2,753 dead. A figure often cited. Total 9/11 casualties. Just when you start feeling that by now those lives have been reduced to a mere statistic do you come across the book “Who Owns the Dead” by Jay D. Aronson.
He cites a different figure: 21,900. That’s the total tally of body parts ever found (only 293 victims were found intact).
The rest were forensically identified.
Painstakingly slow, prohibitively expensive, and politically incendiary, this was the largest forensics project ever undertaken — a scale unimaginable for most of the world.
This is the story of a stunned superpower’s dogged conviction not to solve away the problem of Ground Zero by simply creating a mass grave.
Instead, the care with which victims were identified and shipped to their loved ones — anything bigger than a thumbnail were sent off, sometimes years after that fateful September morning, often to the dismay of a bereaved family trying to get past the terrible nightmare — was intended to stand as a testament of America’s fair treatment of its own citizens. In honoring the dead, we were saying “screw you” to the terrorists.
But where do you sift through megatons of rubble? Who pays for the land and the electric bills? Who sends the packages to victim’s families, and in what containers? When does commercial redevelopment start on the site?
This is the unknown story of a well-known tragedy from an entirely new perspective: the nightmare of logistics.
When a litany of 9/11 books just focus on blame — from the CIA to the Saudis to a Washington inside job — this book brings the real horror and the real heroes back into focus.
Chromatography, simulated blood samples, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), fiber analysis — this book would make for a very bad Hollywood script. But truth is seldom flashy. And closure is seldom animated.
This is not a book about 9/11.
Reading it, you quickly realize that the science and politics of death at Ground Zero is the story of America, unadulterated.