The Last Responder
From Ground Zero to Ward 57
Witnessing the attack and the Warriors who came home
The Last Responder
From Ground Zero to Ward 57
Witnessing the attack and the Warriors who came home
PROLOGUE
Content Advisory: This book recounts firsthand experiences from September 11, 2001 and subsequent work with combat amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Some readers may find the material difficult.
I didn’t look at it for decades.
September 11th went into a box. St. Vincent’s Hospital - waiting for casualties that never came in numbers. Ground Zero - the unauthorized civilian working alongside others with hands that had no business being there. The smoke, the silence, the specific way dust settled on everything. I closed the lid and learned how to not open it.
Then I sat at Walter Reed Hospital with Warriors missing arms.
They were young. Nineteen, twenty-two, twenty-five. IEDs in Fallujah, Kandahar, Helmand Province. They’d volunteered after watching the towers fall. Now they were learning to ‘type’ again, relearning everything hands do without thinking. I was there to help with voice-to-text technology, to give them back some of what the war took.
One day around that table, while they brought humor to our training and to life itself, a thread connected without my seeing it. The connection didn't announce itself. It waited.
I was at Ground Zero when it began. Years later, I was at Walter Reed, working with warriors from the battles that followed.
This book connects those two places—from the pile to Ward 57, from the attack to the soldiers who returned carrying the cost of the wars that came after.
It’s not about policy or strategy or the grand arc of the war on terror. It’s about people - first responders running toward buildings, victims who never made it out, young Americans who volunteered, medics who patched them up, Warfighters who came home to rebuild.
I’m not a journalist. I’m not a historian. I’m just someone who was there at both ends who finally opened the box and saw the line connecting them.
This is what I found inside.
About the Author
Stephen Koski was present in New York City on September 11, 2001 and became part of the ad-hoc response at St. Vincent’s Hospital and Ground Zero. Years later, he worked with arm amputees returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. A former Army officer forged by professors, leaders, and peers, he self-deployed because he was trained to respond. He witnessed the attack that started the war on terror and the returning Warriors who bore its cost.