Rob Riggle is looking back at 9/11 and the “apocalyptic” scene he witnessed while assisting at Ground Zero.
During a recent interview with Fox News Digital, the actor and retired U.S. Marine officer recalled the scene at Ground Zero following the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, calling it a “surreal” thing to process.
“It was so unreal that it was surreal,” he said. “I was looking at skyscrapers that had the front of the building clawed out from the falling of the towers. They had gouged out other buildings. They had knocked other buildings over. They had weakened buildings to such a state that they would collapse.”
He remembered seeing the Brooks Brothers store across the street from the towers, saying “it looked like Godzilla had scratched out the front” of the building, as it “was all gutted out from where falling debris had smashed into” it.
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“Then you had burned-out fire trucks and police cars and there were pictures and paper debris, and it was just, it was surreal,” he explained. “It was surreal to see that much of Manhattan laying in some sort of apocalyptic ruin. It was shocking, and it was hard to process for sure.”
Riggle was on site working as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve based in Manhattan. He was among firefighters, police officers, military personnel, construction workers and volunteers who lined up and cleared debris by hand in buckets.
They avoided using machinery to remove the rubble, in order to avoid hurting potential survivors trapped underneath.
“Everybody was spread out, so when we stopped, you didn’t always know necessarily what was going on,” he shared. “Were we dropping a listening device into the rubble? Did they find someone? Did they find someone alive or did they find remains? You just never really knew what it was, and so when they blew the whistle to stop moving and stop working, you would pray, you would just put your head down, and you would hope that it was somebody who was still alive.”
He added that if they discovered remains, he and the others would say a prayer for them and “that their family would get closure,” in addition to praying for themselves, so that they would “have strength to keep going, and hopefully find someone soon.”
One thing that stood out to Riggle about the days following the terror attacks was the unity among all Americans, saying it was “a unification that I hadn’t seen maybe in my entire life.”
He went on to explain that it didn’t matter to anyone what anyone’s political beliefs were, and that “it didn’t feel like there was anything separating us.”
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“I remember seeing the Senate and the House of Representatives out on the steps of the Capitol singing ‘God Bless America’ together,” he said. “I remember, nobody asked any questions, no one looked at each other and judged down at Ground Zero. Everybody worked. And we were unified in trying to figure out what happened and then figuring out a way to help.”
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Twenty-five years after the attacks, Riggle says the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks about being at Ground Zero are “the firemen that went in that came from all over the city,” calling them “heroes,” and noting, “that’s the thing I like to focus on, rather than the terrorists.”
Riggle explained that, for many, 9/11 was “very sobering,” because it came with the realization that, “there’s people out there that are willing to commit evil acts and do harmful things,” but what he likes to focus on is that “for every one terrorist, there were literally thousands of people out there trying to do the right thing.”
For him, when people say “never forget“, it means remembering the innocent lives that were lost, and that “there are more good people than bad people.”
“It means don’t forget those innocent people who died. It means, don’t forget that there are people in this world that are committed to hurting us. It means we have to be vigilant always. We can never just take a break,” he said.
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He added, “It reminds me to remember that we have men and women in uniform, whether it’s a police uniform or a firefighter’s uniform or an EMT or a Marine or a soldier or a sailor or airman or a Coast Guard man. I mean, these are all these people that are wearing those uniforms. They do it so that we can not have more 9/11s. So that just reminds me that we have to be vigilant. We can’t be naive. And it also reminds me, don’t ever forget that there are more good people than bad people.”
