9/11: David Bergman recalls working at Ground Zero as Australian War Memorial marks 25 years since terror

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks changed the world, an Australian soldier has returned to the Australian War Memorial with pieces of the World Trade Centre and a story linking Ground Zero to Australia’s longest war.

Major David Bergman, from Melbourne, was in North America for specialist engineer training when the attacks unfolded on September 11, 2001.

Within weeks, he was working in New York with police teams responding to anthrax and white powder incidents before later joining the recovery effort at Ground Zero.

Now, fragments recovered from the site, including glass, marble and a seared banknote, will help tell that story in the memorial’s Afghanistan Gallery, where the road to Australia’s two-decade war begins.

Mr Bergman had travelled to North America in June 2001 with four other Royal Australian Engineers officers for professional development and specialist training.

After finishing the formal course work, the group moved on to visits with military, civilian and industry organisations, including an attachment with the New York Police Department arranged through the Australian Embassy.

When the attacks happened, Mr Bergman was on the second day of the final course component in Canada.

“When we knew that something had happened was when the doors of the lecture room burst open,” Mr Bergman told NewsWire.

The lesson was cancelled and minutes later, he and his colleagues were watching events unfold on screen.

After the two hijacked planes struck the Twin Towers in New York, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, came down in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

It was a co-ordinated attack on the US that killed nearly 3000 people and triggered the conflict that followed.

In November 2001, Mr Bergman joined NYPD teams because of his specialist skills, helping respond as anthrax scares spread through New York in the weeks after September 11.

The threat emerged after anthrax-laced letters were sent to media offices and political figures in the US, killing five people and heightening tensions.

After about two weeks, as that threat eased, Mr Bergman asked to see Ground Zero. Instead, he became part of the recovery effort itself.

Seconded to the Port Authority Police Department, he worked night shifts at the site, searching for human remains and items of value.

“I think we were working on about the 72nd floor of one of the towers and we were about 80 to 90 feet below street level,” he explained.

“So everything was compacted … all the floors just basically collapsed on each other.”

Mr Bergman was accepted as one of the team while recognising many around him had been directly affected by the attacks.

He recalled gathering before shifts in a crew room lined with photos of missing Port Authority police officers. He remembered the prayers and the effort to keep people united.

“In the event that remains were found, let’s say Port Authority found a fireman, then they would stop work there and the fire officers would come in and recover their own people,” he said.

“There were rules to be able to make everything as workable as possible without throwing in any cross-service rivalries and unnecessary friction in a period of time where everyone needed to be together.”

He later visited Staten Island, where debris from Ground Zero was sorted and processed, and the morgue, where identification work continued.

For Mr Bergman, it was a way to fully understand the scale of what had happened and the lessons it carried.

The debris search on Staten Island lasted about 10 months after September 11, but forensic identification of recovered remains continued for many years afterwards and still hasn’t fully ended.

Among the items he brought home were a seared banknote recovered from a bank vault, pieces of glass from the towers’ windows and a piece of marble from the Twin Towers plaza forecourt.

The marble was a parting gift from the commander of the Port Authority team who told Mr Bergman it was “the heart and soul of those buildings”.

The memorial has now accepted those items as part of Mr Bergman’s donation.

The donation comes as the world reflects on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the war it set in motion.

Just one month after the attacks, Australia launched Operation Slipper, formally committing troops to Afghanistan.

Mr Bergman would later deploy to Afghanistan twice, in 2008 and 2012, after a 2004 deployment to Iraq.

In Afghanistan, he led mine clearance work around Bagram Airfield, helping oversee efforts to remove old Russian landmines from the area.

During that time, he met a young girl who had lost both legs after stepping on a mine while walking cattle because her family was destitute and had no other way to survive.

Mr Bergman recalled that, while medical staff saved her life, he was deeply troubled by what would come next for a child with such severe injuries in a family with no income.

“I got the eldest son, who would have been about 17 or 18, and arranged for him to get a job on base,” he recalled.

“So, what that meant was that from a very bad position, they actually had money coming in now.

“There was a greater chance that that young girl would be able to survive longer than what she would have if there was nothing.”

Looking back, Mr Bergman believes those who served should be judged by the effort they gave, not only by the political end result.

“Everyone was there with nothing but the best intentions to get (the Afghans) over the line,” he said.

“For all of us, whether you’re a member of the Defence Force or just an Australian, we all should be exceptionally proud of actually providing that opportunity.”