TRAUMATIZED BY 9/11, FIRED OVER DRUG RULE

If anyone seemed an able candidate for the harrowing recovery work at
ground zero, it was Firefighter Tom Kelly, a former marine and sandhog who
had spent most of his 14-year career pulling people out of fires and accidents.

But at the site, where he logged long hours, he rescued no one. A face, an
arm, a leg, a scalp with hair, shoes with feet in them, a headless body.
Those were some of the remains that Firefighter Kelly found, and in the
months that followed, he said, they kept finding him.

Overwhelmed with death, he rarely slept. When he did, he often awoke to
nightmares, still swatting at the maggots he dreamt were on his face and
helmet. He became depressed and suicidal and began to engage in risky
behavior, including, he said, the occasional use of cocaine.

In January, he failed a random test at his firehouse in Queens and was
suspended. He is now slated to be fired, ending his career and, under civil
service law, forfeiting his pension.

"What man in his right mind would ignore the warnings?" Firefighter Kelly
wrote earlier this year in a journal. "And the answer to me is, nobody in
their right mind would do that."

Firefighter Kelly, who was found to have post-traumatic stress disorder in
February by a psychiatrist at Safe Horizon, a nonprofit treatment center,
acknowledges that much of his problem was of his own making. But friends
and co-workers say they consider him one of the latent casualties of 9/11,
a rescue worker whose inability to process the horrors of what he saw on
his job ran counter to the Fire Department's zero tolerance policy on drug use.

That policy was tightened after a spike in reported substance abuse within
the department's ranks after 9/11 and a series of embarrassing incidents,
including an accident last year in which the driver of a fire truck was
found to have had cocaine in his system. (An administrative judge
recommended that the charges be dismissed on the grounds that the accident
was too minor to justify a cocaine test.) The policy stipulates that
firefighters caught once using drugs are fired unless they have come
forward to report their problem. The Fire Department says the policy, and a
decision last year to do random testing, are sensible, necessary measures
to protect the safety of other firefighters and the public.

The department says most of the 49 firefighters who have been fired, or are
slated for firing, for drug and alcohol problems in the past two years have
been young firefighters who were not working for the department in
September 2001. But several of those caught have been veteran firefighters,
viewed by many in the department as solid workers with no prior
disciplinary problems and whose drug use may have been related to the
trauma of 9/11.

One is a 10-year veteran from Lower Manhattan who on the morning of Sept.
11 dodged falling bodies to help set up a command post in the north tower
lobby.

Another is a firefighter from a battalion that lost an entire company of
men that day. On Sept. 12 three years later, a day after the memorials to
the 2,749 who died, he contacted the department's counseling unit, seeking
help for a growing drug problem.

Told he had to enroll in a residential counseling program, he balked. The
next day he was caught in a random drug test and, after 19 years, he was
dismissed last October.

Fire officials say that that after more than 2,000 random drug tests, the
small number of firefighters who have failed is an indication that the
policy is a reasonable one that all but a few have been able to comply with.

"There was a consensus," said Francis X. Gribbon, a spokesman for the
department, "that drug use had no place in an occupation that is so dangerous."

But mental health professionals question whether it was wise to make the
policy stricter at a time when the department was facing a possible surge
in substance abuse.

"As an outsider, this one-shot policy strikes me as a little extreme," said
Dr. James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas who
studies how people cope with trauma. "Somehow, we view mental health as
totally under a person's control, whereas physical health is not."

In Oklahoma City, after the 1995 bombing, one study found that firefighters
who drank began to drink more heavily as they struggled to deal with their
anguish, although city officials there do not believe that the number of
substance abusers actually increased. The city resisted enacting a zero
tolerance policy even as it upgraded its counseling efforts.

"The whole policy was put in place to help our folks," said Maj. Kim
Woodring, a human resources supervisor for the Oklahoma City Fire
Department. "The whole basis of the policy was to try to get our employees
to be productive employees."

Zero tolerance works, officials say, because it is a bracing deterrent to
those who do not take the prohibition seriously. After the volunteer Army
adopted such a policy in 1980, alcohol and drug abuse in the military
decreased considerably, said Dr. Ronald Rosenheck, the director of the
Veterans Administration Northeast Program Evaluation Center.

"As in so many areas of public policy, it's a matter of balancing the
well-being of the individual against the well-being of the public," Dr.
Rosenheck said. "And it's clear that the Fire Department's position,
sticking to the no-tolerance policy, comes down on the side of their
responsibility to the public."

In New York, in the years before 9/11, fire officials did not strictly
enforce the zero tolerance policy, which had been adopted in 1996. In 1999,
for example, not one of the 32 firefighters charged with alcohol or drug
violations was fired. Firefighters say the leniency was particularly
apparent in the weeks after 9/11, when they said officials seemed to
recognize the toll taken by the deaths of 343 department members and the
long hours spent at the site and attending funerals.

But as the number of incidents involving alcohol and drugs began to climb,
Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said he became concerned about the
uneven application of discipline and announced in April 2002 that the
department would strictly enforce the zero tolerance policy. Critics say
the department uses the policy to get rid of troubled firefighters without
considering whether the substance abuse they suffer from may directly stem
from their experiences on the job.

"They have all this talk about rebuilding the department," said Stephen
Cassidy, the president of the firefighters' union, "but the truth of the
matter is they are willing to throw guys aside."

In the months following 9/11, the department made a historic outreach,
bringing in hundreds of counselors and volunteers to work with its wounded
force. Though some firefighters have complained that the efforts fell
short, there seems little question that much more counseling has been done.
The agency's counseling unit now sees about 500 firefighters a month, or 10
times the number before September 2001.

Many of the new cases are firefighters coming forward to report problems
with drugs and alcohol. Before 9/11, counselors typically saw 180
firefighters a year who were suffering from alcohol and drug abuse, both
new and old cases. In 2004 alone, the department opened up 185 new cases,
and by last month it was treating a total of 723 firefighters for substance
abuse.

Dr. Rachel Yehuda, the director of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
program at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, said many rescue
workers resisted counseling early on because it was contrary to the image
of strength associated with firefighting. As adults, she said, they should
be held responsible to seek the help they need.

Dr. Rosenheck said if the department adjusted its policy to one with more
discretion, it would be taking on the unenviable task of distinguishing
between those whose drug use really did spring from the trauma of 9/11 and
others who might be using the misery of the day as an excuse.

Still, Dr. Yehuda said, drug abuse is a treatable problem and one that
argues for an approach that gives employees a second chance.

If Firefighter Kelly had come forward to report his problem, he could have
saved his job, under the city's policy. Yet this opportunity is not taken
by some firefighters, according to private counselors who report seeing
firefighters who pay for their own treatment because they do not trust the
department to keep their problem a secret.

Firefighter Kelly said he did not feel comfortable opening up to the
counselors he was assigned to see after working at ground zero. He said he
did not think they could understand what he was going through.

The remains were haunting him, he said, first at the site, where he
encountered them as he sifted through debris, and later at home, where he
could not escape what he had seen.

During one shift, about 4 a.m., after finding additional body pieces,
Firefighter Kelly said he alerted a supervisor. The supervisor began asking
him a series of questions: Name? Rank? Badge number? The information was
used to tag the remains with the identity of the person who had found them,
quite possibly the only identifying markers they might ever have.

"Is this in case we go nuts a few years from now?" Firefighter Kelly asked.

There was no reply, he said.

Firefighter Kelly said he felt anxiety and guilt. He had lived. Others
close to him had died, including three lifelong friends. A co-worker,
Firefighter John Hegeman, said he saw a transformation in Firefighter Kelly
during that period, though he did not know about any drug use. He said
Firefighter Kelly had been known as the General, a no-nonsense man who
barked commands. Now, Firefighter Hegeman recalled, he could be brought to
tears by firehouse teasing.

In 2003, Firefighter Kelly stunned co-workers by leaving Engine Company
281, his busy unit in East Flatbush, for one with less fire duty in the
Rockaways. There, he said, he spent hours on the roof, scanning the skies
for incoming planes or smoke over the other boroughs.

"I was shocked," Firefighter Hegeman said. "Nobody transfers out of our
firehouse - no one."

Firefighter Kelly said simply, "I didn't want to be around any more dead
people - people who burned to death, got shot to death, fell off a roof,
car accidents, suicides, dead babies, crib death or by parents rolling over
and killing them."

In January, he tested positive, was suspended and was given a desk job at a
cubicle, where he had little to do but dwell on what he had seen. As the
breadwinner for five children, he said, it weighed on him that, three years
from being eligible to retire with a full, lifetime pension, he was now in
danger of losing it all.

He said he began to view his predicament and the zero tolerance policy as
deeply unfair and, despite the stigma of being viewed as a drug user, came
forward to speak out about it at length. Other firefighters in similar
positions declined to be interviewed, saying they viewed their drug use as
a personal matter.

"I did what I could for 17 years for the Fire Department," Firefighter
Kelly said last Friday. "It got me into this trouble. They don't want me
anymore, and under these conditions, it stinks."

At the same time, he said he knew he could not blame the department
entirely for his problem. "I'm trying to say," he said, "with all the
humility I can, that I made a mistake."