Jason Setchen

Twenty-five years ago today, an accountant in Connecticut left his desk in the middle of the afternoon and went to get a haircut. His name was Dave Karnes. He was a senior accountant at a firm in Wilton, and before that he had spent most of his adult life as a Marine, finishing as a staff sergeant. He watched the towers come down on a screen in his office and told the people around him that they were going to need men like him down there. Then he did the strangest and most deliberate sequence of actions anybody performed that day. He drove home and put on his Marine combat utilities. He stopped at a barbershop and got a regulation Marine haircut, because he was about to be seen in that uniform and it was going to be worn correctly. He stopped at his church and asked his pastor to pray with him. He bought two hamburgers at a McDonald's, because he understood he would not be eating again for a long time. Then he drove 55 miles south toward a city that was closed. Nobody stopped him. In that uniform, nobody stopped him at a single checkpoint. He got to the pile in the evening, when the fires were still burning and crews were being pulled back for the night, and he found another Marine already walking the wreckage. Sergeant Jason Thomas, 27 years old, had left active duty in August. He had been dropping his daughter off at his mother's house on Long Island when he heard, and he had pulled his fatigues out of the trunk of his car and driven in. The two men had never met in their lives. They teamed up without discussion and walked out onto a smoking mountain of steel that everybody else was walking away from, and they started shouting the same thing over and over into the void. "United States Marines. If you can hear us, yell or tap." Twenty feet down, somebody tapped. His name was Will Jimeno, a Port Authority police officer. He had gone in with a squad of five led by Sergeant John McLoughlin. When the South Tower came down on top of them in the concourse, three of the five were killed. Jimeno and McLoughlin were pinned in a void under the rubble, and by that point in the day nobody was looking for them anymore. The Marines refused to leave. Karnes called his wife in Connecticut and had her phone New York dispatch, because that was faster than finding anyone in the chaos on site. Rescuers came. Jimeno came out after 13 hours. McLoughlin came out the next morning after 22. Only 20 people were ever pulled alive from that rubble. Jimeno and McLoughlin were numbers 18 and 19. Then Jason Thomas rode to the hospital with Jimeno and vanished. Karnes stayed at the site, so his name went into the record and Thomas's did not. For five years nobody knew who the second Marine was. When Oliver Stone made a film about the rescue in 2006, the production had no idea and cast a white actor to play him. Thomas, who is Black, saw the trailer and quietly identified himself. Karnes went back into the Marine Corps and served two tours in Iraq. An accountant stopped for a haircut, a stranger pulled a uniform out of his trunk, and two of the twenty people who came out of that pile alive came out because of it.