Terrorism Fighter Greg Matthews of La Mesa Saw 9/11 Devastation Firsthand

Greg Matthews began searching The Pile on Sept. 15, 2001—answering a call to look for a firefighter buddy missing in the World Trade Center.

Matthews is still searching.

A La Mesa resident for nearly three months but an East County native for life, Matthews is a soft-spoken former firefighter. For the past two years, he has been a civilian anti-terrorism officer for the San Diego-based Navy Region Southwest. His specialty is critical infrastructure protection for 12 Navy installations.

Matthews searches for better ways to protect the homeland.

“I didn’t make a difference,” Matthews says of the 3½ weeks he spent helping a devastated fire station near Wall Street. Most survivors were found in the first 48 hours, and Matthews couldn’t fly out the first three days.

“It just pulverized everything,” he said of the collapsed twin towers. “The most I found was a lot of shoes with feet still in them. There weren’t whole bodies left. … [and] 343 firefighters didn’t go home that day.”

When he returned from New York City, bearing the service jacket of Andre Fletcher, his fallen FDNY friend, Matthews realized his life had changed along with the world. He had a new purpose.

“When I came back, I realized that we had pretty much entered a new era of response potential for the [Eastside] fire department—chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear exposure—and I didn’t feel our country … was prepared to deal with anything like that,” he said from his quiet living room near Grossmont High School, where his son is a sophomore.

So he went to the fire chief of his Issaquah, WA, department and asked if he could start a division focused on terrorism response. The chief said yes.

“They sent me to every [anti-]terrorism school pretty much in the country … everything to bring me up to speed,” he said. He traveled to New Mexico, the Nevada Test Site, Department of Energy facilities.

“During that time, I realized I had a passion for anti-terrorism,” he said. “I actually put in for a position” with San Diego’s Office of Homeland Security, “and they hired me [as homeland security coordinator].”

His work there helped San Diego become one of the biggest recipients of federal anti-terror grants, valued at $16 million to $18 million a year, he said.

“I was in the incipient phase when we were growing [grants] in the San Diego region,” he said of his work in what he calls CIKR—critical infrastructure and key resources.

What were the lessons of September 2001?

Matthews, now 44, points to the 9/11 Commission’s report, saying, “One of the biggest glaring things is the [lack of] sharing of information … and I would say San Diego has gone and taken that as among the primary things to overcome, and we have more collaboration and joint agency operations.”

He said San Diego is touted as a “test bed for a lot of technology and a lot of new programs because of the fact we worked so well together.”

The Backstory: Matthews and 9/11

Matthews was sleeping the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, having gotten off duty the previous night as a technical rescue specialist and HAZMAT technician east of Seattle.

“I got tired of hearing the phone ring,” he recalls. “My buddy was calling from the station.

“What’s going on?” Matthews asked.

“Are you watching the news?” the caller replied.

Then Matthews realized other calls on his machine originated from New York.  One was from Zack Fletcher, a firefighter friend of his whose station at South and Wall streets is near the Staten Island Ferry.

Zack’s twin brother—also a firefighter and friend of Matthews’—had raced to the twin towers on the fourth alarm.

“[Zack] was giving me an update on what was going on,” Matthews said last month. “Then the collapse happened, and they got word that Andre and his squad were in the North Tower and that they were trapped,” last seen in a stairwell.

“They’re both really good friends of mine,” Matthews said. So when he was asked to come out to help look for Andre, he told his boss, “One of my buddies is trapped in all that mess.”

The chief said: “Yeah, whatever you need to do,” Matthews recalled. Then he spent three days on the telephone trying to figure out how to get there, waiting for flights to resume.

The night of Sept. 14, 2001, Matthews arrived and went straight to the fire station, which lost 14 firefighters on 9/11.

Matthews had nearly lost two friends that day.

“Zack [in a fire engine] had blown an air line, which stopped the rig,” Matthews said. “So they left their rig” and headed for the World Trade Center on foot.

Had that mishap with the air line not happened, he said, “they would have been in the collapse zone. The FDNY guys welcomed any support that showed up.”

Matthews joined what he calls the bucket brigade—the crews that went through the rubble and searched by hand, since heavy equipment posed a threat of secondary collapses.  “With each day going by, there was hope in finding some void spaces—stairwell and subfloor areas,” he said.

Most of the time, he slept at the station—three or four blocks from ground zero—but also spent time at the home of the Fletchers.

“For a long time, I was having some [bad] dreams,” Matthews said.

Eventually, he said, “I started to function as a firefighter. I was just glad that I could be there.”

For four or five months afterward, Matthews had shortness of breath and wheezing at night, “but it’s gone away,” he said.  (He wore his face mask no more than 60 percent of the time, he said. “We were there early before they draped all the buildings. There was glass falling all the time.”)

Photos of him at ground zero show him sitting on an upturned bucket. He took pictures as well (attached), snapped surreptitiously because of respect for the moment.

“We knew we were participating in history,” he said.

Today, Matthews is one of four CIKR specialists on a staff of 40 people working on anti-terrorism issues for the Navy—with a 21-year firefighting career behind him.

He writes grants. He shows up at emergency operations centers, such as during the San Diego firestorm of 2007.

He’s especially happy to be back in East County, where he grew up and attended school—at El Cajon Valley High.

Today—Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011—Greg Matthews will be working security on the carrier USS Midway during its memorial service.

He may reflect on his weeks in New York and search for Andre Fletcher.

Did anyone ever find his remains?

“No, nothing,” Matthews said. “They did DNA testing of all the families. But they never found him.”