Two of Mauldin's Leaders Look Back at September 11, 2001

On September 11, 2001 Mauldin Fire Chief Russell Sapp and Mauldin Mayor Don Godbey were working towards the positions they now hold.

Sapp was working as one of the senior firefighters with the Mauldin Fire Department and Godbey was beginning what would prove to be a successful campaign for a seat on the Mauldin City Council.

In short, they, like millions of other people across the country, were helping strengthen the fabric of small-town life.

And like millions of other people, their memories of September 11 are still vivid.

Godbey was working at the Greer Mental Health Clinic and had just finished seeing a patient when he saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center in New York.

“It seemed surreal,” he said.

Sapp too watched in horror as innocent people were killed, but he saw something else amid the carnage. He saw his fellow firefighters

“They were going into the buildings that everyone else was running out of,” Sapp said.

Both men knew almost instantly that the world they lived in on September 10 was different from the one they were living in now and their professions colored their responses.

“You started to look at public places different,” Sapp said. “You saw places in terms of how vulnerable they were to terrorists.”

“I remember not long after that being out in my yard and watching a plane fly over head and wondering if we were being attacked again,” said Godbey. “The remnants of the event were just as damaging as the event itself.”

Because of their professions, both Godbey and Sapp were forced to cope with those remnants, but in different ways.

For Sapp, it was as a professional firefighter and his job suddenly took on a different component.

“(Firefighters) started to get training specific to terrorism and when we talked to people who tracked terrorists it really stopped and made you think,” Sapp said.

Godbey has dealt with the remnants from a psychological standpoint and said he had patients who struggled with something similar to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The actions of the terrorists were difficult to process and led to uncertainty.

“They were doing things out of desperation,” Godbey said. “There were no rules and who knows where that leads?”

One of the good things that came out of September 11, if such a thing is possible, is that there was a new sense of appreciation for emergency service personnel.

‘We have to be ready for anything when we come to scene,” Sapp said of firefighters. “Yeah, we have to get cats out of trees once in a while, but we have to be ready for medical situations, hazardous materials, days like 9/11. After 9/11 there was a level of appreciation from the public for what we do. People just said, ‘thank you’ and that was nice.”

The terrorist attacks also deepened an already strong bond between firefighters everywhere.

“343 paramedics and firefighters were killed that day," Sapp said. "When you see firefighters who were there that day, you realize we’re a brotherhood.”

Taking the long-term view is now possible with the events of September 11 and Godbey believes that is important.

“As time goes on you realize that conflict is part of our world and always has been," he said. “How we respond to that conflict is what defines us.”

While the immediate response brought many communities together, the attacks also exposed fissures.

“There has been a loss of trust from people are different, particularly among Muslims. And that takes time to get back,” Godbey said.

Godbey believes the country is still in the process of healing.

“The wound was open for the first year or two (after the attacks) and the last eight years have been a healing process. But the wound will always be there," he said.

The deepest scars are perhaps in our collective belief that we have, in fact, been changed.

“You hate to admit it, but (the terrorists) changed our lives forever,” Sapp said. “They did.”

“(The terrorists) were trying to damage us economically and they did,” Godbey said, noting the importance both symbolically and in real terms of the World Trade Center.

Godbey returned to the importance of taking the long view.

“But you have to put world events in some kind of historical context because if you don’t, you get caught up in the emotions and you can’t emerge from it,” he said.

That emergence, some 10 years later, is still in progress.