I flew into New York late on the night of Sept. 10. I'd been invited to speak at a United Nations conference on establishing a volunteer UN rapid-reaction force to intervene in places like Bosnia and Rwanda when national governments refuse to do so. With jet lag and a long ride from JFK, I slept through the attack the next morning.

My wife Kitty Felde, host of "Talk of the City" on KPCC FM 89.3, called about 10:30 a.m., learned I was intact and promptly dispatched me to serve as KPCC's newsman on the streets of New York.

The first thing I saw was a vast exodus of people walking right up the middle of Second Avenue. It reminded me of news footage following the partitioning of India and Pakistan in 1947. U.S. fighter jets screaming overhead, defending the airspace of New York City, conveyed a vivid sense of a changed world. From everywhere, the immense smoke column was visible - gray, dynamic, constantly churning out new ruin.

I spent several days volunteering at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. On Saturday, I was dispatched to Ground Zero. Carrying buckets and shovels, we trudged through water and thick concrete dust in the shattered World Financial Center building. We climbed through a broken doorway. And there it was, as big as Dodger Stadium, the twisted and grotesque site of a political mass murder.

Although I had packed mostly suits for this trip, I'd also brought along shorts, a T-shirt and a long pair of knee socks that made me look a bit like a Swiss yodeler. I added kneepads, gloves, respirator, goggles and helmet. I moved in between two tough-looking guys with thick Brooklyn accents, one wearing an FDNY T-shirt; the other, an unlit cigar in his mouth, wearing a battered helmet that said "NYPD Arson and Explosion Squad." They looked me over. I hesitated. Finally, FDNY said: "Ya know, there's not a lotta guys who could pull off an outfit like that." I got in line.

We passed debris-filled buckets backward over and over. Many smelled like badly rotting fruit. Requests got shouted down the line. "Torch!" We passed up the welder's torch. "Burning gloves!" "Gasoline!" "Saws!"

After a few minutes, we heard another request. "K-9!" A search dog and handler carefully made their way up a jagged mountain of rubble and steel. We continued conveying.

Then another call. "Bodybag!"

There were probably 1,000 women and men at the site, and 20 or 30 bucket lines. There were bulldozers, cranes, power tools, lots of noise. The next call came. "Quiet! Quiet. Quiet." The machinery stopped. The women and men stopped. The noise stopped. And we stood silently and watched the coroners slowly carry down the remains of a woman who had been minding her own business at 8:45 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, who probably hadn't ever paid much attention to politics, and who, if you'd asked her if there was any individual or society anywhere on Planet Earth that merited her "hatred," would undoubtedly have replied: "Nobody comes to mind."

Daley is a Visiting Scholar at the Burkle Center for International Relations. He ran for U.S. Congress in a special election earlier this year in Los Angeles.