NATIONAL GUARD BUREAU

Historical Service Branch

Interview NGB-02

INTERVIEW OF

LTC MARIO COSTAGLIOLA

Commander

1st Battalion, 101st Cavalry, NY ARNG

CONDUCTED BY

MAJ LES’ MELNYK

National Guard Bureau

Tuesday & Thursday, September 18 & 20, 2001

TAPE TRANSCRIPTION

Corrections to transcript submitted by LTC Costagliola 

June 2003. Editorial clarifications made by MAJ Melnyk 

are indicated by use of brackets [].
2

1 P R O C E E D I N G S

2 MAJ MELNYK: This is MAJ Les’ Melnyk, Army 

3 National Guard Historian for the National Guard Bureau, 

4 interviewing LTC Mario T. Costagliola, I spell C-o-s-t5 a-g-l-i-o-l-a, on the 18th of September 2001. The 

6 location is Battery Park, New York City, within site of 

7 Castle Clinton.

8 LTC Costagliola, you've read and signed the 

9 access agreement for oral history materials and 

10 initialed that there will be no need to hold or 

11 relinquish any rights to this, that everything is free; 

12 is that correct? 

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: That's correct. 

14 MAJ MELNYK: Sir, if we could begin by going 

15 back to the morning of the 11th of September. Could 

16 you tell me -- well, first off, identify for the tape 

17 who you are, what your unit position is, briefly, what 

18 do you do in civilian life, your career? Thank you.

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I am the Commander of the 

20 1st Battalion, 101st Cavalry, headquartered in Staten 

21 Island, New York.
3

1 I am a full-time AGR Commander. And just an 

2 overview of the unit, the unit consists of HHC and A 

3 Company, located in Staten Island; Delta Company, 

4 located in Newburg, New York; and Bravo Company, 

5 located in Troy, New York; and Charlie Company, located 

6 in Hoosick Falls, New York.

7 Both the Bravo and Charlie Companies are what 

8 we commonly refer to as the capital district, the 

9 Albany, New York area. 

10 MAJ MELNYK: Going back now to 11 September, 

11 when did you first find out about the attack and what 

12 was your initial feelings, initial reaction?

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: On the morning of the 

14 attack, I don't remember exactly what I was doing, but 

15 I know I was basically on my way out the door to work.

16 It was election day here for primaries and we 

17 were having the election people working out of our 

18 armory.

19 I was somewhere, I would estimate, about 8:45 

20 or 9:00 o'clock, my phone at home rang. I was 

21 listening to an incoming message from SSG Koch of the 
4

1 101st Cavalry.

2 I thought I would ignore the message, because 

3 I was on my way to work, and I just listened without 

4 actually trying to pick it up, and the last thing he 

5 said was "If you're there, turn on the TV."

6 That got me curious and I normally wake up in 

7 the morning, click on CNN, and that's how I wake up and 

8 have a cup of coffee. This morning I didn't, because 

9 my four year old daughter was a little cranky and 

10 wanted to watch cartoons.

11 So it's unusual I didn't have the TV on. I 

12 went, turned on the TV, and saw one of the towers 

13 burning. I was immediately horrified, because my 

14 brother is a commodities broker and has a commodity and 

15 trading company in the World Trade Center, and his 

16 wife, my sister-in-law, also is employed by Canter, 

17 Fitzgerald, and she is basically a workaholic and never 

18 misses a day of work.

19 So the panic, you know, immediately had to be 

20 suppressed and I remember the first World Trade Center 

21 bombing. I was the Assistant Professor of Military 
5

1 Science at San Diego State University, and I remember 

2 the feeling getting that phone call that they just blew 

3 up the World Trade Center.

4 So that whole image and horror immediately got 

5 my attention, to say the least.

6 I had always warned my brother about the 

7 potential for chemical threat and that was always the 

8 scenario that I kind of envisioned and have many times 

9 told him to go out and buy a civilian gas mask or a 

10 commercially available gas mask and keep it with you at 

11 work, and if you ever hear a pop or a plume, even if it 

12 seems like a small one, get the hell out of there and 

13 those kinds of things.

14 But I did not know really the extent, other 

15 than the World Trade Center was burning.

16 As I'm watching that, I saw a little blip on 

17 the bottom of the screen saying an aircraft hit it. So 

18 at that point it immediately appeared to be an accident 

19 and what I had envisioned was a small aircraft, because 

20 I remember flying up and down the Hudson River with the 

21 Aviation Brigade here in New York, and those pilots 
6

1 always calling it Kamikaze Alley and a lot of little 

2 planes flying up and down there.

3 And, also, the vision that came to mind was I 

4 always remember hearing a story of a B-25 hitting the 

5 Empire State Building in the '40s.

6 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: As I watched the TV, I 

8 attempted to call both my brother and my mother, and 

9 the circuit lines were jammed. 

10 As I'm watching, I see the second plane enter 

11 the corner of the screen and splash into the second 

12 building. At that point, I realized this is not an 

13 accident. But I'm still just frozen, not knowing 

14 should I run out the door blindly or should I stay and 

15 gather more information, which I thought, at that 

16 point, was the best scenario, to continue to watch the 

17 TV, get on the phone and try to communicate with my 

18 battalion and my family.

19 I knew that this was going to be something 

20 that would be requiring Guard presence, if not some 

21 level of involvement. 
7

1 Shortly after that, I got a phone call from my 

2 brother that said "I made it out. I'm outside the 

3 tower." As he said that, the building collapsed and 

4 the phone went dead. 

5 So, again, I assumed both he and his wife, at 

6 that point, were dead and now my mind turned to the 

7 unit.

8 CPT Willis, my S-1, called me and said "Are 

9 you watching this." I said, "Yeah, I can't believe 

10 it." And he said, "What should I do." I said the 

11 first thing is shut down the election and get them out 

12 of there. The second thing is lock the gates, get some 

13 armored vehicles or some heavy vehicles around the 

14 gates and secure the armory so nobody could get in.

15 That would take us from about 8:45 to, I would 

16 say, somewhere around 9:30, I believe the first 

17 collapse.

18 At that point, I started just -- I knew I'd be 

19 gone for a while, made sure my wife had cash in the 

20 house, knew where the checkbook was, and started 

21 packing a bag.
8

1 Watching the news to try to hear, and, at that 

2 point, I got AM radio and CNN and I'm hearing basically 

3 the city is shut down, all bridges are shut, all 

4 transportation is shut down.

5 So I'm assuming I'm not going to actually get 

6 in. So I waited til about 10:00 o'clock to decide to 

7 attempt to get to New York City.

8 I guess I should back up and say that I live 

9 in Hazlet, New Jersey, which is about 30 miles door to 

10 door from where I live to armory, and the Goethals 

11 Bridge is my normal passage point across the river.

12 Started contemplating should I go to the 

13 nearest New Jersey Guard unit, should I try to get to a 

14 ferry that can get to Manhattan, or should I just 

15 attempt to get to my unit.

16 And I thought I would get as close to the 

17 bridge as possible, identify myself to the authorities, 

18 and if they would not let me across the bridge or if 

19 the bridge was down by the time I got there, I would 

20 attempt to find a police or some official that could 

21 get me across by boat.
9

1 So my focus right there is to get onto the 

2 island of Staten Island.

3 Got in the car, started driving, and to my 

4 amazement, the roads were relatively deserted. This is 

5 about 10:15, I think. I believe I heard about the 

6 Pentagon attack in my car on the way in. 

7 As I approached the Goethals Bridge, basically 

8 what I found along the way were abandoned cars and 

9 anybody who was on the road was basically pulled over, 

10 frantically trying to dial on a cell phone.

11 I assumed that that was -- those roads were 

12 cleared by some kind of official action, police or 

13 anything else, because I've been through too many 

14 accidents and those kinds of things where it just 

15 becomes a parking lot and that was my concern.

16 The fact that there was a lane basically right 

17 up the middle, I did get right up to the police. They 

18 pulled out my ID card and they waved me through across 

19 the Goethals Bridge. So I was able to get in pretty 

20 quickly.

21 Got to the armory and, to my amazement, found 
10

1 at least a hundred soldiers present, loading equipment, 

2 issuing weapons, securing the building, and my first 

3 orders were basically security.

4 We do not normally keep ammunition in the 

5 armory, but I put a call out to any ammunition that may 

6 be authorized or unauthorized. We have a lot of police 

7 officers.

8 I know I had a couple of magazines of nine 

9 millimeter [pistol ammunition] in my safe from some 

10 previous mission, which I can't recall.

11 So we gathered basically weapons and ammo and 

12 physically blocked all entrances to the armory.

13 My armory consists of the main building, an 

14 organizational maintenance shop, and it shares the 

15 property with a direct support maintenance shop, which 

16 is not under my responsibility, but my tenant, for lack 

17 of a better term.

18 In addition, there are a lot of other units 

19 that are not organic to me that use my facility at 

20 Staten Island for the vehicle storage area. For 

21 obvious reasons, a lot of inner city units just can't 
11

1 keep their vehicles in their armories or on the street.

2 So I am basically what they call the officer 

3 in charge and control of the facility, without direct 

4 responsibility, but physical control of those vehicles.

5 We took some security measures. Some of the 

6 NCOs had already started to do some of it. We had 

7 guards at the gate.

8 We made some modifications, found enough ammo 

9 to have a couple of roving armed guards and we put a 

10 team of who I knew were responsible soldiers and also 

11 law enforcement personnel in their civilian life on the 

12 roof of the armory, which also has two turrets, got 

13 them some live 5.56 ammo [for the M-16 rifle] that we 

14 scrounged, and binos [binoculars] and a radio and 

15 basically had some armed protection on top of the 

16 building, and they could see most of the facility, and 

17 physically blocked all entrances, because we knew we 

18 really couldn't defend ourselves.

19 As that was in progress, what we started to 

20 hear over the radio was urgent call for medical. We 

21 made contact with the fire department and police 
12

1 department. Police dispatched the unit to the armory. 

2 I believe four police officers in two vehicles, which 

3 immediately gave us some protection and some kind of a 

4 response force.

5 Fire department arrived shortly after, with 

6 what I call a liaison team, and wanted to know our 

7 capability and I gave them a quick walk-through, and 

8 simultaneously told CPT Willis, I told him to form a 

9 detachment of all medical personnel present, including 

10 qualified medics, put a call out for combat lifesavers, 

11 anybody who was a combat lifesaver, anyone that did not 

12 have a military medical speciality, but had a civilian 

13 medical specialty, and put somebody at the door, so as 

14 the continuous flow of people made it to the armory, 

15 anybody who was identified right at the door with a 

16 medical specialty and put them immediately onto the 

17 truck.

18 What we envisioned at that point was a large 

19 amount of medical casualties. We told our medics to 

20 load. We gave them initially two cracker boxes, two 

21 Humvee ambulances, two deuce and a halfs, because we 
13

1 thought there may be a roll of MEDEVAC with walking 

2 wounded and those kinds of things, and a command and 

3 control Humvee, which also had emergency lights mounted 

4 on it.

5 That initially turned out to be a 12 man, five 

6 or six vehicle detachment that we immediately launched. 

7 Just prior to them --

8 MAJ MELNYK: What route did they take, sir?

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I have to go back and 

10 verify, but as I recall, prior to them departing the 

11 armory, we received a call from the police department 

12 that said they were designating the baseball field in 

13 Staten Island and the ice skating rink on Staten Island 

14 as casualty collection points.

15 I assumed that the baseball field, which was 

16 well lit, would be the actual medical facility and it 

17 just seemed to make sense that the ice skating rink 

18 would be the morgue.

19 So we directed them to go to the ball field, 

20 with all medical supplies that we had on hand loaded. 

21 Our medical stock is generally not good, but almost all 
14

1 of our medics are civilian EMTs and those kinds of 

2 things and are able to scrounge a lot of stuff we 

3 normally wouldn't have. So we did have a fair amount 

4 of trauma type supplies.

5 To get the detail on the route and all that, 

6 we'll this into an interview with CPT Willis, who was 

7 my S-1. He was the senior officer present, and I just 

8 needed somebody I would know would start to be more or 

9 less my quartering party, not only on the medical 

10 piece, but as we flowed troops in.

11 MAJ MELNYK: So CPT Willis led the medical 

12 party?

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: He led that initial party 

14 and I don't remember the time exactly, but I'd 

15 guesstimate, at this point, it probably be somewhere 

16 between, I'd say between 14 and 1600, somewhere early 

17 afternoon, I believe. 

18 He also had a cell phone and I told him to 

19 call me periodically. Once he launched, the next call 

20 we got for police and fire was for generator 

21 capability, because all power was out and we wanted to 
15

1 get that up before darkness.

2 So that was the next party we began organizing 

3 and, to the best of my recollection, that was led by 

4 MSG Urizzo, who also took responsibility and organized, 

5 reorganized the defense and security mission.

6 MAJ MELNYK: Could you spell his name, sir?

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: U-r-i-z-z-o.

8 MAJ MELNYK: Thank you, sir.

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: He handed off the security 

10 detail to another NCO, which I believe was SFC 

11 Quadrado, Q-u-a-d-r-a-d-o. And I remember his two 

12 subordinates that were spearheading that, both civilian 

13 police officers, were SGT Ruggierro, R-u-g-g-i-e-r-r-o, 

14 and SGT Simon, S-i-m-o-n.

15 I also asked my S-4 NCO, who is also AGR, but 

16 has a part-time interest, and I don't know the details 

17 of it, but basically has some ownership in a sporting 

18 goods shop, to find out much 5.56 they had on hand and 

19 how much nine millimeter and to try to secure that.

20 At that point, ammunition of various types 

21 began to appear of civilian make. Some soldiers 
16

1 actually went back home and brought in ammo. So I 

2 remember we had about two to three hundred rounds of 

3 5.56 and probably about the same of nine millimeter, 

4 and, again, began to continually redistribute ammo.

5 So we basically had armed coverage on top of 

6 the armory, pistol armed guards at each entry point, 

7 which was physically blocked by a vehicle, and roving 

8 nine millimeter armed soldiers.

9 One of the concerns there beyond a nine 

10 millimeter is our armory is in a quiet residential 

11 area, so we couldn't really use, obviously, any kind of 

12 machine gun for defense or 7.62 that would have a 

13 penetration problem.

14 So the only live M-16 we had on the roof was 

15 basically at a downward angle, if we did have to get 

16 into a fire fight, because just didn't know what was 

17 coming next.

18 While this is happening, I am frantically 

19 trying to get some guidance from a higher headquarters 

20 of any kind. Between the fact that I'm running around 

21 and not near a phone, the few sporadic calls that did 
17

1 get in, generally, I was not available to pick up the 

2 phone. So it was a call back to brigade commander kind 

3 of thing or call this EOC, but every time I tried, it 

4 was dead, and that was both phone lines, cell phones 

5 lines, and it varied from not having a dial tone at all 

6 to getting a busy signal after hitting the first 

7 number, to actually getting the call out of the 

8 building and it would be jammed on the other end.

9 So there was virtually no communication. I 

10 tried logging on to the military e-mail and that was 

11 unsuccessful. Apparently it was -- I don't remember 

12 the exact message, but it seemed to indicate that there 

13 was some kind of intentional shutdown of the military 

14 e-mail.

15 Didn't try to my civilian e-mail at that 

16 point; much later on learned that that was virtually 

17 the only way to communicate out.

18 So at some point, I began transmitting out on 

19 my civilian e-mail in the blind to distribution, 

20 anybody in charge, basically brigade, division, 

21 whatever e-mail might -- my e-mail list or usual mail 
18

1 list for military was not extensive using AOL, because 

2 I generally rely on my dot-mil. 

3 But I had some key players, like brigade 

4 commander, division chief of staff, some of the staff 

5 guys at brigade, and those e-mails were there.

6 At that point, of course, everything was

7 extremely frantic. So I didn't have time to go looking 

8 up e-mail lists, stuff like that.

9 So I was just trying to transmit in the blind, 

10 and at some point, I want to print those for you and 

11 turn those over to you, because it was basically giving 

12 a time, date, how many people we had, what we were 

13 doing at that point.

14 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

15 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: There was a lot of 

16 hesitation on some of my people because in the past, 

17 these types of emergencies are highly controlled and 

18 there's EOCs [Emergency Operations Centers] and 

19 different headquarters that are set up and if you want 

20 to take the rock off the guy's chest, you got to call 

21 one EOC, who's got to call city EOM, who I knew was in 
19

1 the World Trade Center, who's got to call state EOM, 

2 who's got to give it a mission number and send it back 

3 through the chain of command.

4 And the joke always is if you don't want to do 

5 the mission, you put it up through channels, because 

6 you'll never hear from it again.

7 MAJ MELNYK: And, plus, you know that the 

8 World Trade Center is down.

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right.

10 MAJ MELNYK: So one link in the chain is gone.

11 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. So we knew the city 

12 EOM was gone. We really couldn't -- the last positive 

13 voice communication I distinctly remember having was a 

conversation with COL Soeder, the [3rd 14 ]brigade [of the 

42nd 15 Infantry Division] commander, who said yes, you are 

16 mobilized.

17 I told him we were starting to do some 

18 missions. He -- I don't remember exactly what he said, 

19 but I thought he said something, to be cautious on what 

20 we do because we don't really have any higher 

21 headquarters guidance.
20

1 But I do remember that in the regulation, 

2 because I've been slapped for doing these kinds of 

3 things before on a much smaller scale, is if it's life 

4 or limb, do it, and if it's not, you need permission.

5 Well, I knew an urgent call for medical 

6 supplies. I knew that the generators would become life 

7 or limb, because that would probably be used to light 

8 the triage points and start the rescue.

9 And it became quickly apparent that this was a 

10 disaster beyond the scope of our imagination and any 

11 man that I could get in there, I assumed I'd ask for 

12 forgiveness later, particularly since there was no 

13 reliable communication.

14 MAJ MELNYK: What was the status of your 

15 battalion that night as the sun went down?

16 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I remember -- now, at that 

17 point, my -- getting around sundown, I remember the 

18 number of 212 on the ground at Staten Island, in my 

19 mind. I remember D Company in Newburg, their 

20 commander, who is an FBI agent, calling me on his cell 

21 phone... that was a fairly reliable link ... throughout 
21

1 the day, saying I have 20 on the ground, I have 30. So 

2 my orders to him were if you don't hear from me again, 

3 when you have 80 percent of your unit, move to Staten 

4 Island.

5 Got a similar call from my XO, who -- both my 

6 XO and sergeant major live in the Albany area, and they 

7 were giving me some statuses, and about that time, we 

8 discovered that the civilian e-mail was getting 

9 through.

10 So I was e-mailing to my XO, who was in charge 

11 of basically assembling B and C, some traffic back and 

12 forth. I remember telling him basically he had most of 

13 C on the ground in Hoosick Falls. 

14 My order just about dusk was get C to Troy, 

15 consolidate at Troy, and prepare to move to Staten 

16 Island.

17 My XO had some sporadic contact with the 

18 division headquarters, who had just reported to Fort 

19 Leavenworth for a Warfighter seminar. He had some 

20 sporadic contact with the assistant division commander 

21 and they were discussing the movement of B and C 
22

1 downstate.

2 As far as a state SOP or any kind of prep or 

3 past experience, the headquarters, the brigade 

4 headquarters is in Buffalo, division headquarters is in 

Albany, the [53rd 5 ] Troop Command headquarters is in 

6 Valhalla, which is just above New York City, and 

7 whenever these things have been done before, snow 

8 storms, hurricanes, ice storms, Y2K, generally it was a 

9 geographic organization, where the Buffalo brigade 

10 became the western New York command, the Albany 

11 division headquarters basically became the Albany 

12 command, and Troop Command would be my higher 

13 headquarters.

14 Throughout the day, I tried to contact General 

Klein, who is the commanding general of [53rd 15 ] Troop 

16 Command, and was getting through to his cell phone, 

17 leaving messages in the blind on what we were doing, 

18 but getting no response and later on learned that he 

19 was unable to retrieve any of those messages.

20 I remember at the point that I had about 212 

21 people assembled, we decided we were going to move, 
23

1 and, at that point, and -- at that point, our medics 

2 were on the ground already, the generator and a small 

3 security detail --

4 MAJ MELNYK: Were at the baseball field.

5 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: No. Let's go back to the 

6 baseball field. As soon as they got to the baseball 

7 field, there was nobody there. So CPT Willis, and 

8 we'll get the details of what he found and how he made 

9 these decisions, led everybody to the ferry terminal, 

10 where there was a large emergency response preparing 

11 there, and I remember speaking to the fire officials 

12 that evening, saying, "Yeah, we were expecting every 

13 next boat to be full of casualties," and the casualties 

14 never came.

15 So I don't know if Willis made the decision or 

16 was directed by civilian authorities, but the next call 

17 I got from him is we're on the ferry going over.

18 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: So they never actually set 

20 up this casualty point, because no casualties were 

21 coming.
24

1 And at that point, all assets, it looked like, 

2 you know, civilian doctors, volunteers, everybody kind 

3 of rushing to the ferry.

4 I was getting calls from the borough 

5 president's office, that I also had sporadic contact 

6 with, Lee Covino and he was giving me points of 

7 contacts for boats, private boat owners, commercial 

8 boat owners that were volunteering their services to 

9 either evacuate casualties or get rescue into 

10 Manhattan.

11 MAJ MELNYK: Sir, I'm going to flip the tape 

12 at this point.

13 (Change tape.)

14 MAJ MELNYK: This is MAJ Melnyk, and we are 

15 continuing the interview with LTC Costagliola. Got it 

16 right. And I believe, sir, you were discussing the 

17 movement, the first movement over by the medical and 

18 the generator detachment, and how you found out about 

19 that. 

20 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Roger. I'm trying to get 

21 your plus or minus two hours on all this stuff, so I'm 
25

1 getting you in the ballpark.

2 But if I back up a second to try to re-create 

3 the time frames, I do recall that the medical team 

4 called me from the ferry on their way over at about the 

5 time I was -- at about the time that the generator 

6 detail was about to launch, and the generator detail 

7 also had whatever medical personnel had arrived since 

8 the group left, and these guys were ready to go.

9 We only had one generator mechanic. We loaded 

10 up all the five gallon cans of fuel we could find and 

11 whatever generators and gave basically tankers a quick 

12 lesson in how to run a generator.

13 And the order was get them, delivery them, 

14 position them, and get the trucks back, because we'll 

15 probably be moving troops.

16 So I guess the point there was that I had 

17 identified that the collection points on Staten Island 

18 had been disregarded or disbanded or whatever before we 

19 launched the second wave. 

20 So the second wave went out with orders to get 

21 to the ferry and find your way across, find somebody in 
26

1 charge and get across. And, again, when you talk to 

2 those guys, I'm pretty sure they took a ferry, but I 

3 know there was a lot of commercial and private boats 

4 that were taking across emergency personnel and may 

5 have even been evacuating some citizens off the island 

6 who were obviously panicked and all of downtown 

7 Manhattan was trying to evacuate.

8 About the time that that launched, I don't 

9 remember exactly how, but we got contact with the 69th 

10 Infantry and they were, if I remember, they were at the 

11 point where they had made a good leaders recon, gave me 

12 a good snapshot of what was there, and had gone back to 

13 get the mass at their battalion.

14 MAJ MELNYK: Who did you speak to, sir?

15 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I remember speaking to [LTC 

16 Geoffrey] Slack. May have spoke to [MAJ Jose] Obregon 

17 at some point, but I remember speaking to Slack at some 

18 point, saying that he had already been in ground zero 

19 and was preparing to move.

20 I don't think I ever finished my thought with 

21 COL Soeder. That last conversation with the brigade 
27

1 was he thought we were being chopped to the 53rd Troop 

2 Command, because, again, that was our habitual 

3 emergency response headquarters, that, yes, we were 

4 activated, that the division was on its way home, and 

5 that he really didn't know much more than that.

6 MAJ MELNYK: When the division was stuck at 

7 Leavenworth, I understand. 

8 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: We knew that no aircraft 

9 were flying and somewhere along the line, probably 

10 through my XO, I learned that it was canceled, they're 

11 coming back, and they're trying to find a way, military 

12 aircraft, rental or somehow getting back to their 

13 headquarters.

14 Okay. So we began. One of the decisions we 

15 made was to arm everybody. I believe it was through 

16 COL Soeder, but I wouldn't be absolutely positive, is 

17 that our mission was going to be security primarily.

18 Sometime that afternoon I learned that. So 

19 based on the last information I had, we did load 

20 machine guns. We brought -- put together the package 

21 of the 113 [M-113 Armored Personnel Carrier], our scout 
28

1 ambulances with 50s [.50 caliber machine guns] on them, 

2 knowing we didn't have ammo, but at least assuming we 

3 would be showing some force, and all the -- basically 

4 everything that would roll, all our cargo capability, 

5 our fuel capability.

6 Somewhere in there, we were trying to top off 

7 our fuel vehicles that afternoon, which was presenting 

8 a problem, because most of the fuel stations would not 

9 take the government credit card to top off a bulk like 

10 that for the HEMMT’s. I believe we have four fuel 

11 HEMMT’s that were operational.

12 We generally are prohibited from keeping fuel 

13 at the armory for environmental reasons. So our 

14 HEMMT’s are generally empty, minus whatever we need so 

15 that we don't lose the prime and the pumps. 

16 We were unsuccessful in any local gas station 

17 bulking us up and somehow I believe -- I believe I sent 

18 CPT Reilly out to fix it, and that was the only thing I 

19 told him, get out there and fix it, find fuel.

20 MAJ MELNYK: CPT Reilly is?

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: He is my S-3 Air, but for 
29

1 all intents and purposes, for the duration of this 

2 mission, he has been my fire brigade. He has done some 

3 amazing things out here and if we are calling this a 

4 war, that is a man that needs a bronze star, because he 

5 has just been into so many different things and has 

6 really been a key to my operation.

7 He came back and I don't know how he did it, 

8 but he somehow went to some kind of bulk facility in 

9 New Jersey and I believe it was through Hess, and was 

10 able to come back with everything topped off. 

11 So we now had fuel and we assumed that fuel 

12 would be important not only for our vehicles, but some 

13 of the emergency response vehicles that would probably 

14 -- anybody who has been in Manhattan knows that a gas 

15 station is few and far between around here. So that is 

16 something we considered a critical asset.

17 My S-4 had also initiated the process to get a 

18 caterer alerted and started cooking, and, again, a lot 

19 of this was just being done in the blind, but we were, 

20 at that point, hearing on the radio that the Governor 

21 had ordered a mobilization. Didn't know the extent of 
30

1 it, but assumed this is not a time to wait for detailed 

2 guidance. This was just a time to march to the sound 

3 of the guns.

4 When I came up on the net with Slack finally 

5 and Magnanini, we discussed that myself and Slack 

6 would, if I recall, the initial conversation with 

7 Magnanini was --

8 MAJ MELNYK: Sir, you're going to have to 

9 explain who Magnanini is.

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Okay. Magnanini is a key 

11 player here. Everything that I tell you will primarily 

12 focus on the 40 percent of the stuff that I know my 

13 battalion did, and I'm guesstimating that I know about 

14 40 percent of the job that we did out here, and we'll 

15 go into that later when we talk about command and 

16 control and COMMO. 

17 But Magnanini is the guy who brought the 

18 battalions together.

19 MAJ MELNYK: And this MAJ Robert Magnanini, 

20 who is normally assigned to division headquarters, but 

21 is a lawyer in New Jersey and saw the towers get hit 
31

1 and came into the city to see what he could do.

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: That's the man. He's a key 

3 player.

4 We -- so my conversation with Magnanini was 

5 come to New York now. At this point, my XO was 

6 negotiating with the ADC somehow, BG Taluto, and, 

7 again, getting back to that headquarters relationship, 

8 we were all kind of falling in under the assumption 

9 that we're going to work the way we usually work 

10 geographically.

11 And when that happens, I always hate it, but 

12 my downstate guys normally get attached to the Troop 

13 Command down in New York City. My D Company guys have 

14 gotten attached to various headquarters, and my B and C

15 normally stays in the Albany area. It's always a tough 

16 thing to deal with, but they chop us up like that.

17 Backing up a little bit, my sporadic contact 

18 with my D Company commander was when you had 80 

19 percent, get them down. They began to show up in the

20 armory. And I believe they got here by loading their 

21 men in the back of deuce and a halfs. 
32

1 At this point, it's early evening, it's dark, 

2 and I'm telling B and C Company, transmitting in the 

3 blind with e-mails, to get down here quick. At this 

4 point, I realized there is no division headquarters 

5 available, unknown when they might hit the ground.

6 The emergency is here, I need bodies, get them 

7 moving. And we had some discussions about that back 

8 and forth and finally the ADC had told MAJ Durr, my XO, 

9 who really is the guy to fill in the northern piece 

10 that's happening simultaneously, got the word from 

11 General Taluto to move the following morning.

12 Getting a little fragmented here, I know. But 

13 going back to the conversation with Magnanini. I'm 

14 trying to remember, but the call for B and C to come 

15 down was made early evening. D Company, I had HHC, A 

16 and D on the ground in Staten Island, and we were 

17 getting ready to roll out the door.

18 Medics and generator detail on the ground were 

19 reporting massive casualties. They're on the scene. 

20 They've linked up with the fire department. They gave 

21 us a rally point.
33

1 I also had two more scouts, for lack of a 

2 better term. 1SG Joseph Ranauro is a court officer and 

3 he was in the area on his civilian job when it hit and 

4 he was giving me spot reports throughout the day.

5 MAJ MELNYK: How was he getting through, sir?

6 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: He was getting through on 

7 cell phone; at one point, was calling me from a cell 

8 phone because he was buried in debris and, at some 

9 point, was dug out, but his partner, as far as I know, 

10 was never found.

11 MAJ MELNYK: 1SG Joseph?

12 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Ranauro. The other guy that 

13 was giving me spot reports was CPT Richard Abbatte, who 

14 is also a narcotics detective in Staten Island, who was 

15 on the scene, communicating by cell phones.

16 So I was getting sporadic reports from them 

17 and from CPT Willis. CPT Willis had given us a rally 

18 point here in Manhattan and I'm trying to remember it, 

19 but I want to say Liberty and Broad was the initial 

20 rally point.

21 That's where our generators were set up. 
34

1 That's where our triage center was set up. And that's 

2 where we were going to send people to.

3 At that point, I think I had about 50 soldiers 

4 on the scene. One of the other things that started 

5 happening on Staten Island was individuals that either 

6 lived in Staten Island, were stuck in Staten Island, or 

7 whatever, various situations, from other units, other 

8 services, were just reporting in uniform to the nearest 

9 armory, and we were starting to get Naval CBs and all 

10 these guys just assembling at our armory, and we just 

11 took positive control over them until we can get any 

12 kind of communication.

13 At the same time, the New York Guard, and this 

14 is all at Tuesday afternoon, the New York Guard made it 

15 into the armory and they have some kind of a UHF or VHF 

16 radio, which I had asked them was the main priority to 

17 get operational.

18 That UHF radio was fielded in preparation for 

19 Y2K and I do distinctly remember it was able to 

20 communicate to both Valhalla, Troy and Latham. But 

21 they were experiencing technical problems and didn't 
35

1 really get it up until late that night, and I really 

2 don't think it ever served as a command and control 

3 means for us.

4 Magnanini, I guess about midnight, said come 

5 on in. He basically had found a command post of the 

6 police/fire department that was located at South Street 

7 and Pike. That was the main interface for, I would 

8 say, the first 48 hours between the Guard and the 

9 civilian authorities.

10 Shortly after Magnanini had called and said 

11 that Slack called and said, "Look, I'm on the ground, 

I'm in communication with the 258 [1st Battalion, 258th 12

13 Field Artillery], I'm in communication with Magnanini, 

14 let's split lower Manhattan between the 69th and the 

15 101."

16 We decided that Broadway would be the left17 right boundary between the two battalions. I would 

18 take the east; he would take the west.

19 It would go north. It would start from 

20 Battery Park, go north up to Chambers Street, and that 

21 would basically split us around that line. My lines 
36

1 basically started at Battery Park.

2 MAJ MELNYK: You were going to trace your 

3 perimeter.

4 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Slack and I are agreeing 

5 that the 69th and the 101 will take the day, where the 

6 police department is anticipating a much greater need 

7 for manpower.

8 The 258 is going to take the entire perimeter 

9 at night, because the police department is anticipating 

10 less of a work load.

11 Again, I'm at my armory. Slack is on the 

12 ground with Magnanini, and I believe they're at that CP 

13 at this point at South and Pike.

14 So Slack said basically disregard previous 

15 about launching now, come in, we'll link up at the 

16 command post at South and Pike at 0700, and coordinate 

17 face to face. 

18 So I guess Slack, Candiano, Magnanini all on 

19 the ground.

20 MAJ MELNYK: And Candiano is?

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Candiano is the commander of 
37

1 the 258, LTC Frank Candiano. Not sure if he's on the 

2 ground or at his armory, but they're all communicating 

3 and saying -- coming up with this plan basically.

4 MAJ MELNYK: MAJ Magnanini had developed this 

5 plan with the police or this is something you three 

6 colonels developed?

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: What I think was happening 

8 is while we were trying to get our battalions ready, 

9 Magnanini hit the ground and found somebody who claimed 

10 to be in charge, as far as civilian authorities, and I 

11 guess I have to paint the picture at this point.

12 Let me just cover the deployment, and then I 

13 want to go back to that thought about the civilian 

14 authorities.

15 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

16 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: What we discussed was that 

17 the 101 CAV would deploy from Battery Park along Beaver 

18 Street to Nassau -- to Broad Street, north along Broad 

19 to Wall, across Wall, north along Nassau Street, up to 

20 – [long pause while he examines the map]

21 MAJ MELNYK: All right, sir. Let's try that 
38

1 one more time.

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: All right. So I'm deployed 

3 from Battery Park, Battery Place, from the Bowling 

4 Green area, northeast along Beaver Street to Broad 

5 Street, north along Broad Street, across Wall Street, 

6 into Nassau Street, north along Nassau Street to city 

7 hall, around city hall and west on Chambers.

8 MAJ MELNYK: When you say around city hall --

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Around the --

10 MAJ MELNYK: Your lines were north of city 

11 hall or south of city hall?

12 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: On the map it went east of 

13 city hall and then west along Chambers Street. So it 

14 encompassed city hall.

15 MAJ MELNYK: And this was what was agreed upon 

16 Tuesday night. 

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: This was Tuesday evening. I 

18 believe this was about midnight.

19 MAJ MELNYK: Okay.

20 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And our boundary in the 

21 north would be Church Street, along Chambers. The 69th 
39

1 was going to take from Church and Chambers west to West 

2 Street, south back to Battery Park.

3 Basically, we had a perimeter for the 101 

4 starting Battery Park, going around the eastern edge of 

5 the area, and the 69th was on the west.

6 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Like that. The 258 would 

8 man that completely during the day and I believe one of 

9 the reasons --

10 MAJ MELNYK: During the night.

11 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: During the night. I believe 

12 one of the reasons we did that is because the 258 also 

had a couple of companies of the 105th 13 [Infantry], and 

14 I'm not sure how that happened, but their total 

15 strength at that point was about equal to what we -- me 

16 and the 69th had combined plus a hundred or so. But we 

17 wanted a bigger presence during the day anyway, and 

18 those numbers were based on Tuesday evening, which I 

19 think continued to grow both in the 69th and the 101.

20 The issue with the civilian authorities 

21 became, first, we were trying to coordinate with local 
40

1 officials in Staten Island, but they were not part of 

2 the city effort because, obviously, the impact was in 

3 Manhattan, and it didn't look like casualties were 

4 coming across for Staten Island.

5 What I later found out -- well, actually, I 

6 found out that night -- that afternoon from the fire 

7 department officials, and that was about, as I 

8 mentioned earlier, a fire department liaison team had 

9 showed up, I would guesstimate about 1400 in the 

10 afternoon.

11 There were -- I believe it was a battalion 

12 assistant chief. They were all extremely distraught 

13 and had informed us that when the first plane had 

14 impacted, all of the smart guys ran to the World Trade 

15 Center, and that includes the city director of OEM, his 

16 entire staff, the fire department, it was a term 

17 similar to chief of staff, but I believe it was the 

18 number two man in the fire department, all of the high 

19 ranking fire officials that specialized in rescue and 

20 emergency reaction, and all five of the New York City 

21 rescue companies.
41

1 There's one per borough. All five, including 

2 all the building collapse teams and all the talent in 

3 New York City, which I understand was basically 

4 considered the best in the world, were at the base of 

5 those towers when they came down, along with the police 

6 department emergency reaction headquarters, to put in 

7 an Army term, were all there and wiped out when those 

8 buildings came down.

9 So it became apparent early on that the city 

10 civilian leadership level as far as OEM expertise and 

11 the fire department and, to some extent, the police 

12 department had just been decapitated and it had become 

13 apparent that there was not a good handle on their 

14 response -- or not a good centrally directed handle on 

15 it.

16 I guess the analogy would be is that you had a 

17 lot of local efforts in the local police and fire 

18 department by natural leaders that rose and battalion 

19 level chiefs, but you didn't have a major coordinated 

20 response. It was just like what me and Slack and 

21 Magnanini did basically, the fire and police department 
42

1 did the same, march to the sound of the guns, get there 

2 and figure out what to do next, but let's get the 

3 resources moving.

4 So that was generally the attitude of, I 

5 think, all the military responders, the police 

6 responders, and the fire responders, and the medical 

7 responders, including volunteers that began just 

8 working their way to the ferry. 

9 When we get with Willis and some of the early 

10 guys down at the ferry terminal, I'm kind of curious on 

11 who made the calls or who prioritized what got on the 

12 next boat.

13 But my directive to our guys was try to make 

14 your way to the front of the line, because it sounded 

15 like a lot of help was beginning to congregate at the 

16 ferry terminal.

17 A lot of help was walking in my armory, as 

18 what people perceive as a place to go in an emergency, 

19 and we were directing them to the ferry terminal based 

20 on what we were hearing on public radio and our 

21 intermittent contact with the fire department.
43

1 The fire department maintains a communications 

2 tower about 50 yards from my property line of my 

3 armory, across Slosson Avenue in Clove Lakes Park, 

4 where they had a CP set up. It's one of the tallest 

5 fire department communication towers in the city.

6 And there was somewhat of a CP over there. 

7 The fire department was asking us for security. We 

8 provided some guys for security there, as well as a 

9 113, as I recall, or actually a mortar carrier, as well 

10 as a 113 type vehicle.

11 Somewhere after my conversation with Slack and 

12 what I thought to be somewhat of a plan, I went over 

13 and coordinated with them and I again confirmed that 

14 there was confusion on their end.

15 They were kind of hesitant to just march to 

16 the guns, but were waiting for casualties to come to 

17 Staten Island that never came. So they were starting 

18 to send resources across.

19 But they could not really tell me much about 

20 any plan or any kind of coordinated effort, other than 

21 the fact of what I just relayed about they had been 
44

1 decapitated. 

2 What we decided to do at that point, we had 

3 already given the orders we're going tonight, based on 

4 my conversation with Magnanini.

5 We began to ready them and, again, that was 

6 about midnight. So rather than pull the plug and say 

7 we're not moving, we kept the prep in the works and it 

8 was basically issue weapons.

9 If I could back up, from midnight back up to 

10 about 1800 hours, one of our soldiers, SPC Bloys 

11 (phonetic,) works in Home Depot and said Home Depot 

12 called me and we can have whatever we want, they'll 

13 open the store.

14 And I said, well, we don't really have the 

15 authority to cut a purchase order, we don't have any 

16 kind of authority to do any of that. I don't even know 

17 what our status is. And he kept saying, no, this is 

18 free.

19 And I was very skeptical, but I grabbed a 

20 couple of smart guys, I believe it was led by SSG Koch, 

21 who was one of my full-time readiness NCOs, go to Home 
45

1 Depot, and get the stuff we need.

2 And at that point, we were starting to hear 

3 reports -- and, actually, my people on the ground were 

4 saying basically we're choking, get us goggles, get us 

5 respirators, we can't breath. It's just a toxic dust 

6 cloud.

7 So that was the -- the orders were get all the 

8 respirators, all the gloves, all the picks, shovels and 

9 that kind of stuff, generators, bolt cutters. So we 

10 kind of made a quick 30 second list and launched them 

11 to Home Depot.

12 They returned -- well, I got a call from Home 

13 Depot saying we got everything loaded, we got some 

14 great stuff, Home Depot wants a letter.

15 So I said uh-oh, that's what I thought. So I 

16 got a manager on the phone and he said, "Yeah, I need a 

17 letter saying you guys are" -- I forget the term he 

18 used, taken this or we have signing for this or 

19 something like that.

20 So LT Park was also part of that party. He is 

21 the HHC XO. I had the manager hand off the phone to 
46

1 Park, and I said, "Park, listen, what do you got," and 

2 he says "Well, they made a list, it's 60 grand." 

3 I said, "Look, I do not have any authority to 

4 take 60 grand worth of property from Home Depot and say 

5 I owe you." I said, "You know, Bloys said this was 

6 free, we can have whatever we want, the store was 

7 donating this."

8 I said, "Square it away. Find out exactly 

9 what they want and call me back." He called me back 

10 about five minutes later and he said, "Look, they just 

11 want you to say we took this stuff. It is free, it is 

12 a donation, but they have to account for it."

13 So I wrote a letter and ran a runner down 

14 there with a letter signed by me saying, basically, 

15 thanks a lot, you're saving the day here, I'm not 

16 paying for it, this is great. 

17 (Change tape.)

18 MAJ MELNYK: This is MAJ Les Melnyk, Army 

19 National Guard Historian at the National Guard Bureau. 

20 This is a continuation of the interview with LTC Mario 

21 Costagliola, Commander of the 1st Battlion, 101st 
47

1 Cavalry.

2 Sir, if you want to pick it up.

3 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Okay. So I typed up a real 

4 quick letter about thank you very much, Home Depot, ran 

5 it over to the fax machine. The last thing I told the 

6 Home Depot manager before I hung up was don't release 

7 it until you have the letter in your hand and you're 

8 satisfied.

9 So I attempted to fax it, the fax wasn't going 

10 through, several attempts repeatedly, no COMMO, no 

11 phone lines. So we sent a runner to Home Depot with 

12 the letter.

13 They came back with a couple of our trucks 

14 loaded completely and four Home Depot trucks loaded 

15 completely, with some Home Depot employees, including 

16 an assistant manager, who I'm sure Bloys can tell us 

17 who his name was.

18 He shook my hand, said this is a donation, 

19 good luck, thank you, anything you need, call us 

20 anytime, we'll open the store for you.

21 From what my guys told me, they pretty well 
48

1 cleared up the stuff we need, but we had pick, axes, 

2 shovels, sledge hammers, respirators, masks, goggles, 

3 work gloves, generators, light sets, batteries, rope. 

4 I have the inventory and I will provide that, but 

5 basically all the shit we needed to do this mission.

6 So the thing that got me off on that tangent 

7 was when I had talked to Magnanini around midnight and 

8 they said launch tonight, we began to issue all that, 

9 along with weapons, gas masks.

10 The first thing we checked early on in the day 

11 was how many sealed MOPP suits did we have and how many 

12 service filters do we have for our gas masks, because 

13 we knew our guys on the ground were choking and we also 

14 were concerned on was this a chemical or a bio attack 

15 and was that coming next. So we wanted to have that as 

16 part of the uniform.

17 What we found was that we had about 30 to 50 

18 sealed MOPP suits and about 30 to 50 brand new unissued 

19 gas masks, but no service filters. They were all 

20 training filters.

21 So that may have been okay for the smoke, but 
49

1 we pretty well determined that was useless for what we 

2 really needed them for.

3 So we had no chemical or bio protection, which 

4 I think is a huge mistake, that at some point we need 

5 to go back to and have that stuff on hand.

6 Okay. So we're getting ready. It's midnight. 

7 Rather than stop us from getting ready, I said let's 

8 finish the preparations, top everything off, 

9 everybody's loaded for bear, we roll out of here at 

10 0500 to link up with the 69th at 0700.

11 We all try to get some sleep. I personally 

12 laid down for about two hours. The men might have 

13 gotten four hours sleep that first night. I could not 

14 sleep. I just kept replaying the vision of that plane 

15 hitting the tower all night.

16 MAJ MELNYK: Had you heard from your family 

17 yet?

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: At that point, I did know 

19 that by some miracle, my sister-in-law, who is a well 

20 known workaholic, took one of the few days off because 

21 it was the first day of school for the children, was 
50

1 not in the building.

2 Therefore, my brother, who got out initially, 

3 did not wait around to find out what happened to his 

4 wife. He later recounted how he helped a woman out of 

5 the building, basically someone who had come to 

6 Manhattan for the first time in her life for a job 

7 interview, and he found her basically paralyzed by fear 

8 in a smoky exit, dragged her and himself down to the 

9 ferry and ran and never looked back.

10 And I think I was telling you how I always had 

11 told him whatever happens, get out of there because of 

12 the chemical/bio threat. That stuck in his mind.

13 What he recounted was after the first impact, 

14 he, along with a -- he was one of the first that 

15 arrived at the Staten Island ferry, as it was off 

16 loading. It had just off loaded.

17 Told the ferry captain that New York is being 

18 bombed, got on the ferry with the woman, and the ferry 

19 captain immediately raised the ramp and began heading 

20 to Staten Island with whatever people he could load.

21 As they were pulling away from the ferry 
51

1 terminal, the second jet flew directly over the ferry 

2 and impacted, which was the second impact.

3 So he was out of there on the second impact. 

4 But when he said I'm out and I'm on the ground, he was 

5 already at the ferry terminal, and when I lost COMMO 

6 with him in the middle of that conversation, he -- that 

7 was because the phone system itself got destroyed, not 

8 that him and his phone had gone. So he's safe.

9 MAJ MELNYK: So people were getting some sleep 

10 that night back at the armory.

11 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: At max, the troops got maybe 

12 four hours of rack time, whether they slept or not is 

13 questionable.

14 But we did bed them down. Don't know if I 

15 ever finished the part, I know I'm jumping around, 

16 about the upstate companies, but the last word from 

17 General Taluto was let's not put them on the road 

18 because they're tired and it's late and we really don't 

19 know what we're doing. Rest them for a few hours, get 

20 them on the road in the morning.

21 So before I laid down that night, I sent off 
52

1 another blind e-mail and whenever I sent an e-mail to 

2 my guys, I was copy furnishing it, as I said, to 

3 anybody in the chain that I knew had e-mail on my AOL, 

4 which was limited, but it was like brigade, division 

5 and some people like that, to say copy furnished, my 

6 communications with my subordinates. So if they ever 

7 could get the e-mail, they'd kind of have a picture of 

8 what happened.

9 That morning, 0500, we SP'd [crossed the Start 

10 Point]. CPT Reilly had contacted the MTA, which has a 

11 major bus depot in Staten Island, was able to get three 

12 buses for us to take us from the armory to the ferry 

13 terminal, and we had a convoy.

14 And I'm going to go back through my notes, but 

15 70 vehicles. It was -- the rough numbers were from 

16 Staten Island I had 38 on the ground from A, 52 on the 

17 ground from D, 173 from HHC, which was the Staten 

18 Island assembled contingent, and then C -- B was coming 

19 with 53, C was coming from 48. So I was expecting -- I 

20 was SP'ing the armory with 263 people, 70 vehicles, 

21 including a 113, and had the B and C guys on the road 
53

1 at 05 Wednesday morning, headed to the armory at Staten 

2 Island.

3 And there was some discussion. The EOC in New 

4 York would not release buses to those guys because, to 

5 quote, they did not have a mission.

6 And that was a theme throughout this thing. 

7 One of the things that actually I think enabled us to 

8 do more was the fact that the communication was broken 

9 and there were less people to say no, and we were able 

10 to make some decisions on the ground. 

11 And that's the first good example. You don't 

12 have a mission. The city OEM didn't ask for you to go 

13 there, so why are you going there, and besides the fact 

14 that the city OEM is dead, the last thing they're going 

15 to do is start dealing with a bureaucracy when they 

16 have a crisis like this.

17 So they're going to ask you, Guard, can you do 

18 this, and if you say yeah, but you got to call this guy 

19 and he's got to call that guy and get a control number 

20 and call this guy, they're going to say fuck you, hey, 

21 civilian volunteer, can you get that truck over here, 
54

1 whatever asset he had.

2 But so the lack of communication I think 

3 initially enhanced what we were able to do.

4 We arrived in Manhattan by convoy. I 

5 personally went on the convoy which took the route of 

6 Verrazano Bridge to Battery Tunnel. And it was 70 

7 vehicles, I have in my notes here.

8 And I had the B and C Company convoy on the 

9 road from Troy to Staten Island the people that 

10 couldn't fit on the organic vehicles were going to wait 

11 and dick around and try to get a bus from state, who 

12 was saying, no, you can't have one, you don't have a 

13 mission.

14 At this point, I don't remember exactly how 

15 and when, but we did have a positive communication with 

16 the Troop Command headquarters, COL Edelman and BG 

17 Klein, gave them a picture of what we were doing, where 

18 we were going. 

19 General Klein's guidance was this is an 

20 unusual circumstance, Mario, I trust you, use your best 

21 judgment, I will back you, do the best you can.
55

1 And he realized the problem early on about the 

2 communication. I think he was also early on in tune 

3 with the loss at the city and fire and police 

4 department leadership level and realized the gravity of 

5 it.

6 So he had pretty much given me this is life or 

7 limb, this is what I pay you for, battalion commander, 

8 march to the guns and do good things.

9 So I finally had some clear guidance, which we 

10 were kind of doing anyway, but it was good to know that 

11 we can not worry about the guys that kept wanting to 

12 say no. 

13 He also managed to unscrew the guy who was 

14 saying, no, you can't have a bus, because you don't 

15 have a mission, and got those troops moving south.

16 I arrived at Pike and South with the convoy at 

17 0715 on Wednesday morning, made it as close as I could 

18 with the convoy. We found a little park where we were 

19 able to park our vehicles, progressed up by foot 

20 through an army of police and firemen to the CP. It 

21 was set up in a Pathmark shopping center, and it was 
56

1 basically a police department Winnebago type command 

2 post.

3 They have some acronym for it, HBC or 

4 something. 

5 There I found Magnanini and Candiano -- no. 

6 Did I find Candiano? I don't think I made face to face 

7 with LTC Candiano. I believe it was MAJ Kool, but it 

8 was Kool or Candiano, I can't remember exactly. 

9 MAJ MELNYK: Kool is the?

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: He is, I believe, the XO or 

11 the S-3 of the 258. 

12 MAJ MELNYK: Okay.

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: They brought me over to the 

14 guys in charge in the police department who, again, was 

15 fairly confused and overwhelmed, but I believe it was a 

16 captain that I dealt with initially. 

17 I think, the name that sticks in my mind is 

18 CPT McCarthy. Confirmed that, hey, we're doing the 

19 same thing that the 258 did the night before.

20 So basically, as far as the civil authorities 

21 were concerned, we were just continuing a guard mission 
57

1 and, as far as they're concerned, it was just a screen 

2 mission and it was up to us on how to handle it.

3 And what we were doing is keeping everybody 

4 out of this perimeter. That was the mission.

5 So we laid in that perimeter. I went back and 

6 found out that Slack was in Battery Park, had my 1SG 

7 Ranauro, who had been rescued from the rubble, made it 

8 to the armory, put on an Army uniform, and was now in 

9 the fight with us, ahead to Battery Park to recon it 

10 and guide us in. 

11 While I stopped -- while we stopped we fed the 

12 troops, gave some mission orders, broke the perimeter 

13 down by company and gave each company, I believe we 

14 were planning on six to eight corners each and we set a 

15 squad size element on each corner, and preferably an E16 7 or a first lieutenant on each corner, which we later 

17 found out we just didn't have that many leaders.

18 So this thing ended up being pulled off by the 

19 –5’s and –6’s as far as command and control.

20 So the first thing we wanted to do was I set 

21 that in motion with the company. So they began laying 
58

1 in their manned checkpoints to basically seal off this 

2 perimeter.

3 And I made it down to Battery Park, where I 

4 linked up with Slack and we looked at the area and saw 

5 we could bring our vehicles, and all those things kind 

6 of happened simultaneously. 

7 To paint a brief picture of the scene, I back 

8 up to when I pulled out of the Battery Tunnel at about 

9 0655 on D-plus-one. 

10 The first thing that struck you was just an 

11 acrid smoke that just choked you.

12 MAJ MELNYK: You came right out on to West 

13 Broadway.

14 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Came right out on West 

15 Broadway.

16 MAJ MELNYK: West end.

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah. We actually veered 

18 left with the convoy. We came out of the tunnel.

19 MAJ MELNYK: West.

20 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Battery Park. We were on --

21 MAJ MELNYK: It's right here. So West Street 
59

1 and then you turned.

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: We came out here. We went 

3 out here, went up South to South and Pike, which is 

4 right by the Brooklyn Bridge here.

5 This is not the best map in the world.

6 MAJ MELNYK: So you came around the base of 

7 the Battery and up to the Brooklyn Bridge.

8 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. And it was basically 

9 -- the place we were dealing was right under the 

10 Brooklyn Bridge. This is not the best map. It's only 

11 showing some of the streets. Where the hell is the 

12 Pike? It's not even showing Pike here.

13 But that's where we assembled the convoy, 

14 found out what we were doing, met with the police, 

15 turned them around, came back down, linked up and 

16 occupied here, and started to lay in the lines.

17 MAJ MELNYK: So you established your CP right 

18 here at the top of Battery Park near the 69th.

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah. We basically co20 located our CP with the 69th and said, you know, we'll 

21 just take this one step at a time.
60

1 So our companies had their marching orders. 

2 Initially, we were using, I believe, HHC -- yes. HHC 

3 was going to be the northern part of my unit, followed 

4 by A Company in the middle, and D Company in the south.

5 They deployed basically every corner or every 

6 entrance into -- the inner perimeter was blocked and it 

7 was generally five or six soldiers and one or two cops 

8 at each point. 

9 And at this point, what we're doing at the 

10 lowest level is handing off these checkpoints from the 

11 258 to us, we're leaving them in place and they are 

12 withdrawing north to, I believe, an armory in the city.

13 MAJ MELNYK: Where was their CP, sir?

14 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I never was really clear on 

15 where their CP was.

16 MAJ MELNYK: Not down here in the Battery.

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: It wasn't down here. My 

18 impression was they were more or less running the 

19 operation from an armory in Manhattan. Never really 

20 had a field CP, that I could identify.

21 Had whacked up the area with Slack, had set up 
61

1 that Battery Park would be what we were calling our 

2 combat trains, putting our non-deployed real world 

3 support, maintenance, fuel, all that stuff in Battery 

4 Park, and getting the guys out on the line.

5 Didn't need a lot of supervision from me. The 

6 companies pretty well got it out there and got it in 

7 place. 

8 While that happened, I went up to ground zero 

9 and what I found was my generators powering light sets, 

10 my medics operating a morgue in conjunction with the 

11 medical examiner's office, and, at that point, the fire 

12 was still raging.

13 So there wasn't really an ability to get up 

14 into the rubble.

15 MAJ MELNYK: This is 08, 09 Wednesday morning?

16 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Before 08 Wednesday morning. 

17 So I have my guys equipped, they're chomping at the 

18 bit. They want to get out there and dig and help and 

19 save lives and they're a little frustrated by being on 

20 this perimeter, but there really is no, from my 

21 assessment, need for them to help.
62

1 MAJ MELNYK: Can you discuss a little bit more 

2 the physical environment.

3 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah. That's where I left 

4 off. Let's back up to that. The first thing that was 

5 shocking was right at dawn, coming over the Verrazano 

6 Bridge and seeing a glowing, smoking crater or mound, I 

7 guess is a better term, where the Twin Towers used to 

8 be.

9 As soon as I saw that, I got to be honest, I 

10 cried. I knew that this was disastrous. The second

11 really incredulous event was coming out of the Brooklyn 

12 Battery Tunnel. Also, traffic had been shut down. It 

13 was just emergency rescuers on the road.

14 Coming out of the tunnel looked like a fresh 

15 snowfall had just fallen. There was three inches of a 

16 light gray dust, which I would speculate is something 

17 between powdered concrete, asbestos, and whatever else 

18 was pulverized by the energy of that collapse.

19 And it was still basically snowing this ash 

20 like substance and you could see we were basically 

21 making virgin tracks in it, just like a fresh snowfall.
63

1 Again, the other thing you noticed was you 

2 choked. Then up at ground zero, it was every fireman 

3 and policeman. It appeared to me to almost be a free 

4 for all with some people trying to gain control over 

5 it, but it was just a massive effort to let's try to 

6 get these people out and people were in and around the 

7 rubble.

8 But for the most part, there were still 

9 serious fires burning and you can see extensive damage 

10 to all the surrounding buildings, which immediately 

11 became a concern to us.

12 I identified our medics and saw that they had 

13 operated a morgue in One Liberty Plaza and had about 20 

14 medics there. 

15 But there were, again, no patients. They had 

16 treated a few of the rescue workers for injuries and 

17 those kinds of things, but they were basically 

18 collecting body parts, which were, for the most part, 

19 strewn everywhere, mostly small ones.

20 And I remember the first body part I saw, I 

21 don't want to be funny, I don't want to be gruesome, 
64

1 but it reminded me of a veal cutlet. It was something 

2 wet, rolled in powdered concrete and dirt, was just, 

3 you know, looked like a cutlet that had been breaded.

4 The -- I'm kind of drawing a blank in there 

5 for some reason. Just a smoldering pile of twisted 

6 steel and one of the things we realized early was this 

7 is not something like you would picture or you would 

8 see on TV with an earthquake in Turkey, where you have 

9 a pile of concrete rubble.

10 This was a pile of twisted steel that you 

11 weren't just going to dig through. You were going to 

12 have to cut and rip and lift with cranes and those kind 

13 of things.

14 Tried to coordinate with fire officials, tell 

15 them what we had. I got HEMMTs that could pull steel, 

16 I got guys that could be bucket brigades, got pick and 

17 shovel teams and those kinds of things, and for the 

18 most part, the fire department was kind of overwhelmed 

19 and probably had my counterparts, battalion chiefs and 

20 the fire department that are trying to run their 

21 battalion.
65

1 And you could see the emotion that these guys

2 were not just there to respond to this emergency. 

3 These were people that were trying to get their buddies 

4 out and it really became apparent that that was their 

5 priority.

6 The other thing that was shocking, that really 

7 resembled a wartime scene was the destroyed emergency 

8 response vehicles that were strewn everywhere.

9 Fire trucks and I distinctly remember the one 

10 that said building collapse team, and that thing was 

11 just rubble. 

12 I remember seeing an EMS ambulance pretty well 

13 thrown through the front entrance of the Millennium 

14 Hotel. Police, fire, ambulance, all those kinds of 

15 vehicles just crushed and strewn about. It was 

16 shocking. 

17 They had had a catastrophic -- it was 

18 catastrophic. Again, I could just picture -- I 

19 remember once seeing a plane crash and it was just a 

20 sea of blinking emergency lights basically as far as 

21 your eye could see and I could just imagine that scene 
66

1 and 220 stories dropping on top of it, and that's 

2 basically what you had.

3 All those what would normally be flashing 

4 emergency lights were just ripped to pieces.

5 And the building itself, there wasn't much 

6 left except steel and one of the things that struck me, 

7 also, was other than little body parts, there were no 

8 desks, there were no whole bodies, there were no 

9 computers, there was none of that stuff that you knew 

10 was in that building. 

11 It was just dust, steel, and paper. That was 

12 what was left. And throughout the next five days of 

13 constant digging and ripping through that rubble pile, 

14 the most distinct things I ever saw were dust, steel 

15 and paper, and that was it.

16 Small pieces of bodies which, I'm speculating 

17 here, but I would say were probably the aircraft 

18 victims as opposed to the building victims.

19 MAJ MELNYK: What was the impact on your 

20 soldiers? How did you observe your soldiers react?

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Well, I got to be honest. 
67

1 It was just a dreamlike state. First of all, you had 

2 to deal with the reality that those buildings were not 

3 there anymore, and that was shocking, and it was just a 

4 surreal environment, very quiet, dead quiet.

5 No sirens, no screaming, no noise, no people, 

6 no power, no street lights. It was what I pictured the 

7 nuclear -- you know, aftermath of a nuclear attack to 

8 be. The people are all gone. This white powder is 

9 raining down on us and there's nothing.

10 It was just desolate. So the whole thing was 

11 surreal and I think initially that helped us get 

12 through it. Even when you looked at a body part, it 

13 wasn't a body part. It was a veal cutlet or a piece of 

14 meat or something. It wasn't real.

15 So amazingly, I did not see an emotional or 

16 any kind of paralyzing psychological effect on anybody. 

17 My own personal burden was how do I help and how do I 

18 get my guys out of this in one piece.

19 My initial visit -- I saw my guys working the 

20 morgue, and girls, I have female attached medics. 

21 These are young kids in some cases, vary from young 
68

1 privates to young soldiers who are actually experienced 

2 EMTs and paramedics and those kinds of things.

3 So they handled it well. But nobody that I 

4 saw initially was having a problem. I did hear that 

5 some people reacted badly immediately, especially as 

6 more of our people approached ground zero, in some 

7 cases, had to be immediately pulled out of there. 

8 But for the most part, everybody just got in 

9 and did their job. And the biggest problem I had to 

10 overcome from a leadership perspective was portraying 

11 the fact that, yeah, I know we all want to get in their 

12 and dig, but we have another important thing to do and 

13 we're not going to dig.

14 We're going to, first, provide security. We 

15 don't know who is going to come screaming down, when is 

16 the second wave coming, where are the suicide bombers, 

17 and we assumed that somebody would -- this was kind of 

18 the first shock and the second wave was coming. 

19 MAJ MELNYK: So you --

20 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: So as a commander, I was 

21 very, very uncomfortable with the force protection 
69

1 scenario. First, we're very vulnerable. Is a second 

2 wave coming, are they pre-positioned and I felt very 

3 uncomfortable not being -- we had some limited arms, we 

4 didn't bring the live stuff, that was more of the 

5 armory security piece. I had mentioned we had 

6 scrounged up some ammo.

7 We came in here with weapons slung and machine 

8 guns mounted, but we had no bullets. So it was purely 

9 a bluff and I was uncomfortable that we did not have 

10 that. We were at THREATCON Charlie, which is what one 

11 of the emails I got from state headquarters that we 

12 were at THREATCON Charlie, looked that up, that said 

13 you arm your guard, which we had done at the armory.

14 Nationally, I heard on the radio or TV or 

15 something it was THREATCON Delta, couldn't verify, we 

16 weren't really in communication that much at our higher 

17 headquarters, but either way, we felt we should have 

18 been armed.

19 The second force protection issue is I don't 

20 know what I just led these guys into. We may be all 

21 dead men walking, sucking in anthrax right now. We had 
70

1 no protective masks, no MOPP suits, no detection 

2 equipment. Everything we had was basically for 

3 training purposes.

4 And I'm sure there were teams out here that 

5 were here immediately checking for that stuff, but it's 

6 not something that I had any communication with and I 

7 don't know if those smart guys did detect something.

8 A, how would they get the word out to me and, 

9 B, would they, because that would cause a panic, in my 

10 mind, in the civilian population.

11 So even if the anthrax or the bio or the chem 

12 was there, we were basically dead men walking, and that 

13 was on my mind, because we just had no way of knowing 

14 and no way to protect ourselves.

15 And then the way I left the ground zero 

16 initially was something that became a routine and a 

17 drill. Three horns blew and five thousand or three 

18 thousand rescue workers, National Guard, fire 

19 department, police, EMS, medics, civilians ran for 

20 their lives, stampede.

21 And what we quickly learned, that three horn 
71

1 blasts was the building collapse alarm, and we learned 

2 that because you hear three blasts and the first guys 

3 to run are the firemen.

4 So obviously they know something, and now 

5 we're wondering is this the second wave of planes 

6 coming in, did somebody just assault with AK-47s, what 

7 the fuck is going on, everybody's running, but let's 

8 run and find out later.

9 So right about the time we got everybody kind 

10 of deployed, and I'll keep coming back to this one word 

11 that has really frustrated the hell out of me, is maps. 

12 I can understand not having maps at that point, which 

13 is basically D-plus-12 or so, or H-plus-12 rather, but 

14 I'm at D-plus-eight doing this interview and I have 

15 never been fielded with maps of New York City. So 

16 that's a sore point with me.

17 But the first time we've got our battalion 

18 deployed, we kind of have an idea where they are. We 

19 know who is where. We're running the battalion on cell 

20 phones, personal cell phones. We are not issued any 

21 cell phones, nor do we have any kind of prearranged 
72

1 stock at the armory.

2 Our FM was great until we hit lower Manhattan, 

3 and you get two or three blocks and your FM pretty well 

4 craps out.

5 And as an armor battalion, we don't have a lot 

6 of FM, I mean, PRC-77s and 127s. We just don't have 

7 those in our MTOE. 

8 So FM communication is very limited. It's 

9 challenging to get the command and control established 

10 and now three horns blew and if you had any, it's gone. 

11 Everybody's running for their lives.

12 So once we learned that drill, now we know, 

13 okay, every time the horn blows, you run, a piece of 

14 the building falls off, how do we get control again. 

15 And we started developing, through learning the hard 

16 way, lessons about establishing rally points and, 

17 again, this challenge of if we only had maps, we'd at 

18 least know where the guys were to start looking for 

19 them if they're not accounted for.

20 So we kind of started developing these drills 

21 and I would estimate from the time we hit the ground 
73

1 til the last one, which was the day that the Aviation 

2 Brigade arrived, whatever that day was.

3 MAJ MELNYK: Saturday.

4 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Must have been about 15 of 

5 those drills just on our day shifts. And each time one 

6 of those stampedes occurred, you could pretty well turn 

7 back, look back after the crowd cleared out, and seen 

8 people strewn about that were grabbing their chest, 

9 sucking for oxygen, maybe having heart attacks, and 

10 ambulance crews were EVACing those guys, civilians, 

11 workers, volunteers, guys that we thought had trouble 

12 passing the PT test could have probably won a gold 

13 medal with some of those things. But our medics ended 

14 up treating a lot of those people. 

15 So that was a reality and the fire was 

16 intense, it was still burning, water and all kinds of 

17 chemicals were pouring into it, and that was it. We 

18 had some guys getting into the rubble and digging in 

19 small groups. 

20 We realized if we were going to do that, we 

21 had to organize it, so we organized shovel and bucket 
74

1 brigades, get them up there.

2 That afternoon or later that morning, I 

3 realized that what I think the critical piece that we 

4 were missing was some semblance of a brigade type 

5 headquarters that was on the ground collocated with the 

6 police department.

7 I got that word also that morning, and I 

8 believe I got it from the units I was taking the 

9 handoff from, the 258, we were told at that point our 

10 higher headquarters was the 107th Support Group that 

11 was located at Park Avenue Armory, and they had an EOC 

12 that we were working for.

13 So the first thing was we needed to get all 

14 our logical requirements to them, which I think we did, 

15 screaming for maps, screaming for respirators. Home 

16 Depot did us good, but we realized these little paper 

17 ones that you use around your house for sanding or 

18 something was not going to do the trick. We needed 

19 some quality respirators.

20 MAJ MELNYK: So you went in with paper masks.

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Paper masks. I mean, we 
75

1 had, you know, 20 good ones, 30 medium ones, and 200 

2 crappy paper ones, that kind of thing. 

3 MAJ MELNYK: What was that first day like for 

4 your soldiers on the perimeter? What challenges did 

5 they face? You've been talking about ones who have 

6 been digging on the pile.

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Let me get back to that. So 

8 we're at the point where I left the ground zero an hour 

9 after I got there, because it was a stampede. We re10 established control and I decided what I need to do at 

11 that point, it seemed like we were settling in here. 

12 We had somewhat of a plan.

13 Let me walk the perimeter and see all the guys 

14 that had deployed. So we made it up Broadway in a 

15 Humvee. No, we didn't. We tried to. We couldn't. I 

16 started at Battery Park, walked up Nassau Street, and 

17 didn't find any of my troops, which is where they were 

18 supposed to be, made it up to what was supposed to be 

19 my northwest corner of my battalion, Church and 

20 Chambers, and found my first Humvee, which was an HHC 

21 scout with a .50 cal mounted. 
76

1 Began to walk my way in a clockwise fashion 

2 from 12:00 o'clock, that was basically my 12:00 

3 o'clock, around, and found all my guys in the right 

4 position, past city hall, and that was the HHC. Those 

5 are my Humvee scouts, with the machine guns and the 

6 113. 

7 Continued down Nassau Street, took me about an 

8 hour to walk that far. By this point, start hitting my 

9 A Company, who now is deployed along Nassau Street, 

10 which, again, is completely deserted, dark. It is 

11 daytime, but limited light getting through the 

12 buildings.

13 Black cloud of smoke hanging over us, and 

14 there's three inches of powder and a couple inches of 

15 paper everywhere. 

16 Got all my guys, looked everybody in the eye, 

17 you know, just trying to keep everybody going and what 

18 I got from the troops was, "Sir, when do we get on that 

19 rubble pile, what are doing here, we want to get in and 

20 dig." 

21 And I told them just be patient, this is what 
77

1 the police department needs for us to do right now. 

2 They're shorthanded. We're doing a service for them, 

3 and we'll dig when it's time to dig. Right now, it's a 

4 fireman's rescue.

5 One of the things that became apparent at that 

6 point was at each of those corners, I wanted to try to 

7 establish what we're doing and how we're doing it as 

8 far as, okay, police, there's a couple cops in each 

9 corner, and basically what I find is these guys don't 

10 know anything more than our privates. They're just 

11 told go to that corner and stand there.

12 So the cops, at least at the lowest level, 

13 have no clue what's going on.

14 All they know is keep everybody out, nobody 

15 gets in, which is a fairly simple mission, I guess. It 

16 becomes complicated later when we get into filtering 

17 who gets in and who gets out.

18 So, again, the common theme from the soldiers 

19 is we want to get in there and dig, we want to get our 

20 hands in there and help. 

21 A lot of our guys are civil service - cops, 
78

1 firemen, they all know their brothers from their 

2 civilian occupation are buried in there. That word is 

3 pretty well out, and they all want to get in there and 

4 save lives.

5 So I continued walking the perimeter, A 

6 Company is in place, further south D Company is in 

7 place. Back down at Battery Park, the log operation is 

8 set up, we've got food, we've got fuel.

9 We're doing various missions and what is 

10 starting to happen now is equipment, supplies and these 

11 kinds of things are just being pushed in and dropped. 

12 So we're performing a role of moving that stuff around, 

13 fueling emergency vehicles so they don't have to be 

14 pulled off the job. We could get over the rubble with 

15 our HEMMT fuelers, fuel them on the spot and that kind 

16 of thing.

17 MAJ MELNYK: How far forward did the HEMMTs go?

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I recall them getting right 

19 into ground zero, basically, and basically, we staged 

20 them vicinity of ground zero, about three blocks away, 

21 and then a fireman or a police official would direct us 
79

1 on where to fuel.

2 I later didn't like that arrangement and 

3 changed it to say let's establish COMMO, and I will go 

4 back to that missing link I was starting to get onto.

5 But we later, when we had better FM 

6 communication, more positive contact with the police 

7 and fire department. I brought them into our area, 

8 just took the mission and dispatched them from there.

9 As I was starting to say earlier, one of the 

10 biggest voids was there was not a brigade headquarters 

11 on the scene co-located with the civilian authorities.

12 The 107th, and I believe it was COL [Stephen 

13 R.] Seiter was the commander, was in their armory on 

14 Park Avenue, so they were relatively removed.

15 When I called their EOC to say you guys need a 

16 headquarters co-located with the police and fire so the 

17 missioning could come from them to you or at least 

18 somebody that could say 69th, you take this one, 101 

19 CAV, you take this one, and, sorry, we can't handle 

20 that one or let's get a specialized unit from Buffalo 

21 down here to do that one.
80

1 That's where I saw a role and I think that's 

2 the role that Magnanini stepped up, which was critical.

3 But he was one man with limited COMMO and the 

4 same thing.

5 So I finally did get word to the 107th, hey, 

6 you need this thing here, and it was a LTC Marcni. I 

7 sent my XO as a runner up to Park Avenue and tell them, 

8 hey, tell them they need to set something up here as a 

9 command and control point at Pike and South.

10 The word came back through my XO face to face 

11 with them, face to face back with me, yeah, they think 

12 it's a great idea, they said for you to do it.

13 So I set my TOC - I have an Expandovan at the 

14 CP co-located with the police and fire, but it still 

15 was missing the guy who was making decisions, and not 

16 just a liaison, but somewhat of a decision-making 

17 authority, plus I now had to take my CP out of Battery 

18 Park and put those smart guys into that Expando to make 

19 that a CP.

20 MAJ MELNYK: Still over by the base of 

21 Brooklyn Bridge.
81

1 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. So that became my 

2 CP. We called that the TOC and we called basically my 

3 Humvee and the S-3 Humvee down here the TAC.

4 And the TAC had eyes on, the TOC was 

5 interfacing with the civilians, and we the TAC was 

6 focusing on maneuvering what we had on the ground, the 

7 TOC was our link to the rest of the world.

8 But my communication between what we were 

9 calling a TAC and what we were calling a TOC sucked, 

10 because we had no cell phones, FM was sporadic.

11 MAJ MELNYK: FM was sporadic from there.

12 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I think it actually took us 

13 about 24 hours just to get the hardware and all that 

14 stuff set up, and that CP did not get in place til I 

15 believe it was like Wednesday afternoon, we had that 

16 co-located CP.

17 MAJ MELNYK: Just to clarify, for someone 

18 listening to this tape 20 years from now maybe, TOC is 

19 a tactical operations center. It's a forward command 

20 post. And TAC is?

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: You know, it's funny. I 
82

1 went through that drill. A TOC is a tactical 

2 operations center. I forget what a TAC is, but it's 

3 bringing in the commander of forward seeing the 

4 battlefield [Tactical Command Post].

5 MAJ MELNYK: And the TOC is the main command 

6 post at a battalion level. You're right. They both --

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: We haven't figured out --

8 MAJ MELNYK: In my mind, they're both tactical 

9 operations center.

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah. 

11 MAJ MELNYK: So we just confused somebody 20 

12 years from now. Anyhow, you were saying, sir. You 

13 took your 24 hours or so to --

14 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I think I got it. The TOC 

15 is the tactical operations center. The TAC is the 

16 tactical command post.

17 MAJ MELNYK: Thank you, sir. 

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: We went through that drill 

19 the other day. 

20 MAJ MELNYK: So you ended up then --

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: We ended up manning it and 
83

1 what 107th did provide us was what they called liaison 

2 officers. 

3 During my shift, there was a COL Pietrowski, 

4 but, again --

5 MAJ MELNYK: COL Peter Pietrowski?

6 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I believe so, yeah. And I 

7 heard that a MAJ Gim might have been the night, but I 

8 never actually made face to face or saw him at Delta at 

9 any time.

10 Basically, what I think we need to go back and 

11 capture is there is so much stuff that we did and so 

12 much stuff the guys did that I don't know about.

13 That first day, it was a very local E-5 or 

14 lieutenant or Spec-4.

15 MAJ MELNYK: Any of your soldiers in 

16 particular who stood out, in your mind?

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: The guys I think you need to 

18 hit first would be that whole medic/morgue operation, 

19 because they were like first to fight. 

20 The other guy would be CPT Reilly because 

21 about on day two, he kind of went in there and took 
84

1 control of ground zero and realizing that ground zero 

2 is very, very big, and we -- basically, ground zero 

3 consisted of four dig sites, which the fire department 

4 had named and eventually got a guy in charge of each 

5 one and that kind of developed over time, but initially 

6 was just jump on the rubble pile and don't sleep, don't 

7 eat, just keep digging. It was chaotic.

8 MAJ MELNYK: Who took charge of the medical 

9 operation?

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: The medical operation would 

11 be LT Nougasse, who didn't arrive I believe until 

12 Wednesday morning. He's my PA [Physician’s Assistant]. 

13 I'm going to take a shot at his name. It's N-o-u-g-a14 s-s-e, I believe that's pretty close. 

15 And SFC Bros was the platoon sergeant. 

16 MAJ MELNYK: And how do you spell his name, 

17 sir?

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: B-r-o-s. And there is a SGT 

19 Bauer in the medical platoon, B-a-u-e-r. He briefed me 

20 and, unfortunately, I couldn't hear, finish everything 

21 he needed to tell me, but he got in there and was 
85

1 pulling bodies and him and a group of medics that he 

2 led really got into the rubble pile. 

3 What I know of the morgue operation was we 

4 were tracking where the part was found, bringing it 

5 back to the morgue, handing it to an ME, who would say, 

6 look at a small piece and say 30 year old male, 

7 whatever, tag it, put it in a body bag.

8 And there was a critical shortage of body 

9 bags. I have to go back to that. And then plot it on 

10 a map on where it was found.

11 I don't think that operation is probably still 

12 in place, because we've been digging for a week and 

13 we've only found less than 200 people. I can't imagine 

14 that kind of a job.

15 But anyway, that's what we were doing 

16 initially.

17 To just jump back real quick. After the 

18 urgent call for medical supplies, the call came in, I 

19 think from multiple sources, borough president's 

20 office, fire and police, everybody looking for body 

21 bags.
86

1 We didn't have any. What I did was I sent CPT 

2 Reilly, again, my fire brigade out. He went around to 

3 local hospitals and scrounged up about 200 body bags.

4 So we did provide those and used that 

5 initially in the morgue operation.

6 And then at some point, the medics became 

7 fatigued and this combat stress, for lack of a better 

8 term, the same thing when somebody's not shooting at 

9 you. We had to relieve them and they were relieved by 

10 maintenance and support platoon guys in the morgue 

11 mission, and the guy who would probably be the best to 

12 talk to initially would be Perillo, SFC Perillo. He's 

13 my support platoon sergeant. 

14 I know he ran that thing for at least a day.

15 MAJ MELNYK: What about the men on the line? 

16 Not the men at ground zero. What did they encounter 

17 the first day? Were there a lot of attempts to get 

18 through by --

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Initially, what we had 

20 coming through were masses of firemen, policemen, from 

21 New York, from out of town, all just rushing to the 
87

1 sound of the guns.

2 I don't recall any significant issues with 

3 civilians or anything else, because civilians basically 

4 said let's get the hell out of here and never looked 

5 back.

6 I don't remember very significant activity as 

7 far as potential looting or anything like that. 

8 I do remember late on the first day, some of my 

9 guys came to me and said, hey, somebody from city hall 

10 came over, they're going nuts that we have machine guns 

11 on our thing, on our vehicles, apparently it keeps 

12 popping up on CNN, and he wants the guns off.

13 So what we did was we collected up all the 

14 machine guns, all the M-16s, initially we left the 

15 pistols there to make it appear that we were armed, and 

16 by the end of day one, we had pretty much disarmed the 

17 battalion as far as a physical armed force.

18 It was very inconspicuous, nine millimeter, 

19 which, again, wasn't really loaded.

20 Again, it was a very vulnerable time for us. 

21 Most of the cops were focused on digging and did not 
88

1 have a real good handle that if somebody wanted to 

2 start exploiting the attack, we had any means of 

3 stopping it. 

4 We also were very uncomfortable with the fact 

5 that we had no rules of engagement. Asked the JAG to 

6 come up with some, he never did. Really didn't 

7 understand what we were allowed to do, what we should 

8 be doing, what our authority was.

9 So the guidance was you stop everybody, you 

10 refer them to a cop.

11 What became apparent at the street corner 

12 level, the five soldiers and the two cops that are on 

13 each street corner, is the cops thought we were in 

14 charge and we thought they were in charge. 

15 And what happened, I think, was, nothing 

16 against cops, but the civil service mentality is I'm 

17 just a cop, I don't make decisions.

18 And so when you refer them to a soldier who 

19 has been trained all his life to make decisions, the 

20 natural leadership came from the Army side.

21 So you got the Guard really running things, 
89

1 making decisions and doing those kinds of things, and 

2 the cops are more or less our security and if we did 

3 see something real, that's an obvious crime, like a 

4 looter, than the cop would arrest them.

5 And then --

6 MAJ MELNYK: At what point was that 

7 relationship clarified? Because martial law was not 

8 imposed.

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I think it was clarified 

10 yesterday. That was the first time we got rules of 

11 engagement. And I'm going to go into another dynamic 

12 that happened out here maybe day two or three, was 

13 basically longstanding rivalries, emotions and all 

14 those kinds of things between police and fire 

15 department.

16 The fire department basically, I guess, is the 

17 expertise, saying, look, get off the rubble pile, 

18 you're not really doing any good. Everybody else is 

19 saying my buddies are down there, let me claw away at 

20 the steel.

21 And you have a very unstable situation and you 
90

1 got city engineers out there trying to evaluate which 

2 buildings are going to come down. They're setting up 

3 these devices that are basically watching the angle of 

4 the building, if it shifts.

5 Every couple of hours, windows start popping 

6 out of buildings as they're setting and shifting. So 

7 you have a lot going on there, unstable place, unsafe 

8 place. You really don't want to have non-essential 

9 people there.

10 You want to make room for the experts. You 

11 got out of town rescue people coming in. The fire 

12 department is directing a rescue effort here, but the 

13 police department has an incident commander who is 

14 supposed to be in charge.

15 And none of that ever really solidifying, up 

16 until a few days ago.

17 At some point, we're there, what can we do to 

18 help, what can we do to help. We were eventually used, 

19 and this is where CPT Reilly is going to give you a 

20 real big story and a big picture of what happened in 

21 ground zero, and I think it's really a heroic story for 
91

1 the Guard.

2 But basically we were able to come in as the 

3 third party and the honest broker and it left some bad 

4 blood and some bad feelings and we had some poor 

5 judgment and that kind of stuff on both sides, but 

6 basically the fire department used us to keep the 

7 police department out of ground zero, which obviously 

8 led to a lot of stress and resentment.

9 But it worked because of what I was saying. 

10 The cops thought we were in charge. We thought they 

11 were in charge. But they're listening to us when we 

12 talk.

13 So it wasn't cops trying to muscle their way 

14 through, but we were able to diplomatically keep the 

15 cops out, and Reilly will give you the whole story 

16 about basically it broke down to the workers and 

17 rescuers and the tourists and the guys that were doing 

18 good and the guys that were spinning their wheels, and 

19 now we need contractors in here.

20 There's a lot of activity happened around the 

21 dig site and that was a big role for us. But that 
92

1 relationship was never clear. The average cop on the 

2 street thinks just the fact that we're here, it's 

3 martial law and that we're in charge.

4 The leaders, I think, a lot of the senior guys 

5 that are cops and firemen, cops and officers or NCOs in 

6 the Army know that we really don't have authority. 

7 We're a show of force and a manpower pool and maybe, in 

8 some case, some expertise, but we're not in charge.

9 But the natural leaders were more on the Guard 

10 side than they were on the police side. So you'll see 

11 that dynamic happening. 

12 Just still on day one, somewhere around --

13 actually, it was early morning, right after I had 

14 gotten my marching orders, we're sticking to the plan 

15 that we talked about on the phone last night. A couple 

16 of minor adjustments to the line and we're relieving 

17 the 258 and we decide on this rotation.

18 The 258 has the whole perimeter at night, with 

19 some OPCON or attached units. I've got the east in the 

20 day, Slack and the 69th's got the west in the day.

21 Pretty clear cut and we're going to rotate 
93

1 battalions. 

2 (Change tape.)

3 MAJ MELNYK: This is MAJ Les Melnyk, Army 

4 National Guard Historian for the National Guard Bureau, 

5 continuing the interview with LTC Mario Costagliola, 

6 Commander of the 1st Battalion, 101st Cavalry, and we 

7 were discussing the events on 12 September, when your 

8 battalion had established its perimeter.

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Okay. We got the perimeter 

10 pretty well defined. We are rotating on a 0800 to 2000 

11 hour basis. 

12 Logistically, we're in Battery Park and we're 

13 withdrawing across the ferry. Ferries are not carrying 

14 civilians at this point. They are carrying rescue 

15 workers back and forth.

16 So we could pretty much have a ferry on call. 

17 Initially, we're withdrawing a 100 percent across back 

18 to Staten Island, living in the armory, and that's 

19 basically our lifeline.

20 We have contract food working. In the 

21 beginnings of all this outpouring from the community 
94

1 and the businesses of more food, it eventually just 

2 started being literally rammed down your throat, once 

3 that whole structure got in place.

4 Initially, we were feeding from Staten Island, 

5 packing it out here.

6 Let's see. Where did I want to go? Still 

7 first day. COMMO was still sporadic. Did get a 

8 message through to COL Gennerieux at Troop Command, had 

9 some confirmation back that we know you need cell 

10 phones, they're coming, they'll be there soon.

11 At this part, again, the missioning is really 

12 being done at the squad level, company level, some 

13 missions at battalion level, especially those that 

14 require resources, like HEMMTs and those kinds of 

15 things.

16 Some of our guys take charge of what seems to 

17 be a natural development of a supply dump at South and 

18 Pike. Bottled water starts pouring in. Work boots 

19 start pouring in. Clean socks; and ultimately that 

20 Pike and South becomes this huge depot of all this 

21 stuff that's being pushed out from the outside world.
95

1 MAJ MELNYK: By the police command post.

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. And we basically 

3 took charge of that. I understand that. LT O'Buckley, 

4 who was formerly in the 101, now assigned to the 127 

5 Armor, but reported to the scene, I think directly, I'm 

6 not sure if he assembled at the armory or came right 

7 here, but he disappeared.

8 I heard from my XO that he took charge of 

9 that, organized that, where the police department 

10 didn't really have somebody to deal with it, and 

11 eventually brought in forklifts and kind of managed 

12 that whole depot, did a lot of deliveries for them, 

13 kind of organized it, organized the routes in and out 

14 and those kinds of things.

15 So I think there's a story there and it was a 

16 significant mission that was performed all week.

17 MAJ MELNYK: LT O'Buckley. 

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah. As soon as we started 

19 doing things on Tuesday afternoon, again, this thing 

20 about mission tasking and mission tracking would 

21 constantly creep up.
96

1 Under ideal circumstances, we would track 

2 every single mission and track how many miles we put on 

3 vehicles and how many gallons of gas we use and how 

4 many people times how many hours.

5 When it's a snow storm and you're taking 

6 doctor from his house to the hospital, those things are 

7 easy to track. But you have hundreds of these things 

8 going on simultaneously. But we started to have a 

9 situation where the staff guys, my XO, my staff, I'm 

10 telling them to try to work through the EOC.

11 When they do have success in this intermittent 

12 COMMO, we're getting things like, hey, we're doing 

13 this, we need this in ground zero, we need respirators 

14 in ground zero, for argument's sake, and we get a call 

15 back saying, what are you doing in ground zero, you're 

16 not supposed to be there, you have no mission, you have

17 no task.

18 We're there and I got a hundred guys there and 

19 you want to take this report or do you want to tell me 

20 I'm not really there, kind of thing.

21 So the staffs are kind of struggling through 
97

1 that and that cumbersome chain of command that we're 

2 all used to.

3 MAJ MELNYK: So this is a problem coming from 

4 the 107th Support Group or [Troop Command in]Valhalla?

5 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I think it's really at all 

6 levels from staff officer to staff officer, and 

7 eventually what I tried to tell my guys is work through 

8 both headquarters, if you get through, because 107th is 

9 the direct headquarters, Troop Command is -- they're 

10 higher and we've worked with Troop Command before. 

11 They're kind of like a division headquarters.

12 So some of the stuff, especially on the log 

13 side, may have to go direct to them.

14 And on the staff side, you're getting this 

15 what do you mean you need cots? and what do you mean 

16 you need buses? and why do you need maps? and, no, you 

17 don't need wireless phones.

18 And on the commander to commander deal, you 

19 know, General Klein is telling me I'll back you, you 

20 know, if you make a bad decision, that's a bad 

21 decision, but no decision is inexcusable, so go in 
98

1 there and make things happen.

2 But the staffs, I think, never caught up with 

3 that intent and that kind of mind set.

4 And, of course, and this is, I guess, just a 

5 dynamic in the military, I don't have time nor do I 

6 want to constantly say to General Klein, "Hey, your 

7 guys are not doing the right thing, they're fucking me" 

8 or whatever. 

9 But the staff guys in his headquarters are 

10 telling him, "Hey, everything is going great," but they 

11 really I don't think ever had any picture of what was 

12 going on down here.

13 And when they did, they were a source of 

14 resistance rather than a source of actual support.

15 MAJ MELNYK: Do you want to comment on how 

16 things developed after the first day and how did the 

17 routine change for your troops or what routine was 

18 established? 

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: It started to improve I 

20 guess the second day we got that CP set up at Pike and 

21 South, and that started to give us a much better link 
99

1 in with the police department.

2 But I don't think there was a significant 

3 operational mode change for a while and it went like 

4 that for three days or so without a significant change.

5 Whenever I could get to an e-mail, get a 

6 message out, and I remember a couple of successful 

7 conversations with COL Generreiux, who was the night 

8 shift at Troop Command, and COL Hefner eventually when 

9 he made it back to division headquarters.

10 Those two were very supportive. I'm firing 

11 out a couple little fragmented things of things I need 

12 and whenever I got Hefner or Generreiux, it happened, 

13 and, again, Hefner is the chief of staff of the [42d 

14 Infantry]Division. I guess Generrieux would be his 

15 counterpart at Troop Command, Troop Command being, if 

16 you're not familiar with it, more or less a division 

17 type headquarters or TDA.

18 But my contact with them was sporadic. 

19 I just lost how I got on this. 

20 MAJ MELNYK: Talking about how the routine 

21 changed and how things improved after the first day.
100

1 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: That's right. And the point 

2 I kept making to both of them was we need some kind of 

3 headquarters here on the ground. I don't know what 

4 happened from their perspective, but I do know that 

5 they said don't worry, headquarters is coming, not sure 

6 who it is.

7 Eventually, it turned out to be Aviation 

Brigade [of the 42nd 8 Division]. But for that, I think 

9 they -- okay. They got here Saturday. So four days. 

10 And Saturday, when they hit the ground, I got with them 

11 and Slack and gave them a dump of what was going on and 

12 things were real intense at that point. I think their 

13 heads just spun and it took them really 24 hours to get 

14 up and into the fight. 

15 But what they did was they collocated with the 

16 police department here. Coincidentally, about the same 

17 time they hit the ground, the police department had 

18 really gotten this thing back under control and had 

19 taken Manhattan south that Slack and I had just kind of 

20 whacked up informally and broke that into zones that 

21 each had a two star police chief in charge of, and they 
101

1 started to bite this thing off and get some 

2 organization and get it going. 

3 And I guess in the grand scheme of things, 

4 what you had shape up was fire department predominantly 

5 in control of ground zero, with our troops and support, 

6 police department in charge of the outer perimeter, 

7 which our guys were involved with, and then a lot of 

8 logistic and support type operations going on all over 

9 the city.

10 Hey, can you pick up these 400 blankets and 

11 bring them here, this battalion chief needs to get 

12 uptown. One of the things we found is that a Humvee 

13 can get through a crowd or a traffic jam or anything 

14 faster than any police cruiser or any fire department. 

15 It just seemed to create a hole. And we did a lot of 

16 those transportation missions, a doctor needs to get 

17 here, run this doctor up to the hospital here, so we 

18 could load the Humvee with medical supplies and bring 

19 it down.

20 So all those things were happening, very 

21 localized, decentralized levels.
102

1 We did have mission tracking and we do have 

2 those charts and whatnot that need to be captured. But 

3 I'm going to say, conservatively, it's probably a 50 

4 percent solution on what we actually did. Actually, I 

5 won't say conservatively. That's pretty generous.

6 If we actually captured --

7 MAJ MELNYK: You only captured about half of 

8 the missions you accomplished.

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah. I mean, if you 

10 consider I took the boulder off that guy's chest a 

11 mission, I would say 50 percent or less. If you define 

12 a mission as something that required one man hour or 

13 ten man hours, there really is no definition.

14 But in the past, taking the boulder off the 

15 guy's chest was a mission that required a very 

16 cumbersome request procedure and chain of command.

17 So this has definitely been different. This 

18 has been every agency at every level being stressed to 

19 the max.

20 And the other thing is you're wireless and 

21 paperless. We have no power, we have no copy machines, 
103

1 we have no fax machines. Eventually, we got the cell 

2 phones, D-plus-three, I believe, and that hand receipt, 

3 we need to capture exactly when those cell phones hit 

4 the ground. I wanted that for my AAR, but I'm pretty 

5 sure it was D-plus-three.

6 We had no hard lines out of here, telephone 

7 lines. So again, everything that was done out here was 

8 stubby pencil and verbal, and that's one of the reasons 

9 I'm glad you're here, because there's just a lot to 

10 capture. It was a verbal operation, so let's capture 

11 it verbally and then try to verify some of it with the 

12 limited paper that is available, phone records and all 

13 these other kinds of things, mission tracking charts 

14 and stuff like that.

15 If you can get to me in the next 24 hours, 

16 maybe talk to your smart guy, what are the things that 

17 we need to gather, and I'm thinking of some obvious 

18 ones, but there may be some good ones out there that 

19 your guys -- maybe dispatch records.

20 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: What do we really need to do 
104

1 to -- which data would be a good place to go and 

2 capture it before we lose it?

3 MAJ MELNYK: Do we need to take a break here, 

4 sir?

5 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah. I think my mind is 

6 starting to go to mush.

7 MAJ MELNYK: I think we'll do that at this 

8 point. 

9 (Tape stopped.)

10 MAJ MELNYK: This is MAJ Melnyk. We are 

11 resuming the interview with LTC Costagliola, several 

12 days later. Today is the 20th of September, and we are 

13 still in Battery Park.

14 Colonel, we were about to discuss operations 

15 on the second day and subsequent, up to today, how 

16 things have developed in your battalion.

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Okay. Once we got settled 

18 in, as I said, we set up a CP and a logistic area in 

19 Battery Park, collocated with the 69th Infantry.

20 The 69th and I had basically the day shift, 

21 258 had the night shift, and we started to try to help 
105

1 at the crash scene.

2 My first impressions of what was going on 

3 there was basically every cop, firemen, whether it was 

4 organized or unorganized, EMS worker, correction 

5 officer, you name it, just basically did a free for all 

6 charge for the rock pile.

7 MAJ MELNYK: Continue, please.

8 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: You had this burning, 

9 smoking, twisted pile of steel, which I distinctly 

10 remember was colorless. Everything was gray. You 

11 couldn't really see people, desks, you couldn't see 

12 anything. All you saw was twisted steel and gray dust 

13 and paper. That's basically what the scene looked 

14 like.

15 The other thing that stood out, in my mind, 

16 was the eerie silence. There was no sirens, no 

17 generators, no traffic, no people, all the kind of 

18 stuff that we kind of get used to having here now.

19 No sound, no color, and that kind of added to 

20 the surreal feeling of the scene.

21 So you had what I considered to be a 
106

1 completely disorganized effort as far as rescue. Not 

2 sure if I mentioned this before, but basically, for 

3 those of you listening to this that are not familiar 

4 with New York City, the city's OEM, what they call 

5 Giuliani's bunker, which it was nicknamed, was in the 

6 World Trade Center.

7 That was the OEM command post and had all the 

8 communications and had all the right guys working 

9 there, including representatives from each agency.

10 MAJ MELNYK: And Mayor Giuliani had just spent 

11 millions of dollars --

12 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Millions.

13 MAJ MELNYK: -- to build this brand new 

14 facility in the World Trade Center.

15 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Very controversial. We all 

16 kind of said why build it there, because that's where 

17 you're going to have a crisis. I guess that was pretty 

18 prophetic a couple of years prior.

19 But the facilities, the hardware, all that 

20 stuff obviously gone. But in addition, when the first 

21 plane hit the World Trade Center, of course, all these 
107

1 guys, the city OEM, director of OEM, his staff, the 

2 number two man in the fire department, all these high 

3 ranking chiefs in the fire department, all the rescue 

4 companies in New York City, of which there are five, 

5 one per borough, all ran to the site of an airplane 

6 crash, which, at that point, was to considered to be 

7 accidental.

8 Plus, all the police, fire, port authority and 

9 all these guys that work in and around that area, all 

10 rush to the scene of a fire at this point.

11 Then you had the second impact, followed 

12 shortly by the collapse, which basically decapitated 

13 all the smart guys in New York City that are supposed 

14 to be able to handle this kind of stuff. 

15 So at that point, it turned into something 

16 that I think we can identify with in the military, 

17 local attacks by what we could -- the analogy would be 

18 the squad leaders and the company commanders charging 

19 to the sound of the guns and trying to help.

20 And I think what aggravated the situation is 

21 every one of those agencies, police, ESU, emergency 
108

1 service unit, port authority, corrections, fire, 

2 police, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, are all trying 

3 to save their buddies that are under the rubble.

4 And what I have learned subsequent to those 

5 early days is that's a very sensitive issue in New York 

6 City and later on, as I see -- every time the body of a 

7 fireman is a found, that a group of firemen is 

8 assembled and it's unwritten protocol that only the 

9 firemen carry him out. Same for the police. 

10 So what you had was no leadership, no 

11 organization, and emotion, complete panic. 

12 So I think early on, the three of us battalion 

13 commanders got together. As I mentioned to you 

14 earlier, the Home Depot had given us all this great 

15 stuff to do rescue work, and what we did is we got up 

16 there and found that this is not the kind of thing 

17 you're going to start digging with a shovel.

18 You need welders, you need heavy equipment, 

19 you need expertise.

20 So we sent a few of these companies, which are 

21 tank companies, which probably equate to about a rifle 
109

1 platoon, 40-50 guys, armed with kneepads, goggles, 

2 respirators, gloves, shovels, sledge hammers, all these 

3 kinds of things.

4 We'd march them up to the rock pile or the 

5 ground zero, try to work, realized it was futile. In a 

6 few cases, the fire department would say, hey, you guys 

7 aren't helping us, get out of the way, and you just had 

8 an army of ants running up on this rock pile. You had 

9 a lot of injuries, because the thing was still burning 

10 and it was not only burning, but putting out a lot of 

11 toxic stuff.

12 And you still had this toxic cloud in the air 

13 of asbestos, powdered concrete, cremated bodies, and 

14 there was just that acrid pollutants in the air.

15 They irritate your throat, your lungs, your 

16 eyes, it was a very uncomfortable environment to be 

17 working in.

18 So we realized that there was definitely a 

19 role here for the Guard in organizing the site. Police 

20 vehicles were blocking fire vehicles that were blocking 

21 ambulances that were blocking civilian contractors and 
110

1 it was just a freaking mess.

2 So basically what we had, the analogy I used, 

3 I remember, when I briefed my company commanders, was 

4 what we have is a screen line, which was the perimeter 

5 I had mentioned earlier, which I was responsible, my 

6 battalion, for the east side.

7 Slack and I had used Broadway as the battalion 

8 boundary and we had this outer perimeter, it was more 

9 or less a screen.

10 What we didn't want were civilians, looters, 

11 tourists and all this kind of stuff, which --

12 MAJ MELNYK: You didn't have much of a problem 

13 with that.

14 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: -- didn't really come, 

15 because everybody had just left New York in a panic and 

16 were not coming back anytime soon. The people who had 

17 been anywhere near this thing were terrorized. 

18 And what I later found out was that a lot of 

19 these surrounding buildings were hit with debris, 

20 filled up with smoke, and several days later, when I 

21 got into some of these buildings, it was very eerie, 
111

1 because time had just stopped. 

2 You know, you could see it was 9:30 in the 

3 morning on a Tuesday and everybody had just 

4 disappeared.

5 Newspapers were opened to the first page. 

6 Coffee cups were still full. Bagels were half eaten. 

7 Jackets were on the backs of chairs. Time just 

8 stopped. That was eerie.

9 But anybody that had been near this thing was 

10 not coming back. They were terrorized and they were 

11 gone.

12 What you did have a problem with was all these 

13 do-gooders and a big percentage of those do-gooders, 

14 that we later characterized as workers and tourists, 

15 but initially it was everybody coming to help.

16 The radio was basically saying we need help, 

17 we need volunteers, we need medical people. They were 

18 coming.

19 Cops, firemen and all those guys were coming 

20 because their brothers were in the pile.

21 Didn't see too much, as far as I'm aware, of 
112

1 relatives or people trying to look for their own, but 

2 you did have a lot of the public service people just 

3 coming.

4 Anyway, so our outer screen initially provided 

5 that first line of defense. Then what we found is in 

6 the crash site, we needed to kind of get some order and 

7 my guy who really took charge of this was Reilly.

8 Basically, what we did was provide security 

9 for the crash site and at this point, it was very 

10 difficult to find somebody in charge and interesting 

11 thing, as we went through this operation and continue 

12 to learn, that your average civil service police 

13 officer, and not to knock them, but the equivalent of 

14 their private is no less than our private.

15 And it quickly became apparent that although 

16 we were here to aid civil authority, did not have any 

17 authority really, any arresting power, any authority to 

18 do anything, the cops thought we were in charge, 

19 especially the rank and file cop. So what that did was 

20 allow us to start to get some control over the area and 

21 we put up a perimeter which became known as ground zero 
113

1 and by late on day two, really into day three, what you 

2 had was the people that were really the experts in this 

3 stuff, the fire department, I would say, at this point, 

4 and, to some extent, ESU, police special services, were 

5 basically going on 24, 48 hours, and they were just 

6 continuing to try to work at this pile.

7 And it was still hazardous, still burning.

8 So most of, I think, day two, which would have 

9 been -- this happened on Tuesday, it would have been 

10 Wednesday, was us realizing, really assessing this, and 

11 getting that outer perimeter going, which went in very 

12 quickly. 

13 I don't remember, but I guess I'll back up, if 

14 I mentioned this or not, but we came in with guns 

15 mounted, machine guns mounted and that kind of stuff, 

16 we got the word to disarm, which we did, or at least 

17 made it invisible. 

18 We still kept the weapons here on Manhattan, 

19 but took them out of site.

20 So we started to get some control of the crash 

21 scene. I had my B and C Company hit the ground on 
114

1 Wednesday. They, as we had discussed, they were a 

2 little bit delayed. They were told to hold until 

3 Wednesday morning before they convoyed down, and the 

4 EOC up the state was telling us no, we can't have a bus 

5 because we don't have a mission.

6 So we left the people that we couldn't carry 

7 organically behind and the convoy SP'd out of Albany 

8 about 0500. 

9 I got a call about noon from my XO, who was 

10 honchoing that piece, and they were -- their orders 

11 were go to Staten Island. 

12 When I provide you with copies of the e-mails 

13 and stuff, you will see that about 0300 or 0400 on the 

14 12th of September, I had sent an e-mail to my Albany 

15 units to say, look, this thing is out of control, we 

16 need to go in immediately, meet us in Manhattan.

17 Well, they didn't get that word. I guess they 

18 didn't check the e-mail before SP'ing. So they were on 

19 the road headed for Staten Island. 

20 My XO called me from the road. I was at 

21 ground zero, and I explained to him to bypass Staten 
115

1 Island, come direct to a rally point, which, at that 

2 point, I gave him as Pike and South and later adjusted 

3 to Battery Park.

4 My XO was a little frazzled by that, because 

5 these guys don't really know Manhattan, and he implored 

6 me not to do it, let him go to Staten Island, and I 

7 insisted that stop on the[NY State] Thruway, get a map, 

8 figure out where it is to get here, which they did.

9 About the time I gave him that order, I think 

10 the bus thing was resolved by General Klein's 

11 intervention, who said, "Look, I'm the task force

12 commander" -- I mean, "I'm the brigade equivalent or 

13 division equivalent commander. This battalion 

14 commander needs his companies. Get them on the road. 

15 Give me the bus. Stop screwing around."

16 Whatever transpired there, we got the bus, but 

17 it took his intervention just to get B and C moving.

18 So they later linked up. That afternoon, on 

19 Wednesday, my company commanders, Pickering and 

20 Schultze.

21 MAJ MELNYK: How do you spell that, sir?
116

1 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Pickering is P-i-c-k-e-r-i2 n-g, and Schultze, S-c-h-u-l-t-z-e.

3 MAJ MELNYK: They command, respectively, which 

4 companies?

5 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Pickering is B Company in 

6 Troy. Schultze is C Company in Hoosick Falls, and he's 

7 actually an incoming commander from the 27th Brigade. 

8 On paper, he's an S-1 of some rifle battalion. But 

9 he's been doing his hand receipt, change of hand 

10 receipt holder and all that.

11 MAJ MELNYK: Coming in brand new in this kind 

12 of crisis.

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Coming in brand new. He's 

14 been to one drill with the unit and this is his welcome 

15 to the CAV. Good decisive officer, combat veteran.

16 So they hit the ground and at that point, I 

17 took them on a tour of the crash site.

18 One of the things about the crash site that 

19 struck me and will remain in my mind for the rest of my 

20 life, and you can't really appreciate by looking at 

21 pictures of it, is the size of it.
117

1 MAJ MELNYK: Yeah. I agree.

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And what ultimately evolved 

3 was ground zero -- and this really started to take 

4 shape on Tuesday afternoon late -- became four 

5 different rescue missions.

6 The southeast corner is where we had the most 

7 involvement throughout the operation. That was known 

8 as the 10-10 dig site.

9 MAJ MELNYK: Ten-ten, one zero-one zero.

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I don't know how that name 

11 came about. It was a fire department nomenclature.

12 MAJ MELNYK: And that's right by One Liberty 

13 Plaza.

14 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: That was right by One 

15 Liberty Plaza. By this time, I'm glad you mentioned 

16 it, by this time, One Liberty Plaza is the morgue, of 

17 which my guys are operating, primarily medics and later 

18 that day we switched off with mechanics and support 

19 platoon guys, because they were getting traumatized.

20 I think we talked about the whole morgue piece 

21 and what they were doing.
118

1 MAJ MELNYK: We did, and also that they had to 

2 jump it later because of a danger of that building 

3 collapsing. 

4 So they divided it up into sectors and 10-10 

5 was that corner.

6 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. Yeah.

7 MAJ MELNYK: Do you know what the other 

8 sectors were called?

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I know that the northeast 

10 corner, which is called the east dig site. Don't 

11 really know what the western side was called.

12 The 69th was the military unit that really was 

13 on the whole western side of the island.

14 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

15 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And I'm not sure of their 

16 involvement. When I walked the perimeter of the entire 

17 crash site --

18 And let me just go back for a minute. 

19 Whenever I refer to our involvement at ground zero, 

20 from here on in, it was pretty well isolated to --

21 MAJ MELNYK: The eastern side.
119

1 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: -- 10-10 and it went, I 

2 would say, from the southern -- if due north is 12:00 

3 o'clock, our major involvement was from the --

4 (Change tape.)

5 MAJ MELNYK: If you could say, again, sir, the 

6 area you were involved in.

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: From here on in, when I 

8 refer to ground zero, I'm referring to my piece of 

9 ground zero, which was known as 10-10 to the fire 

10 department, and it went from -- if due north was 12:00 

11 o'clock, it went from the 3:00 o'clock to the 6:00 

12 o'clock position.

13 It was basically the southeast corner of the 

14 area.

15 Adjacent to us was the 105th Infantry, Bravo 

16 and Charlie Company. They pretty much handled from 

17 12:00 o'clock to 3:00 o'clock. 

18 And I think --

19 MAJ MELNYK: That was the area in front of the 

20 Millennium Hotel.

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Pretty much. From the 
120

1 Millennium north is where they were.

2 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

3 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Millennium was pretty much 

4 our boundary. 

5 When you talk to other commanders and other 

6 people who were there, you're going to wonder to 

7 yourself were these guys at the same place, were they 

8 at the same ground zero, and I just want to emphasize 

9 that ground zero was tremendous.

10 And I'm going to go into that a little bit in 

11 a minute, but my ground zero is going to be completely 

12 different than somebody that was a block away from me, 

13 and it's just that huge.

14 MAJ MELNYK: How far out did the rubble extend 

15 when you got there? Because in the week since, it's 

16 been pushed back considerably.

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: It has really amazed me, 

18 from hitting the ground that night to watching that 

19 footage, to everything we did here, how isolated that 

20 rubble really was.

21 On day three, I spoke to a civilian contractor 
121

1 that claimed to be one of the engineers that built the 

2 building and right in front of the Millennium Hotel, 

3 there was about a four story structure of steel 

4 girdering that you could obviously make out was about 

5 four floors of the World Trade Center sticking out of 

6 the ground.

7 This engineer, with blueprint in hand, 

8 explained to me that that was the 72nd, 73rd, 74th, and 

9 75th floor that's sticking up.

10 MAJ MELNYK: From the South Tower, that 

11 immense piece of the South Tower facade that's sticking 

12 in the ground.

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: There's two. There's one 

14 that's bigger.

15 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

16 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Where, if you look closely 

17 at it, you could actually see the shape of where the 

18 plane hit.

19 And then there's one that's smaller that was 

20 right in front of the Millennium Hotel. It's the 

21 smaller of the two steel structures that are standing 
122

1 up, was the 72nd, 73rd, 74th, 75th floor.

2 And they knew that and I asked him how do you 

3 know that, and he said the number. And at that point, 

4 he had guys with welders up on top of it. 

5 So can't verify it, but this is what the man 

6 told me. Point being that the building basically 

7 imploded on itself. It didn't really go out. What 

8 went out into the surrounding area was this gray ash 

9 and concrete and asbestos.

10 But the debris was relatively contained to 

11 that immediate area.

12 Now, the adjacent buildings that are part of 

13 the World Trade Complex, like Building 5, Building 7, 

14 you know, these things were, for the most part, still 

15 standing, but completely incinerated and burnt. 

16 But most of the structure fell into itself and 

17 it was a tremendous amount of glass, as you can 

18 imagine. You have 220 stories of glass.

19 There's another hotel that was on the east 

20 side of the towers that was completely black. But 

21 there was damage to the buildings. 
123

1 What I -- I remember looking at the 

2 surrounding damage and what it looked like to me was 

3 fragments of the aircraft that had still had velocity 

4 when it came out the other end and basically had made 

5 shotgun patterns on the buildings, and those were 

6 pretty evident, and then just some damage from like the 

7 collapsing structure.

8 But the rubble did not really extend out of 

9 the World Trade Center boundaries. It pretty much fell 

10 right on top of each other.

11 MAJ MELNYK: Within limits, it did destroy the 

12 other buildings in the World Trade Center complex.

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: It did cause collateral 

14 damage. What you had at this point was a lot of 

15 emergency vehicles that were completely destroyed.

16 MAJ MELNYK: In the surrounding streets.

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I remember seeing at least

18 six fire engines that were destroyed. I'd say at least 

19 eight police cars, four ambulances. I mean, they were 

20 just twisted metal.

21 MAJ MELNYK: There's been some people making 
124

1 the commentary on the news that the towers were 

2 designed to sort of implode like that if they ever had 

3 to be taken down someday, and that was sort of the way 

4 they did end up coming down.

5 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: There was some -- and I 

6 don't know if there's any truth to this, but some 

7 mention, also, that those were built during the time

8 when we had a lot of nukes pointed at the Russians and 

9 they had nukes pointed at us, and those things were 

10 designed to come down like that under a nuclear attack.

11 MAJ MELNYK: Whether that's true or not.

12 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Don't know if that's true. 

13 Heard that before about the Verrazano Bridge. It was 

14 designed to open so it won't block New York Harbor. So 

15 I wouldn't be surprised if that was a planning 

16 consideration.

17 But getting back to that mid-day, noon, 

18 approximately, B and C hit the ground, got my two 

19 incoming company commanders, and told them to let's go 

20 recon the site.

21 We walked the entire perimeter of the crash 
125

1 site and it took us three hours at a pretty good pace. 

2 So to give you an idea of the size of it. 

3 One of the distinct moments I remember there 

4 was walking through this pattern, if you've ever been 

5 to the NTC [National Training Center, Ft. Irwin, CA], 

6 you kind of identify that real fine silk powder that 

7 kind of makes a little dust cloud when you step.

8 MAJ MELNYK: When you step in it, sure.

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Covered by a couple inches 

10 of paper everywhere, and as we were walking around 

11 there, I remember looking down and picking up a 

12 perfectly intact boarding pass from American Flight 11. 

13 That was kind of an emotional moment there. 

14 MAJ MELNYK: What did you do with that?

15 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Ended up turning that in to 

16 the FBI, who tagged it, wanted to know where we found 

17 it, that kind of stuff, and I guess that became a piece 

18 of evidence.

19 So what we were looking for was really a place 

20 that we could get into and start working. 

21 I was continuously bombarded from the time we 
126

1 hit Manhattan throughout really the first three days. 

2 My soldiers were very, very frustrated. They wanted to 

3 get into the rubble pile. They wanted to get into the 

4 rubble pile and dig. 

5 It was fairly apparent that that was not going 

6 to be the most useful way to use -- for us to be 

7 deployed, but that's what the soldiers thought they 

8 were going to be doing and they wanted to get in there 

9 and you kind of have these visions of these earthquakes 

10 where you have concrete buildings and you can start 

11 picking up boulders and lifting them off of people and 

12 that kind of stuff.

13 But this wreckage was clearly different. It 

14 was -- where you did have anything that could be 

15 distinguishable as the insides of the building, it kind 

16 of reminded me of a landfill, where something has been 

17 compacted by a garbage truck and really compressed.

18 I think the impact of all that weight coming 

19 down in the center of that building just really 

20 compressed everything in layers of whatever, but it was 

21 just one big compact.
127

1 And it also became apparent very early on that 

2 there were no survivors. 

3 I remember thinking day one, into day two, 

4 there's nobody left. I even remember calling my -- I 

5 don't remember if it was my wife or my brother, and 

6 telling them, you know, there's nobody here. There are 

7 no wounded.

8 The mass casualty drill that we had 

9 anticipated didn't happen, because you either got away 

10 or you were dead. There was really no in between.

11 I did not see one injured person ever that was 

12 a victim of the building. We saw a lot that were 

13 rescuers injured trying to get in there, but never saw 

14 a victim.

15 The casualties that we saw initially that were 

16 the pieces of bodies that were strewn everywhere, I 

17 believe, were primarily the people in the aircraft, and 

18 you can kind of see -- wherever you saw concentrations 

19 of body parts, you saw evidence of an airplane, whether 

20 it was a little piece of a window or aluminum skin or 

21 an airplane seat.
128

1 It was obviously not people that were in the 

2 building. 

3 So what our role very quickly became was the 

4 outer perimeter was critical and organizing the dig 

5 site itself, and that became a controversial issue. 

6 You have police and fire department in New 

7 York City that are longstanding rivals and I always 

8 remember, and even when we've done practice drills with 

9 them in the past when they do -- we used to have a 

10 training site on Staten Island where they would do 

11 practice train wrecks and this kind of stuff.

12 You know, the fire department would run to one 

13 train, the cops would run to another, and nobody would 

14 ever work together.

15 I remember an incidence once where fire 

16 department and police arrived on an accident scene, 

17 reading this in the paper, and ended up in a fist fight 

18 while the victim died. 

19 So there is an intense rivalry there between 

20 those two departments. Now you had complete 

21 exhaustion, complete confusion, and a lot of their 
129

1 brothers missing. So that intensified.

2 What we saw, I think, was the fire department 

3 get control of the rescue much quicker than the police 

4 department did. It was very difficult to ever find a 

5 cop who would admit he was in charge.

6 I didn't know enough about the police 

7 department initially, and we have so many cops in a 

8 unit and you always kind of assume people know things, 

9 but it took me into late on the second day till I 

10 realized that the guys in the white shirts are the guys 

11 in charge.

12 But when you approach a white shirt, 

13 generally, he would tell you he was not in charge. 

14 And the fire department was a little 

15 different. They started to set up these dig sites, 10-

16 10 dig site; by the end of day two, had a cordoned area 

17 which was kind of equivalent of a command post. 

18 You had a chief that was directing the rescue 

19 and you had an assistant chief who was kind of doing 

20 his deflection.

21 I would call it a classic analogy where you 
130

1 had a battalion commander fighting the battle and you 

2 had an XO that was managing information and working 

3 resources and those kinds of things.

4 So it was something we could identify and have 

5 now found somebody in charge. Generally too busy to 

6 really deal with us much, but what they did tell us 

7 was, look, the way you guys can help us is get all 

8 these freaking people out of here, get all these 

9 vehicles out of here, and we'll start telling you what 

10 can come in and what can't.

11 That put us in a bad position because we had 

12 soldiers that were very eager to execute a mission. 

13 They really wanted to dig, but they were eager to help.

14 And when we gave them those marching orders, 

15 what we ended up having to do is move police officers 

16 out so firefighters could work, and that obviously 

17 started to cause friction very early on.

18 We got things like "Who are you guys, this is 

19 our city," you know, "You're not going to tell us what 

20 to do." It eventually evolved into, because our guys 

21 really held their ground, it evolved into a situation 
131

1 where the police thought we were in charge and they 

2 started to listen, for the most part.

3 And so our mission became get the guys that 

4 aren't really helping out of here. Let's get the road 

5 clear. Let's get priority traffic in and out. Let's 

6 get routes organized, and those were the things we were 

7 able to do and I think that's really where we made our 

8 money.

9 The cops, when we first came on the scene, 

10 were very glad to see us. They said, "Look, we don't 

11 have a plan, we don't know what's going on, we're 

12 trying to figure this out, but we're glad you're here."

13 So what we were able to do is that outer 

14 perimeter really gave the cops a chance to figure out 

15 what they were going to do.

16 And I also remember pulling up with that 

17 convoy that first day or second day, D-plus-two or D18 plus-one, and getting -- making my way -- having to 

19 park about six blocks away from this command post at 

20 Pike Street and South Street, basically right at the 

21 base of the Brooklyn Bridge, and walking that six 
132

1 blocks, because there was just an endless mob of cops, 

2 and they weren't doing anything.

3 They were just waiting for somebody to tell 

4 them what to do.

5 So we were able to do that. By day three, we 

6 were really up and running into that mission. That 

7 perimeter was adjusted slightly. The Mayor, as we got 

8 it and city hall basically didn't want a big military 

9 presence around city hall. So we withdrew from that 

10 area. That was secured strictly by cops. And our line 

11 continued down Nassau Street, down into the Battery 

12 Park area.

13 What we began to do immediately was a 12 hour 

14 shift, eight to eight. We would relieve the 258 at 08. 

15 They would relieve us at 2000. 

16 And it generally took longer than that to 

17 physically hand off each post in the dark. There's no 

18 electricity. There's no phone COMMO. So doing those 

19 battle handoffs were a little slow and tedious for the 

20 first at least four days.

21 So then we would rally at the ferry terminal, 
133

1 which was basically, even from our furthest post, was 

2 never more than a couple of mile walk, and get on a 

3 ferry, go back to Staten Island, vehicles on the ferry.

4 The ferries, at this point, are shut down 

5 completely, only emergency traffic. So a ferry boat 

6 would come in, unload, the cops would fire them in, 

7 we'd get on and go out on the ferry.

8 MAJ MELNYK: What elements stayed behind, if 

9 any?

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: We did not leave any at all 

11 the first night.

12 MAJ MELNYK: The medics came back and --

13 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Everybody came back. The 

14 generators were up and running at that point. They 

15 were left in place. But I do not recall specifically 

16 leaving any element back.

17 MAJ MELNYK: You took all your vehicles out,

18 as well.

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: All our vehicles, unless it 

20 was engaged with something, which, at that point, might 

21 have just been the water buffaloes and the generators.
134

1 The morgue was basically set up with military 

2 equipment. So we left all our stretchers, medical 

3 supplies and those kinds of things. 

4 We never actually did recover any of that, 

5 because eventually the morgue was abandoned due to 

6 structural problems and we abandoned all our equipment 

7 with it.

8 But for the most part, we did not leave 

9 anybody in Manhattan the first night.

10 By the time we got on the ferry boat, it was 

11 about 2300, between battle handoff and getting 

12 everybody consolidated and accounting for everybody, 

13 priority of boats.

14 We eventually got out, got back to Staten 

15 Island, got back to the armory.

16 I remember it was probably about 01, and we 

17 had a 05 SP the next day.

18 I personally -- you know, we had some 

19 meetings, tried to get organized. Most of us had been 

20 up all night the night before, because as you recall, 

21 we thought we were coming in.
135

1 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And then we decided no, hold 

3 till morning. I laid down on the couch in my office 

4 and could not sleep, and I have heard that from a lot 

5 of leaders.

6 It probably happened to a lot of soldiers, 

7 too, but I've communicated it with leaders that nobody 

8 really could sleep. 

9 I just kept replaying that picture of the 

10 second plane hitting the building. I just couldn't get 

11 it out of my mind.

12 And 05, we were back up and running, back 

13 headed to Manhattan, on the ground in Manhattan about 

14 07, on our post by 08, and basically a replay of the 

15 whole thing.

16 MAJ MELNYK: Thursday morning now. A little 

17 less hectic?

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Thursday morning, what we're 

19 starting to see is a little bit of organization take 

20 shape. I think we contributed a lot to that. 

21 I did not spend a lot of time on ground zero 
136

1 that day, but what I tried to do was start getting 

2 communication out.

3 Communication was a big problem. Let's talk 

4 about that for a little while.

5 As I said, we're limited. We don't -- we're 

6 basically running this operation verbally and on cell 

7 phones. Don't really have a command post, per se.

8 Now, I am calling to higher headquarters, 

9 which is changing several times.

10 Initially, it was the 53rd Troop Command when 

11 I left Staten Island the first time. Now it's the 

12 107th Support Group on Park Avenue.

13 And we don't really have consistent 

14 communication with them. We're calling for cell 

15 phones, we're calling for maps, and I'm calling to get 

16 a higher headquarters on the ground.

17 The 107th is set up at Park Avenue, but the 

18 link that was missing ... and to the credit of the 

19 battalions and the companies and the platoons, we were 

20 able to really hit the ground and have an immediate 

21 impact, immediate positive impact just by using our 
137

1 common sense, judgment and all those kinds of things.

2 But what we were really missing was a good 

3 link into the police department and we had some LNOs 

4 [Liaison Officers] there, but we didn't have a 

5 consistent face to face, here's the guy to go to in 

6 charge, here's where I get my missions.

7 So basically it was missions being coordinated 

8 on the ground by the guy that happened to be on that 

9 particular block with the guy from another agency that 

10 happened to be right there; you know, hey, can you move 

11 this here, can you give us 20 guys here for a bucket 

12 brigade, and it happened all at a very localized, low 

13 level. 

14 The CP that -- the only CP that we could 

15 identify at that point was the police CP at Pike and 

16 South. So basically you had the outer perimeter 

17 security mission being more or less coordinated through 

18 that point.

19 Then you have the ground zero /10-10 dig site 

20 being directed under the fire chief, and Reilly really 

21 working direct with that fire chief.
138

1 So he pretty much had control of that 

2 operation. I more or less stayed out of his way, as a 

3 battalion commander.

4 I saw he was really doing good. You could 

5 talk to him for a second and it became apparent that he 

6 was the go-to guy for everybody.

7 That's who the fire department went to, that's 

8 who the police department went to, that's who the 

9 civilian contractors went to. 

10 He really got things up and running there and 

11 I'm sure he's got a good story to tell about it.

12 But now my focus really turned on to the other 

13 things, where is our logistics support coming from, 

14 what's going on. 

15 A lot of frustration from the troops at the 

16 soldier level on the fact that things changed so 

17 rapidly. 

18 Information was not getting down to them 

19 because there was no information. We were really 

20 operating minute to minute based on anything we can do 

21 to help. 
139

1 By Thursday, you started to have this push 

2 down effect of medical supplies and food and bottled 

3 water and respirators and all these things just kind of 

4 showing up all over Manhattan. 

5 A lot of it was dumped at Pike and South. 

6 That became a big kind of depot. But they were showing 

7 up all over the city. So we were doing a lot of 

8 movement missions. 

9 We had missions to provide fuel to fire and 

10 police vehicles. We had the outer perimeter and the 

11 ground zero security and command and control going on, 

12 and the morgue.

13 Don't remember when the morgue was finally 

14 moved, but I don't think it was until late on Thursday 

15 or early on Friday. 

16 Remember, again, going up to see Klein 

17 personally and --

18 MAJ MELNYK: This is at the Park Avenue 

19 Armory.

20 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: At the Park Avenue Armory.

21 MAJ MELNYK: So General Klein had moved 
140

1 forward from Valhalla?

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yes. He had jumped from 

3 Valhalla to Park Avenue. I found out he was there and 

4 I went to go see him personally, because communication 

5 was sporadic. 

6 We're still operating on our personal cell 

7 phones at this point, no e-mail, no fax, no real solid 

8 FM communication.

9 Really went up to see him about some logistics 

10 issues. I was getting real frustrated that I could not 

11 get some very basic things like maps, cell phones. 

12 I was asking for the wireless modems so we 

13 could at e-mail and fax and those kinds of things.

14 We're at, what, D-plus-eight or nine now and 

15 we still don't have that stuff.

16 MAJ MELNYK: What items specifically, sir?

17 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: The biggies really, for me, 

18 were the maps. I wanted every soldier to have a map.

19 And throughout these days, D-plus-one, D-plus20 two, really through D-plus-five, I think, was the last 

21 one, there were these constant building collapse 
141

1 drills, where horns would blow and everybody would run, 

2 every fireman, cop, sanitation contractor would just 

3 run for their lives. That was the building collapse 

4 warning.

5 And every time that happened, it was very 

6 difficult to get command and control back without maps.

7 We also had two companies worth of guys from 

8 the Capital district [Albany area] that don't know 

9 Manhattan. So you can't tell them to go to Pike and 

10 South and expect them to know that.

11 So that was really hampering our operation and 

12 I thought that was really a force protection thing.

13 By this point, most leaders had, by hook or 

14 crook, obtained a map, but I wanted a map on every 

15 street corner with every soldier.

16 That never happened, even to this day. It is 

17 one of the things I have implored the incoming units to 

18 make sure they do before they get here, is get every 

19 soldier a map.

20 When I went to this meeting at Park Avenue, 

21 met with Klein, basically his guidance was, you know, 
142

1 you're the commander, I can't micro manage you from 

2 here, make decisions, do good things, be careful.

3 If it's some kind of major off the wall thing 

4 that they want, somehow get through us, but do what you 

5 can to help.

6 So I really credit that guidance and the fact 

7 that COMMO was so bad with the fact that we were able 

8 to accomplish anything at all.

9 It's ironic, but it's really the key to why 

10 all three battalions were effective.

11 And I'll give you a good example. On 

12 Thursday, I went up to ground zero, met with the 

13 battalion chief, the 10-10 commander, fire department 

14 chief, fire battalion chief, and I said, look, I got 

15 these guys that could dig, we got them all set up and 

16 this and that, and he said what I really need are 

17 welders.

18 And I knew I had ten qualified welders in the 

19 battalion, several of which have extensive experience 

20 in the civilian world.

21 So I said great, I got welders. I'll be back 
143

1 with ten welders.

2 Grabbed my maintenance guys and said we need 

3 to start cutting, we need welders. Have you got the 

4 equipment? Yeah, we got the equipment. Okay. Are we 

5 ready to go? No. One problem. What? No acetylene. 

6 Okay. Let's go. Let's get this into the chain.

7 Get it into the higher headquarters chain, 

8 tell them we need acetylene, we're going to be 

9 assisting with cutting steel and that kind of stuff, 

10 and the word that came back through the 107th, and I 

11 believe the name that stands out is LTC Marchi, who is, 

12 I believe, the day EOC OIC, was, first of all, what are 

13 you doing in ground zero, we don't have people in 

14 ground zero.

15 So my response to that was yes, we do, we have 

16 a hundred people in ground zero.

17 And it was almost as if the guy was saying no, 

18 you don't, you know. He's in Park Avenue and he's 

19 telling me I don't have people in ground zero, when I'm 

20 standing there watching one group picking up body parts 

21 and another group digging in the rubble and another 
144

1 group wanting to start firing up their torches, but 

2 they can't. 

3 So we struggle all day Thursday trying to get 

4 acetylene. Then the word comes back, why are you 

5 cutting with torches, you don't have a mission request, 

6 why do you need acetylene, you don't have a mission 

7 request for torches.

8 So, again, am I going go out to a battalion 

9 chief who's got the biggest crisis he'll ever see in 

10 his career, and that's saying a lot if you're a New 

11 York City battalion chief, telling him, you know, call 

12 the state EOC or write me a letter or what do they want 

13 as far as a mission request.

14 So my response was, "Asshole, before you have 

15 a mission, you need a capability. You can't have a 

16 mission first and then try to get a capability."

17 So if I had a capability to cut, then I could 

18 have a mission, because I got ten guys that can really 

19 fire up torches and go to work.

20 So that was a good example of the frustration 

21 of this whole chain of command, which is what we've 
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1 been conditioned to do in these state emergencies.

2 We've never had anything on the magnitude of 

3 this. You know, for a snow storm, you want to take a 

4 doctor to work, you can wait two hours for the EOC to 

5 say okay, do it.

6 But -- and, you know, that takes the hospital 

7 calling the PD, who calls the EOC in the city, who 

8 decides if they're going to do it and then send it to 

9 the EOC at state, who is going to send it to the New 

10 York Army National Guard EOC, who is going to kick it 

11 back down through troop command or whatever, and, you 

12 know, it's two or three hours.

13 And I think I mentioned that the missions that 

14 we really didn't want to do were the ones we put into 

15 that chain, because you'd never hear from them again.

16 MAJ MELNYK: I was going to ask you, sir, what 

17 happened with the acetylene? How did you resolve that 

18 issue with the state?

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: We never did and we never 

20 did any cutting. So we had ten welders standing there 

21 with torches and could never cut.
146

1 MAJ MELNYK: You couldn't get acetylene from 

2 the fire department? 

3 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Could not, no. There was a 

4 story later on that eventually the fire department ran 

5 out of acetylene and the contractors ran out of 

6 acetylene, and some of my guys, Koch, went with a team 

7 of policemen and firemen.

8 MAJ MELNYK: SSG Koch.

9 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yeah.

10 MAJ MELNYK: Your full-time training NCO.

11 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Correct. He took a team and 

12 they drove uptown to various construction sites 

13 gathering acetylene tanks.

14 And there's a story there. If you do talk to 

15 Koch, try to remember to ask him about it, but he went 

16 around to various contractors and, again, the fire 

17 department and police department thought we were in 

18 charge.

19 So they went around saying we need your 

20 acetylene, and these said what are you talking about, 

21 we're working here. And when they saw a military 
147

1 vehicle pull up, they didn't even question it, just 

2 handed over their tanks.

3 So they went around the city and picked up 

4 some tanks for the fire department and police 

5 department. 

6 But we never got any and were never able to 

7 employ our welders.

8 Ironically, there's tons of acetylene tanks 

9 back in Staten Island, but they're under the control of 

10 the maintenance shop and the maintenance shop, Chief 

11 Hayter (phonetic,) said we couldn't have acetylene 

12 because it had to go through the state EOC and all that 

13 kind of stuff.

14 (Change tape.) 

15 MAJ MELNYK: This is MAJ Les Melnyk, Army 

16 National Guard Historian, continuing the interview with 

17 LTC Mario Costagliola. It's a silent G, right, sir?

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. 

19 MAJ MELNYK: On the 20th of September, at 

20 Battery Park, his headquarters location during the 

21 operations following the September 11 attack on the 
148

1 World Trade Center.

2 Colonel Costagliola, you were -- you had just 

3 drawn -- you just related the tale of the long drawn 

4 out process, it would have taken approval to get 

5 acetylene for the Guard and you were making a larger 

6 point about that and the way emergencies are handled in 

7 New York State.

8 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: The acetylene is 

9 representative of something that happened and is 

10 continuing to happen as this operation is in progress, 

11 and that is that the command structure for the first 

12 time I've ever been involved with one of these things, 

13 and, again, I really have to attribute this to General 

14 Klien, because it's never happened before, is basically 

15 saying go out and do good.

16 The problem is I can only go out and do good 

17 with stuff that I left the armory with. I have not

18 been able to really get any of the things I need and 

19 whether that was acetylene or whether that was cell 

20 phones, which, by Thursday, I still did not have. 

21 We're still running this operation on personal 
149

1 cell phones. Whether that's wireless modems that I had 

2 asked for on day one, so we could at least transmit out 

3 what was going on to higher headquarters and what I 

4 assumed that would be a follow-on unit which was coming 

5 quickly, which will be another issue later on, but I 

6 assumed that while we were here, kind of holding the 

7 front line, somebody else was getting ready to come in 

8 and plus us up and reinforce us or replace us, and 

9 trying to get these simple lessons learned out.

10 The whole logistic support of my battalion, 

11 with few exceptions, has been accomplished through 

12 these push packages that have been coming for the 

13 civilians.

14 A couple other examples. My C Company had 

15 just turned in their ponchos and ordered Gortex. So 

16 they came without rain gear, and Thursday was the day I 

17 believe we had rain, and we had no rain gear for one 

18 complete company. 

19 They are still wearing some kind of green rain 

20 gear, civilian rain gear, with a Canadian maple leaf on 

21 it. 
150

1 A lot of us, like myself, grabbed -- either 

2 came to the armory with what we were wearing or, in my 

3 case, and I've heard other people say the same magic 

4 number, grabbed a three day supply of underwear, socks 

5 and that kind of stuff and ran out the door.

6 So we're trying to get stuff like tee shirts, 

7 underwear, socks. We're trying to get rain gear. We 

8 would have been much, much less effective if Home Depot 

9 didn't give us all that stuff, because we would never 

10 have gotten it through any kind of state command 

11 channel.

12 The most recent thing I have asked for 

13 yesterday and was told "Fuck off, you don't need it," 

14 are the camelbacks. My guys are dismounted, walking, 

15 escorting people up and down streets, up and down 

16 flights of stairs, because all the elevators are down, 

17 all the electric power is out, and they're telling me I 

18 don't need camelbacks.

19 MAJ MELNYK: Would you explain, for future 

20 audiences, what a camelback is?

21 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: A camelback is something I 
151

1 didn't even know what it was until recently, but it's 

2 basically a backpack water system. It's a canteen on 

3 your back with a hose that you can just suck water and 

4 keep yourself hydrated. 

5 So all of those things, we're -- water, 

6 bottled water, even chow, to some extent, we did get a 

7 civilian contract up and running and the logistic line 

8 for chow was out of a local caterer on Staten Island, 

9 but really our primary source of food is all these 

10 businesses that have opened up for us.

11 One thing that I will say has been responsive, 

12 for the most part, has been armory improvements. And 

13 I'm getting off on a tangent, but I think it's a good 

14 point.

15 The stuff we needed for our armory has been 

16 fixed almost immediately, and that would be stuff like 

17 hot water in the showers. When we started, we had 400 

18 people, seven shower stalls, two of which had hot 

19 water.

20 Next day, plumber was there, and that was only 

21 because I called COL Hefner directly.
152

1 MAJ MELNYK: COL Hefner is, again?

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: He's the division chief of 

3 staff. But the facilities people, I think, at the 

4 state level have been very responsive to our needs.

5 Our lighting, security lighting system for the 

6 armory has not worked since I've been in the unit, 

7 which, on and off, spans 20 years, and that is being 

8 repaired.

9 So those kinds of things are being fixed. The 

10 LAN that ties into the RCAS, reserve component 

11 automation system, we've been --

12 MAJ MELNYK: It's the local area network line 

13 of the hard hookup. 

14 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Hard hookup. We've been 

15 dicking around with that for a year now and those guys 

16 are at my armory right now getting that thing up and 

17 running.

18 So the facility piece has been very 

19 responsive. 

20 Some of the logistics things that I'm 

21 complaining about, and, again, I'm speaking from 
153

1 somebody who is very isolated information wise, 

2 because, again, I don't have the wireless modems, I 

3 don't have faxes, e-mails, good solid phone 

4 communication, all those things.

5 But what I'm learning as of today is a lot of 

6 the stuff that we asked for, like maps and cots and 

7 stuff like that, apparently was delivered somewhere and 

8 some soldiers have it somewhere, but, again, it's 

9 probably a soldier that's sitting in the Park Avenue 

10 Armory that hasn't gotten his boots dirty that's 

11 sleeping on my cots and my guys are sleeping on the 

12 floor of a classroom.

13 So what I think happens is I ask for something 

14 on D day and it shows up at D-plus-four and some guy 

15 sitting in Park Avenue says, "Oh, that's the stuff I 

16 asked for this morning. It came already, look at 

17 that." And they're on my cot or they got my map in 

18 their pocket.

19 I've talked to one unit, the 258, who has 

20 similar experiences. He's living in an armory that's 

21 not his. So when something gets delivered, the full-
154

1 timers at that armory are securing it for themselves.

2 So the logistics and the staff piece is really 

3 broken. The command piece, I think, has worked because 

4 I've been given that flexible guidance from GEN Klein, 

5 who said "The only thing I won't forgive you for is 

6 making no decision."

7 And there was a lot of heat when I rolled in 

8 here with machine guns and it was kind of funny, on day 

9 two, after we had taken the machine guns down, CNN kept 

10 playing the tape with the Humvees and 113s with machine 

11 guns on them every five minutes on CNN, which I learned 

12 later, and every time that happened, my -- our phones 

13 would light up and somebody would be screaming "Get 

14 those fucking guns out of there," because they think 

15 they're looking at something live and they're looking 

16 at the day before's clips.

17 And we're actually trying to find who the hell 

18 is this unit out here that's got machine guns and who 

19 is getting us in trouble because they think it's us, 

20 and ultimately we found out that it was CNN playing the 

21 day before's footage.
155

1 MAJ MELNYK: So you keep getting in trouble 

2 for a problem you fixed.

3 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. But General Klein 

4 backed me. He said, "Look, you made a decision. You 

5 didn't know what was going on. You came in here with 

6 guns. Maybe I wouldn't have done that, but I'm going 

7 to back you on your decision." 

8 MAJ MELNYK: Many of the soldiers I have 

9 spoken to and some of the officers on your staff and 

10 the other battalions still feel that was the wrong 

11 decision in terms of force protection.

12 They feel that that was driven by politicians 

13 and not by an assessment of the possible terrorist 

14 threat.

15 How do you feel about that? What guidance? 

16 Who actually directed you to take the guns out and how 

17 do you feel about that guidance and how that decision 

18 was made?

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: That's a good subject to 

20 lead into. First of all, my stress as a commander, 

21 since really day two, because day one was so confusing, 
156

1 we didn't know what's what. 

2 But since day two on, it's been force 

3 protection and that takes a lot of shapes and forms.

4 It includes the buildings that were falling. 

5 It includes a limited ability to command and control 

6 because of the communications.

7 It includes the fact that I am completely 

8 unarmed, even though THREATCON Charlie said I should 

9 have at least designated individuals armed.

10 And I know we've been in the press, everybody 

11 knows we're here, and I feel very vulnerable to an 

12 exploiting attack or a follow-on attack and I think 

13 we'd be a very visible target for that. 

14 Even the police are coming up and saying why 

15 the hell don't you guys have weapons, aren't you here 

16 to protect us.

17 These cops are out there with nine 

18 millimeters. A couple of guys come up with satchel 

19 charges and AK-47s and they're going to have a field 

20 day with all the cops and unarmed guards.

21 So I think this is a really bad situation. I 
157

1 like to -- I've tried to comfort my troops by telling 

2 them, listen, there are people here that you can't see 

3 that are here protecting us.

4 And that may or may not be true. It was 

5 probably true the day Bush was here, because that was 

6 the day -- and I don't know. 

7 Did I relay the story about the four Arabics 

8 that -- I think that was actually Thursday.

9 MAJ MELNYK: Other people have relayed that to 

10 me, but I don't know that I have it on tape. So if you 

11 would. 

12 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Let me tell that story in a 

13 second, but let's keep in the time line here. We're on 

14 Thursday.

15 Thursday was my hardest day and I really felt 

16 a tremendous pressure that I had made it through three 

17 days, all my soldiers were intact, I had no injuries, 

18 and I felt like -- and at that point, when I was 

19 talking to some of my people, I said I just call it a 

20 gut feeling for now, but I felt very vulnerable, very 

21 afraid for my soldier.
158

1 I had not slept in three days, because even 

2 when I had downtime, I had that instant replay 

3 nightmare that was haunting me, and it evolved into a 

4 nightmare where I see that plane hitting the building

5 and my wife and my child are on the plane. That's an 

6 image that's just been haunting me.

7 But I felt really afraid for my soldiers and 

8 we had an incident. We had moved into the -- some of 

9 my guys had negotiated, instead of living in the field, 

10 we had moved into the ferry terminal, which was good, 

11 because for the first time, we had some protection as 

12 far as the elements.

13 We had a little more comfortable area to 

14 operate. We had a CP set up in there. The ferry was 

15 our main point in and out.

16 MAJ MELNYK: And you had protection from the 

17 elements.

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And protection from the 

19 elements. It was raining that day.

20 So the ferry terminal was a good, hard CP for, 

21 I believe, at least 48 hours, maybe longer, until the 
159

1 civilian traffic was going to open up again.

2 But we felt -- we still feel very vulnerable 

3 out here.

4 The day Bush was here, we consolidated into 

5 the ferry terminal, had our security patrols out, which 

6 are -- they're security for people that really are not 

7 here to harm us. 

8 You tell a civilian, "Hey, you can't come in 

9 here," he turns around and goes the other way. But if 

10 somebody was coming to hurt us, we have no guns, it's 

11 obvious, you can look at us and see we're not armed, 

12 and we felt really vulnerable. 

13 So on that particular day, 1SG Ranauro and SGT 

14 Encarcion, who is, on the civilian side, a highway 

15 patrol officer for the NYPD, saw three male and one 

16 female what could be initially described as Arabic or 

17 at least dark skinned Caucasians, coming into our ferry 

18 terminal area.

19 Encarcion approached them and asked for ID and 

20 they proceeded to turn around and run. 

21 MAJ MELNYK: Encarcion, how do you spell his 
160

1 name?

2 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: E-n-c-a-r-c-i-o-n. 

3 MAJ MELNYK: And this 1SG Ranauro from HHC.

4 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Correct. I believe 

5 Encarcion is definitely a five, if not a six. He's in 

6 the mortar platoon.

7 They pursue the four subjects and two what 

8 appeared to be sanitation workers or bums or -- I 

9 didn't witness it, but it was definitely somebody you 

10 wouldn't expect, quickly apprehended two of the 

11 subjects that were running.

12 Turned out to be undercover police of some 

13 type. 

14 So they were searched. One male and one 

15 female got away. The two were searched and were found 

16 to have $7,500 in cash in their backpack, multiple 

17 country passports, and videotape of most of the crash, 

18 from what I understand, and all of the response.

19 The female was later asking suspicious 

20 questions in the 69th area and ultimately was -- the 

21 police were alerted by the 69th and she was 
161

1 apprehended. One male was never apprehended. 

2 At that time, we thought that was a possible 

3 terrorist. It appeared to be somebody that had kind of 

4 hung around in these buildings and now that people were 

5 moving around again, may have come out.

6 But we later learned from the police, and, 

7 again, this probably needs independent verification, 

8 but from the police CP that's here, that they were 

9 actually highly wanted drug dealers. 

10 But at that time, that was the kind of stuff 

11 that was making us very uncomfortable.

12 We had somebody who we later think was of 

13 Indian descent that was apprehended in our area and 

14 when we asked him for ID, he pulled out an expired 

15 reserve ID card, and we had him arrested.

16 So those kinds of things were starting to 

17 surface. 

18 There were F-16s patrolling the skies 

19 overhead, which was kind of surreal in lower Manhattan.

20 So we felt vulnerable.

21 The other thing, and I might have discussed 
162

1 this, but I felt very vulnerable to the chemical and 

2 bio threat. I think I mentioned that early on.

3 MAJ MELNYK: Yes.

4 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: One of our preps was to see 

5 if we had MOPP suits and filters. And we didn't have 

6 any of that stuff on hand.

7 MAJ MELNYK: Right.

8 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And I recall about 18 months 

9 ago or so, the former adjutant general, Fenimore and 

10 his PAO guy, Sandman, came down to do an editorial 

11 board at the Staten Island Advance, and General 

12 Fenimore was hot into these kind of scenarios and had 

13 -- the state was forming this RAID team that was 

14 basically a chemical and bio detection team, from what 

15 I understand, those kinds of things. [This unit would 

become NY’s 2nd 16 WMD Civil Support Team in Scotia, NY]

17 And I remember telling him that I was 

18 concerned that units don't have that stuff, and I 

19 remember the response at that time was -- from me was, 

20 well, I mean, I had mentioned that we needed all that 

21 chemical stuff, live 258 kits and all that, and they 
163

1 said, well, you don't need that stuff.

2 MAJ MELNYK: Could you explain what a 258 kit 

3 does?

4 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: A 258 kit would be the -- be 

5 able to test, tell us if it was positive or negative 

6 and type if there was a chemical agent.

7 MAJ MELNYK: Okay.

8 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And the response from the 

9 general and his PAO guy, who was a civilian, Sandman, 

10 said, "Well, you guys don't have to worry about that. 

11 We have a RAID team. That's what they do."

12 And I remember my response to him, "Well, 

13 what's the NYPD and fire department going to do with 

14 40,000 dead bodies that are chemically contaminated? 

15 Who is going to go in and police those up?" So I had 

16 thought about this scenario in the past, but I always 

17 thought it was going to be a bio or a chemical 

18 scenario.

19 But we don't have that stuff and we don't know 

20 what was on that plane. I really would have preferred 

21 to have been in MOPP-4 with a test kit out when we came 
164

1 through that tunnel the first time, instead of charging 

2 into the smoke. 

3 And even now, I mean, my heart dropped the 

4 other day. We have one our company commanders who has 

5 been with us sporadically because he's an FBI agent and 

6 they can't really deploy with us.

7 He has been flying back and forth to both 

8 crash sites and those kinds of things. Two days ago, I 

9 called him because we had some Intel I wanted to pass 

10 on to the FBI.

11 One of our soldiers actually went to flight 

12 school with some of these bombers, PFC Trudden, T-r-u13 d-d-e-n, from A Company, and I wanted to pass that on 

14 to Pat Kern, who is an FBI agent in civilian life.

15 And when I called Pat, he was in the hospital 

16 with flu symptoms and I knew he had been to both crash 

17 sites extensively, and when I say both, I mean New York 

18 and Pentagon, and that gave me a scare.

19 And I talked to my PA about, hey, well, what 

20 do you think about putting everybody on antibiotics and 

21 he talked me out of it. My S-3 calmed me down. But 
165

1 between being tired and everything, that was a scare.

2 But I feel very vulnerable to that kind of 

3 threat here and I think it would be disgraceful if we 

4 have ten or a thousand or five hundred or one casualty 

5 to chemical or bio, and that's the thing we have been 

6 talking about for years, and we are completely 

7 unprepared for that scenario.

8 Who the hell is going to -- we don't even have 

9 the MOPP suits. So if they use that shit, we're all 

10 dead.

11 So some active duty division is going to have 

12 to come in and police up the dead Guard bodies, because 

13 the Guard is not ready.

14 That's something I think should be in every 

15 armory, if not every individual's trunk of his car.

16 But so we have no bullets, we have no chem 

17 protection. We are at the mercy that people think we 

18 have that shit and when they figure out we don't, it's 

19 going to increase our vulnerability level.

20 The only thing that gives me comfort is when I 

21 drive 20 blocks away from this area, being -- having 
166

1 been here since the first day, you kind of start to 

2 feel like the whole world is locked down like lower 

3 Manhattan is, and you drive 20 blocks away from here to 

4 a meeting at Clark Avenue and the girls are out roller5 blading, people walking their dog, and it's like this 

6 thing never happened.

7 So my only comfort as far as force protection 

8 is that this is probably the least likely place to get 

9 hit, because it's the most secure probably in the world 

10 right now. But that's not really a good force 

11 protection plan.

12 So we are extremely vulnerable and that has 

13 caused me considerable stress as a commander.

14 Since about day four, when I started to 

15 realize that we came in here, I think we really did a 

16 good service for the police, fire, and they still want 

17 us here and we're still having an impact, as a 

18 commander charged with 400 lives, my priority right now 

19 is to get my guys off Manhattan Island before there's a 

20 counter-attack or some more of these buildings come 

21 down, because I know, from some of the meetings I've 
167

1 had with the police, that the ground is continually 

2 washing out the base of a lot of these buildings.

3 Battery Park was built on a landfill that was 

4 further filled with sand and there's a major water 

5 break underground that's still washing that out.

6 A lot of these -- Manhattan is made of 

7 bedrock, but a lot of these large buildings are not all 

8 the way secured to the bedrock. So I still think 

9 there's a building collapse potential here and a 

10 counter-attack.

11 If I was the bad guys, when these civilians 

12 here that you see wide-eyed and scared, scared to 

13 death, leerily come back to work, you hit them again 

14 and, you know what? Nobody will ever come to 

15 Manhattan. 

16 And I know a lot of people, from what I'm 

17 hearing when I get contact with my wife or family, that 

18 have quit their jobs. My brother had a business in the 

19 World Trade Center. He's moved that out. 

20 Most of the escort duty we're seeing are 

21 people grabbing their passports and their important 
168

1 documents and they look to me like people who are not 

2 coming back.

3 The businesses are coming in, we're escorting 

4 them, they're grabbing their hard drives and their 

5 files and they're out of here.

6 So these are not people that are coming to get 

7 their businesses up and running again. These are 

8 people that are coming to get the fuck out of 

9 Manhattan.

10 So psychologically, if they hit us again here, 

11 I think they would have a devastating economic impact 

12 and I think it's a shame that the Guard is really not 

13 able, has no means of protecting these people.

14 We are comforting them psychologically and we 

15 have been getting nothing but thank you's and praises 

16 from the civilians and even from the cops and firemen, 

17 that we're glad you're here and all this kind of stuff, 

18 but they really think we have a capability that we 

19 don't.

20 That's really been a frustration for me and I 

21 think to my subordinate commanders and my peers.
169

1 MAJ MELNYK: You've touched on COMMO, you've 

2 touched on force protection and chem protection and 

3 touched on the tasking process during emergency 

4 operations.

5 Any other AAR areas that you want to reach 

6 into?

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: I guess we could talk 

8 briefly about the psychology of it. 

9 Going back again, about Thursday, I said it 

10 was a low point for me psychologically. I think I saw 

11 that as a low point.

12 That's when I saw my company commanders and 

13 first sergeants and platoon sergeants crying whenever 

14 we got together and talked, and it would just be an 

15 uncontrollable, overwhelming feeling to want to cry, 

16 and then it would last 30 seconds or two minutes and it 

17 would be gone, and you would say like why was I just 

18 crying.

19 But the emotions would just kind of bubble up 

20 and then you'd get them back down. 

21 So I'm concerned that we are suppressing a lot 
170

1 of shit that's going to come back to haunt us, 

2 literally.

3 I did, on that Thursday, fire out some e4 mails, one of the few e-mail opportunities, some 

5 messages to every higher headquarters that I have any 

6 connection with, either in this operation or normally, 

7 and said, "A, get us out of here, my guys are breaking, 

8 and, B, I need some crisis intervention and critical 

9 incident people waiting for us when we come off the 

10 line."

11 I am really surprised that we are still here. 

12 I'm not sure why we are. Again, we have a pretty well 

13 feeling of isolation here, not a lot of command 

14 information, that kind of stuff.

15 That's been my biggest complaint I'm hearing 

16 when I get around and talk to soldiers, that I can't 

17 give them an answer, why does stuff keep changing, and 

18 we're trying to explain that it's changing because 

19 we're doing something that we have never trained to do.

20 And the information we're not getting is 

21 information that just hasn't been decided.
171

1 So it hasn't been decided how long we're going 

2 to be here, who is going to replace us. It hasn't been 

3 decided if we're going to leave here and be federally 

4 mobilized.

5 And the missions and things we're doing with 

6 the police are just so fluid that what's a critical 

7 mission now in two hours from now is abandoned because 

8 it's just the nature of what we're doing, and I think 

9 soldiers are starting to understand that.

10 There has been absolutely no ability for me to 

11 mass a battalion and get up there and talk and tell 

12 them what's going on.

13 I've had the ability to talk to one company in 

14 a company formation. So information dissemination is 

15 really going through the company and other than me 

16 getting around and patting the soldiers and shaking 

17 their hands and telling them what I know at that 

18 moment, which changes two hours later, that's their 

19 biggest frustration.

20 Psychologically, here are the factors that I 

21 see. Came in here, was initial frustration that we 
172

1 want to get in and help, we want to pull these people 

2 out of the building, and, A, we can't do it physically 

3 with the equipment we have and, B, even if we did, 

4 they're all pretty well dead.

5 Second psychological impact is the horror of 

6 what we saw, body parts, suffering, death.

7 Third psychological impact is that most of us 

8 have a friend, relative, neighbor or somebody we know 

9 is in that thing.

10 Next psychological impact is that we are New 

11 Yorkers. I'm 38 years old. I grew up watching those 

12 towers be built and that was a symbol of New York, and 

13 I cry every morning still when I come over that bridge 

14 or over that ferry and there's a smoking hole where 

15 those buildings used to be.

16 That has a tremendous psychological impact on 

17 us.

18 The next psychological trauma is for at least 

19 the first three days, we were in pretty severe physical 

20 danger, especially with the buildings collapsing. That 

21 was scary.
173

1 The next one is this force protection thing of 

2 feeling naked. I think I'd feel better if I had an 

3 empty M-16, just from a psychological aspect of it.

4 The next thing is we're all calling home and 

5 our wives are all crying, saying what's going on, are 

6 you okay, we're seeing this on the news, buildings are 

7 falling, is that you, are you there, the shit is poison 

8 in the air, you're going to get lung cancer and die, 

9 when are you coming home, are you going to war, are you 

10 getting mobilized.

11 My wife is completely freaked out. Guys are 

12 telling me their kids are crying on the phone, "Daddy, 

13 are you going to die." So big stress on the family.

14 I don't know if I'm going to be federally 

15 mobilized and have time to do a will and a power of 

16 attorney and all that kind of stuff. 

17 So we have that stress, plus the inability for 

18 anybody to tell us when we're getting out of here and 

19 for me to be able to tell my troops there's an end 

20 state to this thing.

21 MAJ MELNYK: Is that still true?
174

1 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: That's still true. It looks 

2 like we're out of here on Monday now, but I'm very 

3 leery to put out dates, because they've always changed.

4 MAJ MELNYK: Yesterday it was Saturday, is my 

5 understanding.

6 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Yes. At one point, we 

7 actually had buses scheduled, and then they were 

8 canceled, because now we got a new headquarters coming 

9 in.

10 What I sense is a reluctance to pull a unit 

11 out of the line that has a handle on this for fear that 

12 an incoming unit will drop the ball or skip a beat, 

13 which I don't think is the case, especially as the 

14 operation stands down.

15 But what -- early on, it was, "Guys, I'm 

16 working on getting us out of here, I'm working on 

17 getting us out of here, maybe tomorrow, maybe 

18 tomorrow," and I think that was even worse.

19 So now we're saying we're on active duty 

20 indefinitely. When we get the word, we'll all 

21 celebrate, but let's just plan on being here for the 
175

1 long haul. 

2 So those are some of the key -- and then a 

3 real big one that could never be understated, and I've 

4 always believed a medal of honor winner is one because 

5 of this reason, is sleep deprivation.

6 We're not sleeping and I know what happens to 

7 my nervous system when I don't sleep and I could just 

8 imagine being going 24 hours without sleep or longer 

9 and somebody's shooting at me. I'd probably win the 

10 medal of honor, too, because I'd drop my rifle and just 

11 go for his throat.

12 I'm sure you can identify with what happens to 

13 your patience when you've been sleep deprived.

14 So those things are all adding stresses. I'm 

15 feeling a lot of physical stress on my body. 

16 Initially, it was choking on the fumes. Now it's all 

17 kinds of foot problems.

18 I'm seeing a lot of guys limping around. 

19 MAJ MELNYK: They are standing for 12 hours at 

20 least on these street corners without relief and 

21 without being able to sit down, I've noticed.
176

1 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And these are not grunts. 

2 These are tankers. They're guys that join the Army to 

3 be a tanker, because they hate to walk, and we're 

4 putting some mileage on, we're going up and down 

5 stairs, and the whole operation has been dismounted.

6 The thing that's keeping the guys going is the 

7 fact that they feel like they're doing something 

8 important. We're doing something real. 

9 I think we've got some real good leadership in 

10 the battalion as far as NCOs and junior officers, and 

11 people are saying that they'd rather be here than 

12 watching this on CNN.

13 And there is some merit to that. On that 

14 Thursday and Friday when I was screaming to get us out 

15 of here, again, my fear is force protection and I've 

16 made it this far without hurting anybody, I want to get 

17 my people off this island in one piece, and the sooner 

18 I can do that will be the point when I can really relax 

19 and take a breath.

20 But on the other hand, I think it would have 

21 been a bad thing to go from ground zero, which we 
177

1 handed off on Saturday to the engineer battalion, to my 

2 living room couch, and I think that would have had a 

3 bit of a psychological impact that would have been 

4 negative, and I'm sure the soldiers are the same way.

5 By sitting around and slowly scaling back the 

6 operation, we're all getting a chance to decompress, 

7 and I think that, in the long run, is going to help us 

8 deal with the long term psychological effects of what 

9 happened here.

10 But we're fatigued and we've worked out an 

11 internal rest plan. One of the things that really put 

12 us behind the sleep power curve was by rotating 

13 battalions, when you add the travel time and the 

14 meetings for the leaders, when we get back, on what 

15 we're going to do the next day and those kinds of 

16 things, there wasn't a lot of time for sleep and that 

17 time was not restful sleep for anybody, I don't think.

18 And what happened was on Saturday, when the 

19 Aviation Brigade hit the ground, coincidentally, the 

20 police department, who also had a whole slow evolution 

21 of getting a grasp on this thing and getting it 
178

1 organized, separated southern Manhattan into zones.

2 Now, initially, it was all Manhattan south. 

3 Me and Geoff [Slack, commander of 1-69 Infantry] had 

4 whacked it up during the day in half, 258 had the whole 

5 area at night basically. But now it condensed into 

6 zones.

7 And when the brigade hit the ground, they 

8 said, which was, I think, a good plan, for command and 

9 control, let's assign a battalion to a zone. And what 

10 that gave me was a positive link with the police 

11 department, who, by using those zones, had a two star 

12 chief in charge of that zone.

13 I think that would be equivalent of a battle 

14 brigade commander, but now we have a definitive point 

15 to get taskings, mission, share Intel, do all those 

16 kinds of things.

17 What it also gave me a chance to do was shrink 

18 my area to a point where I could go from 12 hours on 

19 and 12 hours off as a battalion to manage those 

20 missions as maybe two companies on, two companies off.

21 Initially, it was actually four companies on, 
179

1 one resting, they would come in and take the night 

2 shift.

3 And as this thing is scaling back, we're at 

4 the point where one company is on day, one company is 

5 on night, and the rest of the people are back at the 

6 armory doing maintenance, resting. They have the CIS 

7 team, the critical incident stress teams back there.

8 We have chaplains back there. We have some kind of 

9 historical team was due in today to start debriefing 

10 people. 

11 MAJ MELNYK: Was this your internal battalion?

12 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: No. This is an external 

13 team. It might have been the one that you were talking 

about [126th 14 Mil. History Det., MA ARNG, was due to 

15 report to NYC shortly]. They had word back at the 

16 armory that somebody was coming in today. Plus we were 

17 doing our own internal debriefings. So all those 

18 things are going on and the majority of the battalion 

19 is now in the armory.

20 What we do is we have what we call a one hour 

21 reaction force, which is a company size. And when I 
180

1 say company, remember, my tank companies are 63 guys. 

2 So we're talking about 40-50 guys on the street when we 

3 talk a company, which is really a platoon size, except 

4 for HHC, which is almost 300 people. So the majority 

5 of the battalion is resting and doing other things 

6 simultaneously, which was not the case early on, really 

7 until Saturday.

8 MAJ MELNYK: The 101 has been assigned to the 

9 zone here in Battery Park.

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. Our territorial area 

11 now in Zone 2 is Battery Park, Battery Park City, and 

12 the financial district, everything south of Rector 

13 Street at the financial district. And the control has 

14 slowly -- the missions and the control that we were 

15 required to exert has slowly diminished.

16 We're at the point now where we're not 

17 escorting people. We're just providing checkpoint 

18 manning and checking IDs and those kinds of things.

19 Prior to that, we were screening people. If they 

20 didn't live here or have a business here, we put them 

21 right back on the ferry or right back in the subway. 
181

1 If they were going to pass the screening, if 

2 they did have a business or live here, they were 

3 escorted in, basically given 20 minutes to go get their 

4 passport, for the most part, their deceased pets, and 

5 get out of here.

6 And if it was a business, again, the intent, I 

7 think, was to get these businesses up and running. But 

8 other than the stock exchange itself and some of those 

9 big operations, most of them were grabbing the hard 

10 drives and records and getting out of here.

11 So we're providing presence. We're providing 

12 checkpoints. We're supplementing the police. We're 

13 providing these escorts. That's been the nature of our 

14 mission since Saturday, when we've collapsed into the 

15 zone and the whole thing has taken on a different 

16 dimension.

17 MAJ MELNYK: And now it's Thursday.

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: And we're also away from the 

19 physical and mental danger of being occupied on ground 

20 zero.

21 MAJ MELNYK: Right.
182

1 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Which has been helpful, I 

2 think, psychologically.

3 MAJ MELNYK: When you do stand down, assuming 

4 you don't go straight to federal active duty, but when 

5 you do stand down, what is your plan in order to deal 

6 with creating closure for your soldiers?

7 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Well, I really -- you know, 

8 I thought I would be out of here before earlier and I 

9 thought we'd have a couple of days to lick our wounds, 

10 do maintenance, dedicate some stress intervention type 

11 stuff, but it's turning out we're going to have to do 

12 that concurrently.

13 One of the problems that the higher echelon is 

14 facing is they have a cap on the state active duty. So 

15 as far as the state is telling the division right now, 

16 they can't have me and my replacement on active duty at 

17 the same time, which is, of course, insane and 

18 impossible.

19 So there has to be an overlap, but it's going 

20 to be a quick one. So I'm going to tell them, hey, 

21 this is what we're doing, here is where you got to be, 
183

1 and they're going to hit the street, and I'm going to 

2 go do some maintenance and get my guys moving north.

3 So all of those things that we want to do as 

4 far as the closure is being done concurrently.

5 One of my unanswered questions, which couldn't 

6 be answered by the leadership today, was what we do --

7 when you say demobilize, are we demobilizing and 

8 handing the mission off and giving our trucks and all 

9 our critical assets away, or are we preparing the next 

10 call or the next bomb, which is what my intent is.

11 I want to have, for example, all the rescue 

12 equipment that we have accumulated loaded on a truck 

13 ready to go when we demobilize.

14 So when the next thing happens, we don't have 

15 to go through the same pain. Let's leave the 

16 ambulances uploaded with all the medical supplies that 

17 we've gotten and, you know, let's clean the rifles and 

18 make sure everybody has an assigned weapon and do all 

19 those kinds of things.

20 So when the next bomb goes off and we all come 

21 rushing back to the armory, we're a little better 
184

1 prepared.

2 What I'm sensing is that we will be less 

3 prepared if another incident happens in the next coming 

4 weeks or months than we were for the first one, and 

5 that's a little disconcerting.

6 But I don't have definitive guidance. I think 

7 if I can go back to any past experience, where we're 

8 trying to sustain an operation like this, they're going 

9 to start telling me give them your Humvees and give 

10 them your offices.

11 Instead of starting to think about further 

12 preparation and maybe even preparation for a federal 

13 mob, we're going to be kind of kicked out of our 

14 offices and have our equipment being used and lowering 

15 our readiness.

16 So my job once we get back, and I'll have the 

17 ability to watch it as a full-timer, is try to keep 

18 things ready to go for the next incident, which is --

19 appears to be inevitable, but, of course, there's no 

20 telling. 

21 MAJ MELNYK: If you could give your closing 
185

1 thoughts, sir. We've covered an awful lot of ground. 

2 How do you feel about your battalion, about 

3 your experience? What does this experience mean to the 

4 New York Army National Guard? What does it mean to 

5 America?

6 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Well, I'm not sure that we 

7 really realize the significance of what happened here.

8 I hope we can really capture lessons learned, 

9 because my sense of the initial reaction is there's so 

10 many very simple things that we could do to be much 

11 more ready.

12 We could be much more ready with a small 

13 investment. And every time we have a snow storm or 

14 hurricane, we ask for the same things, maps, cots, cell 

15 phones. Why don't we have maps, cots, cell phones in 

16 our armories?

17 We knew this was going to happen someday. I 

18 remember I used to tell my people, and we were thinking 

19 more of a nuke or a chem or a bio, but I always told my 

20 guys, look, this is going to happen someday. It could 

21 be next week or it could be ten years from now, but 
186

1 it's just a matter of time, and we never took it 

2 seriously.

3 And even now, in the middle of the exercise, I 

4 can't get maps, camelbacks and these kinds of things.

5 So we have these bureaucrats, for lack of a 

6 better term, that are really hampering our readiness, 

7 because we're not -- I'm not asking for, you know, high 

8 tech laser or range-finding thermal sights on my M-16. 

9

10 I'm asking for some real simple stuff to have 

11 in my armory. I should have ammunition. Something bad 

12 happens, communications are going to be shut down 

13 initially. 

14 We need an OP plan and we need some basic 

15 things that give me some flexibility, and as long as 

16 people out there don't trust a battalion commander and, 

17 to a certain extent, a company commander, because some 

18 of those guys are in their own armories by themselves, 

19 our readiness will never be there, which means the guys 

20 that are in the affected area are not going to be the 

21 guys that can help.
187

1 You hit New York, you've got to bring guys 

2 from Jersey or Pennsylvania, because we're going to be 

3 part of the problem.

4 I'm extremely proud of my battalion. I'm 

5 extremely proud of the fact we're getting everybody out 

6 of here in one piece, and I'm extremely proud of the 

7 response and interface we've had with the emergency 

8 response teams, the civilians.

9 I'm proud of -- I know a lot of my guys that 

10 are civil service, cops, firemen, EMS workers, and we 

11 have a fair amount of them, would be making a lot of 

12 money if they were at their civilian job, who is 

13 calling and screaming for them to come to work. 

14 They're getting triple overtime and all this kind of 

15 stuff. I mean, they're getting creamed financially 

16 being here with us, but they want to be wearing an Army 

17 uniform, and I've been pretty amazed by that.

18 Very few of those guys have not shown up. 

19 They are here with us. They've been here with us.

20 They didn't go to their civilian job. They 

21 came to the armory, and I think that really, really 
188

1 says a lot about why these people are here and what 

2 they think of the Guard and their role in the Guard.

3 The fact that we marched to the sound of the 

4 guns, three battalions bumped into each other in the 

5 smoke, we figured it out, we laid it out, we got it up 

6 and running quickly, you know, I would go to war with 

7 these sister battalions anytime. 

8 That's the way I envision it will happen on 

9 the battle field, and brigade headquarters or division 

10 headquarters gets wiped out, I know I could count on 

11 these other battalions.

12 We all have our little peacetime rivalries and 

13 our little opinions, and we're the best and you suck, 

14 but I would really count on these guys.

15 Geoff Slack I would trust with my life. 

16 (Change tape.) 

17 MAJ MELNYK: Continuing your final comments.

18 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Okay. As far as the force 

19 protection, you know, this is not over, this is 

20 probably just beginning. 

21 When we start hitting back at these guys, 
189

1 they're going to hit back at us. I think the military 

2 is a particularly symbolic point of balance to hit, 

3 because everybody thinks we're protecting them and if 

4 you come in here and wipe out a bunch of Guardsmen, 

5 you're going to really create some psychological panic 

6 in the population.

7 And I'm hope I'm wrong, but I hope it's not 

8 going to take some casualties to really realize some of 

9 these things that I'm saying, and I'm sure you'll hear 

10 from the 69th commander and the 258th commander, we're 

11 sitting here naked, with no guns, no NBC equipment, and 

12 if the terrorists want to hit us and make an example or 

13 show the vulnerability, and we're completely helpless, 

14 that's something that we should never let hopefully.

15 Hopefully, it won't take some casualties to 

16 learn that lesson. 

17 MAJ MELNYK: You're on, sir, if you want to 

18 continue.

19 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: One of the other things, 

20 like as in many military organization or family or 

21 group, some people really rose to the occasion beyond 
190

1 expectation and guys I thought I could count on I have 

2 second thoughts about now.

3 But what I've been telling my commanders is 

4 that it's time to do the quality cut on everybody. 

5 We're no longer a peacetime Army. We're not going to 

6 be worried about our strength numbers and those kinds 

7 of things.

8 Those things were important for us to keep our 

9 battalion in business, but with the threat we have now, 

10 I don't think that's really going to be a problem.

11 So we're looking at who in this battalion is 

12 dead weight or is not a guy that you would trust on a 

13 street corner with a loaded M-16 or a guy that just 

14 can't hang, and that's what we're starting to look at 

15 now.

16 And we're also starting to look at the post17 mob training program. And what I told them is put 

18 together a couple committees, let's start a couple 

19 weeks of a basic training type scenario, starting with 

20 basic PT, road marches, CTT.

21 We're scheduled to rifle matches and shit this 
191

1 month. So that will be good. 

2 MAJ MELNYK: CTT, common task training?

3 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Right. NBC tasks, 

4 individual weapons qual, zeroing, make sure weapons are 

5 assigned, so when we pull them out of the rack, they're 

6 zeroed for that man.

7 And then start to look at a couple scenarios. 

8 If we're going to be guarding Newark and LaGuardia 

9 Airport, let's start doing stuff like room clearing 

10 drills and those kinds of things, or if we're going 

11 overseas, let's start looking at tank table XII and 

12 company level maneuver.

13 So we're starting to looking at some post14 mobilization training, which I think would start in a 

15 home station type environment at a very basic level.

16 I always said, in the Guard, one of our 

17 biggest challenges was going to be able to get our 

18 battalions and companies up to the level of physical 

19 fitness that they need to be at, and obviously it's 

20 difficult, in a part-time organization, where we can't 

21 have a PT formation every morning and that kind of 
192

1 stuff.

2 So we're going to start identifying our master 

3 fitness trainers, start with those really basic type 

4 things.

5 And the other thing is when we finally get 

6 dismissed from this thing, we're going to leave the 

7 armory locked and cocked for the next hit that's going 

8 to be similar like this, the next plane that crashes or 

9 the next car bomb that goes off.

10 We've learned a lot in the last two weeks. So 

11 we're going to leave it locked and cocked.

12 I have to, as a commander, resist all the 

13 people that are going to want to pull my water 

14 buffaloes and give my trucks away and that kind of 

15 thing to support an operation here that's kind of 

16 winding down.

17 So that's what we're looking at now and that's 

18 where we're leaving off as we kind of collapse this 

19 thing, and the police department is relieving us of 

20 most of the missions and the whole thing is just kind 

21 of winding down.
193

1 I think, personally, the reason we're still 

2 here is the higher headquarters may be getting behind 

3 the planning cycle and the decision-making cycle, and I 

4 don't think anybody could appreciate how fast the 

5 situation changes out here.

6 So when you get into elaborate planning, 

7 you're planning for yesterday and yesterday is ancient 

8 history out here, and it's probably the same way it 

9 will be in combat.

10 So all the things we're conditioned to do and 

11 we feel obligated to do 20 page OP orders and all that 

12 kind of stuff, we have run this whole operation without 

13 any paper, no faxes, no computers, very limited 

14 telephones, and we have accomplished every task.

15 We've made something out of a complete mess. 

16 We've gotten everybody through it safe, and we did it 

17 without all the paper and all that stuff. And as a 

18 battalion commander, what I have learned most is the 

19 information management. 

20 I don't want to talk to people about anything 

21 unless it's a high priority major issue, and a lot of 
194

1 people have been conditioned, because, A, we -- in a 

2 peacetime National Guard environment, we're at kind of 

3 a crawl stage and if I have to kind of come by and talk 

4 to that tank crew about maybe you should try this and 

5 that, have a good rapport at the soldier and NCO level, 

6 and the other fact, that I'm a full-timer.

7 So when somebody walks in the armory and they 

8 want to get some information, I'm usually the go-to guy 

9 and I have a very open door policy.

10 That works against me out here when I'm making 

11 decisions very rapidly and trying to limit the 

12 information I have. I don't want to know about the E-7 

13 whose wife is sick and, you know, you guys figure that 

14 shit out.

15 So filtering all that kind of bullshit that 

16 normally I might be interested in has been key to being 

17 able to manage overwhelming information and make quick 

18 decisions without being distracted, and kind of 

19 preserve some of my brain that has had a lot thrown at 

20 it in the past week and not getting proper sleep and 

21 all those kinds of things, and the overwhelming feeling 
195

1 of just a responsibility of getting these guys through 

2 it has taken a personal toll.

3 But we did and hopefully I'm not speaking 

4 prematurely here, but we're almost everybody here, with 

5 everybody in one piece, and that's really my number one 

6 priority right now.

7 MAJ MELNYK: Thank you, sir, for taking the 

8 time with me, Colonel Costagliola, and I really 

9 appreciate it.

10 LTC COSTAGLIOLA: Thank you.

11 (The interview was concluded.)

12 * * * * *