The Date That Froze Time

'I Never Asked for Any Recognition'

It will not occur to Patrick Dowdell, 23, to resist going to Iraq, just as it wouldn't have occurred to his father, Kevin, a firefighter in Queens, not to respond to a call for help at the World Trade Center.

"We're the good guys, " Patrick Dowdell says of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. "We're capable. Why not us?"

Dowdell, who graduated this month from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, appears not to have spent as much time as others pondering the reasons for, or results of, 9/11. He estimates that he's talked to 15 or 20 reporters over the past five years, and done so willingly.

But his situation is a bit different from that of some others. His father was a hero, not a victim. Kevin Dowdell ran into the Twin Towers as they collapsed; other fathers and mothers ran out, or never made it. Assuredly, some of those trapped tried to help others, but their kids will never know. Patrick Dowdell knows what his father did, or tried to do. He has been too busy to do much reflecting. He was attending Iona College when the twin towers were hit. He returned to classes three days later. Once the family realized that Kevin had perished, Patrick finished his morning classes, then drove to Ground Zero, the site of the explosion in Lower Manhattan, to assist the surviving firefighters in Rescue 4 unit, Queens, look for the remains of his father and other victims. "Sooner or later that site was going to be broom-swept. I didn't want to say I was too scared to do it. There was no reason for me not to."

"The buildings fell so fast and so hard that everything turned to dust," he recalls. He would stay on site until 2 or 3 a.m. searching through that dust. Someone found a halligan that his dad used to pry open doors and windows -- it bore Kevin's initials: KD, R4. Kevin's body was never recovered. The family finally held a funeral on April 20, 2002, and Patrick played the bagpipes. Then he went to West Point, where he had applied and been wait-listed the year before. At West Point, he said, "you're not just going to school, you're putting on a uniform. You're there for business and every summer you train."

"I grew up real fast at Ground Zero," he said, sitting in his dorm the day before graduation, while his mom and younger brother waited outside. "I found out I could handle the scope of what happened to my family and all the other families. It helped me see what I could do. Confident, I guess that's the word I want."

That confidence was undoubtedly already there, waiting to be called upon.

Dowdell tells this story: His father had a second job installing flooring, and from the time young Patrick could hold a hammer, he went with him as his assistant. "If you work like a man, you get paid like a man," he'd say. "He paid me well," Patrick said.

Soon, he will be off to Oklahoma for field artillery training. In his view, moving on is more important now than looking back. He has never asked for special treatment, he says, and when he's told that some Americans suspect he might have, his voice rises for the first time in the conversation.

"That's a pet peeve of mine," he says. "I never asked for any recognition. Most people don't even know my history unless they know me well, or know my family. My dad is not a credential, not something I brag about or put on my r?sum?. I didn't call you ."