody needs to go out there and have him removed.” She looked at me and said, “Terry, think about this man. He lives in such an awful state of mind in his life that he’s coming here trying to take money away from real victims. If anybody needs help, it’s this man.” Then she went on, “Give him fifty dollars, some free bus tokens, tell him God bless, and send him on his way. I’ll bet you anything he’ll go away happy. It’s not worth causing a big scene.”
So that’s what I did. And that’s the true meaning of what the Salvation Army stands for, which is really what religion is supposed to be about.
I never wanted to believe anything different than what we were told about what happened that terrible day. I didn’t really have any doubts at the time. Except for one: Having been in the military, the first question that arose in me, the very day of 9/11, was: Where were our jets? How could our air defense have failed so miserably?
What happened to Payne Stewart, the golfer who died in a plane crash, makes an interesting analogy. He took off in a private plane from a private airport in Florida and, within a half hour, the tower lost communication with the plane. Within another half hour, they had a fighter jet up on the wing. The jet’s pilot was able to ascertain that everyone in the cockpit appeared to be dead, because they were slumped over. It was later found to have been a mechanical malfunction that apparently killed everyone on board, and the plane was flying on automatic pilot. So the fighter jet just stayed with the plane all the way until it reached South Dakota and ran out of fuel. Of course, if it was going down in a metropolitan area, they would have blown it out of the skies. Since it went down in a wheat field, they let that happen instead.
Yet on 9/11, when you had four airplanes being hijacked roughly a half hour apart from each other, nobody from our military was up there. Maybe you could buy that the