As a newly trained firefighter, Minogue was taking his first vacation day when he saw Flight 11 crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He grabbed his uniform and told his wife, “I’m going to work. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.” 

Minogue watched the towers fall as he drove along Grand Central Parkway. After arriving at the firehouse in Corona, Queens, Minogue was dispatched to Ground Zero. When his company got to the Twin Towers, “Everything just stopped in time. We walked through the glass and we saw the pit. We saw the World Trade Center.” 

Minogue said it was like a scene from a movie, with so much ash falling that it was almost black. He noticed how bizarre the rest of his company looked, 

“They were just covered, like somebody opened a bag of flour and dropped it on them,” he said.“Their eyelids were caked with it.” 

Three days later, Minogue’s role with the fire department changed. With 343 firefighters lost on September 11th, they needed someone to play taps, the 35 second song played by a single trumpet at the end of service member’s funerals. 

 “So, I would still go to work, then I would go to a funeral to play taps. Sometimes two, sometimes three funerals a day. In the end, it got so busy I was pretty much offline,” Minogue said. 

With only one other bugler in the NYFD, Minogue played taps at around 170 9/11 memorial services. Yet, each song was never the same.

“I played it different for everybody, because everybody is unique,” he said.“I think everybody needed a different song. Ya know, for me, it’s a gift that I could give back.”

Minogue kept playing taps as a fire department lieutenant, but in 2006 he developed a cough. At age 46, Minogue developed stage four throat cancer and high-grade bladder cancer from exposure to the 9/11 ash and debris.

 “Everything I had done with the ceremonial unit was over, they had to run without me,” he said. The illnesses forced Minogue to retire and leave the fire department. 

As of September 2021, over 200 active and retired NYC firefighters have died of illnesses linked to 9/11 according to the Scientific American. Even more have developed cancer and survived, including Minogue, who said it was because of his strong attitude.

“Two doctors, separately, would call me the poster boy,” he said. “My friend Mark and I had radiation burns and our faces were all red, but we were always smiling and laughing.” 

Many of Minogue’s friends and colleagues also deal with the lasting health effects of being at Ground Zero. The destruction of the Twin Towers created an ash of computers, concrete, and pipes that first responders inhaled. In 2019, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published a study finding that 9/11 first responders are 25% more likely to develop prostate cancer, 41% more likely to develop Leukemia, and two times more likely to develop thyroid cancer compared to other people. 

On this 20th anniversary of 9/11, Minogue is still playing taps on his trumpet, but said he doesn’t have enough breath to hold the last note. Despite all of his health problems, he said he would still go back and do the same thing again. 

“When you’re on this earth, you have to do the best you can for others, without asking anything in return,” he said. “That’s it.”

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Returning to ground zero for the first time since being deployed to the site two days after the Twin Towers fell, retired U.S. Army Sergeant Wilfredo Torres marveled at how different the area looked ten years later. Photo by Chris Palmer

Two days after the Twin Towers fell in 2001, Wilfredo Torres, a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in Harlem, was sent to ground zero with his platoon.

Ten years later, returning to Lower Manhattan today for the first time since 2001, Torres leaned against a guardrail at the corner of Church and Murray Streets and gazed up in awe at the buildings towering over him.

“It’s amazing how it’s so clean,” said Torres, 56, who now is retired and lives in Buffalo, N.Y. “When I was here 10 years ago, there was a lot of dust, a lot of garbage. The buildings were just covered in white.”

Torres spent 21 days in the rubble with fellow members of the military, firefighters, police officers and others, cleaning, deconstructing and pulling bodies out of the collapsed towers.

“We did whatever was needed,” he said. “Anything to help.”

Torres was one of many veterans at the remembrance ceremonies today, eager to share stories of war, death, hardship and triumph.

“It means so much to me to be here right now,” said Robert Dodds, 22, a lanky Army civilian affairs specialist from Pocono Pines, Pa. Dodds, sporting Army fatigues with a maroon beret, had vowed to spend as many 9/11 anniversaries as he could in Manhattan, but spent last year’s anniversary in Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

While serving in Afghanistan, Dodds said he was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG. “We took, like, 50 RPGs to our vehicle after it flipped over,” he said. “I was with my friend. We were fighting for our lives, but we made it out alive. It was a miracle we didn’t die.”

“My legs got peppered with shrapnel,” he added. “I had some nerve damage on my right ankle. For a while it was hard to stand up without pain medicine. But after a bunch of rehab, it healed up pretty good.”

Dodds, stood with his friend Ashley Cialella, 22, of Levittown, Pa., also an Army civilian affairs specialist. Both he and Cialella have lost friends to the war.

“One of my sergeants died,” Cialella said. “My good friend Ralphie died, too.”

Dodds joined her in recalling their losses.

“One of my good buddies died when I was home,” Dodds said. “I hadn’t cried since I was a little kid, but I just lost it. I’d rather get wounded every day of the week” instead of losing a friend.

Scott Sanchez, 34, of Midwood, Brooklyn and a former field artillery specialist in the Army, lost a friend in a Humvee accident.

He said he dealt with minor symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder when he got home.

“It didn’t really hit me ‘til after I got out,” said Sanchez, who left the Army in 2007 and is now a student at Berkeley College in Manhattan. “A lot of guys in the military say ‘What are we doing?’ It’s hard to know sometimes.”

Despite the difficulties of military service, Vincent Fraser, 51, of Middle Village, Queens, a captain in the Army Reserves, swelled with pride as he looked around the area of Manhattan that was once caked in ash. He served at ground zero on the day of the attack. He thought it would take 10 years to clean up the rubble and debris.

“I remember seeing a firefighter being brought out with a flag on top of his body,” he said. “Everyone was crying. Barely a day went by when you didn’t cry.”

Then he paused and took a deep breath.

“But to see this,” he said, motioning towards the partially-constructed 1 World Trade Center tower. “This is a miracle. I was proud then, when we went to ground zero, and I’m proud now of being a New Yorker.”

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